The Dapper Blog

They say there’s a fine line between clever and stupid.  I’ll let you be the judge on this next exploration of what we could do to make United Airlines’ current winter promotion perform better.  We have some other brands up our sleeve for future episodes

There’s more to this than just a playful jab, however.  I’m actually a United frequent flyer (about to make 1K this year!) and get served these ads constantly.  I know they’re doing some heavy retargeting.  Just, the messages they’re choosing have absolutely nothing to do with me, or the user profile they clearly have of me.

Here’s the thing: half the time I see their ads its for something irrelevant that I already get for free as a frequent flyer: “Opt for Extra Legroom with Economy Plus” — yes, I get that for free and so does everybody else with the profile you’ve identified me with when I log in.  How about instead of that messaging, you remind me when prices drop, go up, or seats are running out on that flight I searched for today.  Or how much I could pay to get upgraded to First on my next flight I already booked…

I know what you’re thinking — you’re such a small subset of their audience, Paul, they are targeting a much broader set.  Really though? The set that I’m a part of likely makes up 80% of their profits, yet they’re mass marketing to the set that gives them 20%.  The moral here is that dynamic messaging, and proper intent derivation allows you to tailor messages (offers!) to the audiences that are most likely to respond to them.  And the ad in the video isn’t that hard to do…

pknegten Behavioral Advertising, Dynamic Ads

The digital world is abuzz about the new UPenn / Berkeley study showing that 2/3 of consumers polled don’t want targeted advertising.  For those unfamiliar, I urge you to read the study and methodology (and pursue the questions themselves) to make your own judgment.  Below is mine.

Questions ranged from “Tell me whether or not you want websites you visit to show ads that are tailored to your interests / give you discounts that are tailored to your interests / show you news that is tailored to your interests” to “Would it be OK / not OK if these ads were tailored based on the following [targeting methods]“ and defines these targeting methods as tracking what you do on/off websites you’re visiting, and even offline.

This survey was missing some very important questions to establish a baseline, and with that I take issue.  Namely, participants were not asked:

“Tell me whether or not you want websites you visit to show ads”

Let me save us some guesswork.  An overwhelming majority of us do not want to see ads and would respond as such.  The current study’s results should be no more surprising than our intuition on this one, folks.  Of the set of people who do not want to be shown ads at all, I imagine most of those would also reject targeted advertising.  So what have we revealed here?

The trouble is there’s going to be a law, and if consumers had their way, they’d support a law that would make it illegal to target advertising to them.

How about, then, we ask this:

“How much would you pay to access your favorite news site if it meant no ads were ever shown to you? $5/month, $10/month, $15/month”

…because the free service we all enjoy simply won’t survive (and is already faltering pretty hard).

Yes, ads are annoying.  But, given the fact that ads are simply here to stay (they are), would you prefer an ad that has something to do with your interests or an ad for teeth whitening / male virility / MySpace themes?

Another question that was not asked.

I implore our US litigators and the FTC to consider the context of our browsing experience and that, given the choice, none of us would prefer ads.  But that shouldn’t make better ads illegal when they legitimately do not collect personal information or any such information that can be linked to a human being (which, by the way, a majority of users polled in a recent TRUSTe study approved of).

Oh, and how many of us like receiving unsolicited mail based on our shopping behavior, credit scores (yes, credit scores), income, and other cues we seem to ignore?  How many of us like getting disturbed at dinnertime by an unsolicited phone call?  Both of these activities are opt-out, as should behavioral advertising.

Comments welcome!

pknegten Behavioral Advertising

(not seeing the whole ad? click on the post itself or refresh — a Wordpress embedding issue)

Pretty cool, eh? We’re helping our friends over at ClickZ / SES promote their upcoming show in Chicago with a Dapper Dynamic Ad that updates when new speakers are added.

pknegten Behavioral Advertising, Dapper Campaigns, Dynamic Ads, Events

My take on how behavioral advertising should look in the very near future in Mediapost Today:

I must admit, I’m a sucker for being targeted. Just the other day I was making a mockup of a JetBlue ad (don’t ask, I’m a marketing guy!) and in the process of creating it I visited JetBlue.com to grab their logo and get some styling tips.Next thing I know, in my inbox is an email from JetBlue announcing a $20 off promotion. Wait…did they just…retargeting delivered via email campaigns? Cool!

Turns out plenty of other people got that same email that day who hadn’t visited JetBlue.com, so it was just a coincidence. Got me thinking though.

Everything should be delivered behaviorally, when it can. Given the choice between a) sending your mailer out all at once to a bunch of people who may or may not be interested in your offer right now or b) sending it asynchronously to people as they visit your website, which do you think would net more fish?

From a technological standpoint, this would be complex but not that difficult (and maybe someone’s doing it — let me know if you are!). I have booked with JetBlue before, they have a good idea of my likely IP address and have my email on file. It’s just a matter of connecting the two in real time.

But why stop there? With Google’s foray into managing TV ad campaigns, why shouldn’t those commercials I watch (read: fast forward through but certainly notice brand images) pique my attention by being directly related to my online brand intent? I know what you’re thinking: this is creepy. Any new intent-based technology always is, and the challenge for us as marketers is how to harness it for our own good while engaging the consumer in a not-too-intrusive way.

For example, if the fact that I’m being retargeted so early and often across channels means that I get an exclusive, 20% offer for a trip I was already going to book with my favorite airline, I say bring it on. Here’s a tip: if you’re retargeting people, there’s usually a reason they left your site, and you should do what you can to sweeten the deal for them. First time you retarget them, remind them of the product they were deliberating over on your site. Still no conversion, give them a coupon to buy that product. Still nothing? Free shipping. Eventually cut them off, but this stuff works — yet there are a scant few companies doing it right.

