Take Two Targeted Ads and Call Me in the Morning
Take Two Targeted Ads and Call Me in the Morning
Media Post
By Steve Smith
December 31, 2009
Among all of the possible messaging goals a marketer might get assigned, convincing online users that targeted advertising will be good for them has to be one of the toughest. As we have discussed in these columns, and at recent OMMA Behavioral shows, the communications piece of the online privacy and data collection puzzle is going to be the most daunting. How do you explain the technology behind digital ad targeting quickly and fairly enough so the consumer can make an informed choice about opting in or out, sharing their surfing history, etc.? Whatever regulatory or legislative measures come down the pike related to digital advertising in the next year, the industry still needs to find ways of translating a dark targeting art perfected by engineering dweebs into concepts and language that my 78-year-old dad can understand without reaching for his pistol.
Jules Polonetsky quoted:
Finding the right icon and text descriptor is not as easy as it looks, says Future of Privacy Forum Director Jules Polonetsky. The FPF has been working with WPP on crafting icons and messaging to test with focus groups. They recently concluded a study with 2,600 people who responded to various icons, labels and Web pages.
“Certain terms performed far better than others,” Polonetsky says. He will be publishing a full report in January, but preliminarily, he told us that word choice proved critical in getting users to glean quickly that the ad label was not just another upsell from the sponsor.
“If there is language near an ad, the consumer thinks it is about the product. We are used to disclaimers. There were some terms that did better in clueing in the user on the ad data process and others that were easy to confuse.”
In addition to the current labels now running at Yahoo! and YellowPages.com, test logos included labels such as “About this ad,” “Ad Preferences,” “Tailored ad,” “Ad Choice,” and “Why this ad?”
We will get the detailed findings in coming weeks, but Polonetsky did say that some consumers just didn’t like the term “tailored ad” and while the FTC was interested in phrasing like, “Why this ad,” that label didn’t perform well.
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