What's to Come

How Personal Can It Get?

Personalization has been a big thing for a number of years in many different venues. The Internet brought this to the forefront where people could have their own personalized home page with their choices of news, content, pictures and so forth. Earthlink and AOL really brought this to the forefront. As mobile phones became more prevalent, we saw personalized ringers, pictures and messages.

My question is: "How personal can or should advertising get and still be effective and palatable?". There's really a number of things involved in this question.

1. Do advertisers really know who is on the other end of the device and do they know enough about them to send a specific and personalized message? Answer: depends on the device, but in mobile, there is a pretty clear one-to-one relationship with the phone. Most people don't share phones. This breaks down a little with the family plans that carriers offer. You might have five phones that roll up under one account. There are other ways to get to tie the mobile phone to person. With television and the Internet knowing your audience is a little less accurate. Assumptions could be made on time-of-day and types of programming or behavioral targeting, but it's not as clean as with mobile.
2. Does it make sense for advertisers to really personalize their messages? Does this personalization really make that much of a difference? Do the economics support the efforts of personalization? Do we really mean personalization or is it really clustering?Answer: There are a lot of studies, full degree programs and legions of researchers trying to figure out these questions. In the meantime, there is a belief, as is evidenced in the advertising community, that better personalization and better targeting does produce better results. I suspect there is a point of diminishing return, but that point is unclear.
3. Do people really want personalized ads? Answer: I think consumers get weary of all of the marketing noise. They do, however engage better with ads that are relevant and entertaining. Understanding their personal styles and behaviors can help to form this higher level of relevancy. The flip side of this has to do with privacy or their perception of privacy. See my last post What About Privacy? Another reference is an article entitled Consumers Want Personalization -- and Privacy By Sean Michael Kerner | August 16, 2005.

How do you feel about this, either from a consumer or an advertiser standpoint?

-Andy

posted by Andy Huckaba @ 9:21 AM