Google's Behavioral Ads Are Just The Start

from the privacy? dept

Google's latest privacy flap emerged this week when it announced its "interest-based" ads, which are behaviorally targeted banner ads based on a user's web-browsing activity. It's nothing particularly new or ground-breaking, and the company was kind enough to give people a way to opt out, but the way the company presented the new system to users was a little odd. It titled its blog post announcing the new system "Making ads more interesting," and it later said, "We believe there is real value to seeing ads about the things that interest you." But are better-targeted ads really something that delivers any benefit to users? The benefit to advertisers and marketers is obvious, but it's hard to see users really caring enough to forfeit some privacy just so they can help out advertisers.

But web browsing is just the tip of the iceberg: lots of marketers are looking at how to take information generated by mobile phones to hit users with targeted ads. They're not talking about the worn-out Starbucks example of hitting people's phones with a coupon when they walk past a store, but building profiles of people based on their travel patterns, favorite applications and web sites, and even gender, age and income information. Again, all of this info given up for the sake of seeing "better" or "more interesting" advertising. That really doesn't benefit the user, so why should they give up -- or be forced to give up -- all of this information?

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Google Expands Video Distribution Via Adsense In Deal With Family Guy Creator

from the confusing-enough? dept

Late last year we mentioned that Google was tiptoeing into the content distribution game, using its AdSense network. The program seemed very limited (and somewhat confusing). Basically, with all the various sites out there (including us) that used AdSense for some advertisements, Google would let them choose from a (incredibly small) selection of videos to include on their sites. The videos would run with ad overlays, potentially providing a little bit of revenue to the partner sites. The whole thing seemed extremely forced and not all that compelling. Most sites have plenty of options for adding content, and this didn't seem to add much of value.

Google is now trying to expand that by getting content creators to create content specifically for this program, kicking it off by signing a deal with "Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane, who is creating new content just for this endeavor. It definitely helps to get a big name involved -- and we still think that it's worth watching what other services Google tries to provide to its AdSense partners, but it's still not entirely clear how compelling an offering this is. Yes, having good content in the pool will certainly help -- but Google is going to need to do a better job explaining why this is different than just embedding videos from YouTube.

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