At the Digital Britain keynote a couple of weeks back Peter Bazalgette (ex Endemol) said "The truth is that not a single media company knows what its model will be in ten years' time." His vision of a content model for publishers was that "In future all content will be paid for either by people's attention spans or their personal data".
Internet users refuse to pay for mainstream content and services, preferring to substitute a worse free version rather than shell out for micropayments or subscriptions. The challenge with ad-funded models is that the advertising is not valuable enough to pay for the content or services. Increasing the relevance of advertising means that publishers can charge more for relevant placements, which generate higher conversions and ultimately better ROI for brands.
Enter Google, with their announcement of a new service “interest-based advertising” a polite way of describing their behavioural targeting platform.
Behavioural targeting has been a hot topic for digital strategists. We’ve been leveraging the personalised communications which we carry out through other channels into website experiences with tools like Omniture’s Touch Clarity for many years. But taking information we’ve learnt from one site and applying it to adverts on another (“cross domain”) has raised privacy and legal issues.
Google are the masters of digital relevance, their Adword PPC product put relevant ads next to search results for active seekers. Their Adsense product puts these Adwords onto content partner sites, this time matching the site content. This is great for the low hanging fruit, but after last years acquisition of DoubleClick. Google is focusing on display advertising, to stimulate demand.
Google has been laying the foundations for this, on the 3rd of March they collaborated with the IAB to launch “Good Practice Principles”, the UK’s first self-regulatory guidelines to set good practice for companies that collect and use data for online behavioural advertising purposes.
While Google’s new offering has an “opt out” option in line with the IAB best practise, the mass market know that their data is being used, but can’t be bothered to opt out.
Other practitioners of behavioural targeting such as Phorm are about as popular as a spammer at a Tweetup. Will this move put a dent in netizens perception of Google as a brand, looks like we'll have to wait a bit until the come up top in organic results for "pure evil".
