"Contextual advertising is a form of targeted advertising in which the content of an ad is in direct correlation to the content of the web page the user is viewing. For example, if you are visiting a website concerning travelling in Europe and see that an ad pops up offering a special price on a flight to Italy, that’s contextual advertising. "
For this reason, I think the ultimate ad network would be a combination of Google's data, Facebook's data, and data from a payment processor (PayPal or Stripe).
Google knows what you're after, right now.
Facebook knows what you're into, in general.
PayPal/Stripe know your propensity to spend money online.
I would argue that the perfectly targeted ad will want to know about all of these. Google's data & mechanism (search) is probably the most useful; there's a pretty good chance someone searching "where to buy X" is looking to buy X. Combined with purchase data and personal preference data, the ability to target would seem near-perfect. Not only would you know whether the user is likely to buy X online, but you would also know what brand of X they might be interested in (eg. if they liked "Dell"), where they would prefer to purchase it from (eg. if they liked "Amazon"), and what bundling might appeal (eg. if they liked "Logitech").
For some people, this is the nightmare scenario. All these big companies putting together their data to algorithmically know what a consumer will buy before the consumer knows what they will buy. I'm with you, though. I think it would make advertising a lot less annoying, especially if it leads away from "we need your attention!" video ads into hyper-targeted text & images.
The underlying assumption, though, is that advertising companies would be more successful if targeting were better. Undoubtedly, a segment of their audience would be in much higher demand than they are now. I suspect that a lot of other segments would be in much lower demand, though. Would Emirates bid as high on Google for "holidays in Europe" if they knew I had never spent online, was elderly, and liked "Cruises" on Facebook?
> For some people, this is the nightmare scenario.
Because the power balance is completely in favour of the advertiser. They employ psychologists[1] to improve the effectiveness of their adverts — that is, to make people buy things they didn't actually want to buy.
What? No. if you've done any online marketing employing a psychologists would be stupid for 99% of businesses (Walmart being the 1%). You just analyze mountains of data, learn best practices, and you'll be successful. That link is trash, asking people to pay for training.
You dream about things people don't want. There is no reason to solve it with complex technical solutions, when "contextual advertising" makes sense and is relatively easy to implement - and everybody loves ads that make sense too.
If I read an article about a book (book review), please show me an ad to buy the book.
Unfortunately, this is at odds with the privacy/tracking debate, even though I think most people are worried about all the wrong things when it comes to ad network tracking vs real threats like government surveillance, malware, etc.
Agreed. I have clicked on many Adsense ads and never a Facebook ad. I have also clicked on a couple of Stack overflow ads, and got my current job thanks to stack overflow careers.
These advertisements add value to me and the site owner, and while I don't like them, I do not mind them if they are appropriately done and non intrusive.
I don't give a crap about the latest clash o clans rip-off, and if you advertise that to me you're hurting your CTR.
"Contextual advertising is a form of targeted advertising in which the content of an ad is in direct correlation to the content of the web page the user is viewing. For example, if you are visiting a website concerning travelling in Europe and see that an ad pops up offering a special price on a flight to Italy, that’s contextual advertising. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdSense#History , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contextual_advertising