Thursday, May 17, 2007

Personalized Ad Banners

NYTimes.com has an article on companies bringing the same algorithm-driven rigor to brand ad banners that we see in search engine text ads. When I was at Modem it was understood that the Creative had to be engaging, interactive and above all relevant. But at the end of the day it was all about placement, and understanding how to intercept the right person with the right message was the key to driving a particular behavior.

I like the idea of getting personalized ads, more often than not when I'm searching on Google the ad links are as meaningful to me as the "natural" results. What I'm less comfortable about is having the criteria for showing me the ads be opaque; based on covert cookies and tracking my past traffic. Personalized ads are just like recommendations in Amazon or Netflix, right? I can tweak the criteria in those by rating products I like and telling the system to disregard certain choices. Why shouldn't I have the option to do the same for ad banners?

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