A recent article in Slate magazine talked about some of the recent moves by companies like NebuAd and Charter Communications around moves towards behavioral targetting of web ads. The basic idea is for your ISP or a third party site that sees a lot of your traffic like Google, to keep extensive records of your web activity, theoretically anonymized, and use it to create maps of how they expect you react when specific styles of ads and information are shown to you.
At one level targetted advertising has a certain appeal, we get subjected to so much advertising that we get used to just ignoring. There are companies out there that possibly have products that I would benefit from. I might potentially have seen multiple ads for this company and simply ignored them from habit. Both of us have lost in this scenario. If the advertising companies were able to target ads that would be for products that interested me, and I could somehow trust the smaller number of ads I was presented were reputable then I would potentially pay attention to them.
The idea of tracking our online behavior to try and predict what will get us as individuals (or loose agregates of individuals) to take a specific action has a distasteful feel to it. Possibly its because I cannot see a way in which it helps people develop a product that suits me better, or determine that I am in need of a product they have. I can see any number of ways that it would help advertisers fooling me into being more likely to click their ad, regardless of the usefulness of their product to me. This focus on what is best for the advertiser rather than the consumer imbues the technology with an inate level of distrust. If there is a way for advertisers to use this in an ethical way it will be drowned out by the noise.
Setting aside the uncomfortable conversations I can see this technology causing, “No honey, I have no idea why I keep getting all these naughty site ads when you don’t” the companies that keep trying to work out better ways to fool consumers are poisoning their own nests, and making it harder for any company to legitimately market their products. The anonymity possible on the Internet helps to make it easier for bad marketing to flourish and damages the revenue opportunities that could help Internet media take off. Behavior targetted ads will not do anything to improve this situation.