And I bet the privacy hawks would clamor a whole lot less if they were getting a better deal from JFK to Aruba because of our new scary technology…

pknegten Behavioral Advertising, Press

I wrote an editorial commentary in Mediapost today about how conversion performance is the only significant metric that we’re being measured on lately, and how pricing for us and companies in the media game should reflect that…

And yes, we’re prepared to eat our own dog food on that

pknegten Behavioral Advertising, Press

Great insight by Philip Leggiere on how Real-Time meets Behavioral Targeting; some quotes from me in there, notably:

Instead of just repeating the same ad about ‘Flights to Las Vegas from $99,’ we can tell the consumer who was looking for that flight 15 or 20 minutes ago that now there are only four seats left on the flight. Or that if they book NOW they’ll get a 20% discount.

pknegten Behavioral Advertising, Dynamic Ads, Press

Our good friends at BizReport covered our Behavioral Remessaging offering today.  I’ll let the article speak for itself…

pknegten Behavioral Advertising, Dynamic Ads, Press

Nice analysis by Enid Burns @ ClickZ of the onslaught of new Dynamic Retargeting solutions going on as of late — I’m personally shocked that so many other suitors stepped up in such a short period, and frankly it’s invigorating.  Dynamic Ads have been such a “err, wtf?” product for so long that when the big boys start playing, suddently it’s the flavor of the week.  This is good for Advertisers, Publishers, and Consumers: better ads are on the way!

Also good to hear from our pals at Teracent, who are also fighting for this cause.  Indeed, as Vikas Jha (CEO, Teracent) comments, “Dapper’s [strength] is automatically creating a feed by scraping a company’s Web site or product catalog,”  He continues to say that regarding the integration with feeds and APIs that the rest of the Dynamic Ad solutions require, “this method has fewer errors.”  Agree with the first part Vikas, but have to say we haven’t experienced anything that resembles the second part

I’ll get into how our live feed creation (and management) technology works in a separate post — or better yet I’ll have its inventor do that.  Creating a “scraping” technology that is actually robust is indeed something that hasn’t been done until we came along, quite frankly.  In fact, after hearing the explanation of how it works, it becomes pretty clear that it isn’t really scraping by the traditional definition of it.  But I’ll let Eran regale you all with that!

pknegten Behavioral Advertising, Dynamic Ads, Press

Nice writeup by Tanya Irwin @ Mediapost today on our Remessaging product, hot off the assembly line.  Yes, we’re doing some pretty amazing stuff with retargeting, but instead of the usual take on it (showing your ad to previous visitors of your site), we’ve taken it a step further in showing consumers the exact product or offer they were looking at on your site.

Think of a an ad that can show you the product you’ve already expressed interest in, but maybe at a lower price?  Or with diminishing availability — “Flight form LAX to LAS: only 5 seats left!”  The possibilities are endless.

I’ll let Tanya’s article speak for itself.  But in the meantime, we’ve put together a little cartoon that explains what Behavioral Messaging is:

pknegten Behavioral Advertising, Dynamic Ads, Press

With Google opening its Behavioral platform, as well as user controls for what type of behavioral targeting users will be exposed to, the ongoing debate on the “creepiness” of Behavioral Advertising has been dialed up a notch the past week.

(courtesy of AdAge)

Emily Riley (Forrester) did some interesting research on Gen Y and how their attitudes on targeting (behavioral or otherwise) show a clear disdain for UN-targeted ads, rather than an aversion toward intelligent targeting based on user data.

This confirms what a lot of us must have already been thinking.  Gosh, when my baby-boomer generation aunt describes her thoughts on IM, Facebook, or Twitter, her overwhelming sentiment is “this is creepy!” and equates unwelcome IMs as a literal home invasion.  There’s obviously a perception gap here: those that fully understand these tools (in the way one could if they’re introduced to them at an early age) would accept their personal availability to others on the net as a default, and their own privacy as simply a function of their own preferences.  Want to be invisible today?  Turn things off, block people, etc.

The same can be said about ads.  Come on, people — do we really think that Behavioral Advertising is going to be undermined by “oohhh that’s creepy that those ads know about me?” Guys, it’s about to get even creepier: to the extent that marketers are able to target us to help publishers pay for free services that we enjoy, they will.  The debate, today, is academic at best.

What we need to be espousing about behavioral data right now is that:

1. These personal browsing data have been collected for years
2. They are and have been largely anonymous for years
3. Now they’re being used for robots to interact with you

That’s right, robots.  The perception is that somehow if you’re being followed around by an ad that shows you an offer eerily based on some previously expressed interests, that some how they know you and are personally following you.  I can assure you that the marketing grunt that uploaded the ad to DoubleClick hasn’t the foggiest who you are, nor does he/she care.  A piece of code is communicating with another piece of code, triggered by some clicks of your mouse around a website you’ve chosen to visit.  And there it ends.

Crappy, irrelevant ads have somehow created an expectation that targeted ads are such science fiction that now all of a sudden we’re in an Orwellian 1984 if they become self-aware.  Ignoring the fact that websites we interact with every day use cookies, user behavior, and all kinds of tricks to target us as consumers — for years — we have been so used to dumb ads that we feel like advertisers are breaking-in-entering when they actually show us something relevant.

Gen Y is expecting relevance, and subsequent generations even more so.  The age of the online billboard is over; let’s embrace technology’s return to advertising!

pknegten Behavioral Advertising