Targeted advertising
[4] By tracking and monitoring what websites users visit, internet service providers can directly show ads that are relative to the consumer's preferences.
Most of today's websites are using these targeting technologies to track users' internet behavior and there is much debate over the privacy issues present.
[13] Information such as a user's likes, view history, and geographic location is leveraged to micro-target consumers with personalized products.
Paid advertising on Facebook works by helping businesses to reach potential customers by creating targeted campaigns.
This targeting method can be used across different mediums, for example in an article online, purchasing homes would have an advert associated with this context, like an insurance ad.
This is usually achieved through an ad matching system that analyses the contents on a page or finds keywords and presents a relevant advert, sometimes through pop-ups.
Working memory is known to be vital for language perception, learning, and reasoning[23][24] providing us with the capacity of putting away, recovering, and preparing quick data.
[28] This type of targeted advertising focuses on localizing content, for example, a user could be prompted with options of activities in the area, for example, places to eat, nearby shops, etc.
Although producing advertising off consumer location-based services can improve the effectiveness of delivering ads, it can raise issues with the user's privacy.
[32] If a consumer was frequently searching for plane ticket prices, the targeting system would recognize this and start showing related adverts across unrelated websites, such as airfare deals on Facebook.
As a result, site publishers can use this data to create defined audience segments based on visitors who have similar profiles.
When it comes to the practical problem of successfully delivering the profiles correctly this is usually achieved by either using a specialist content behavioral platform or by bespoke software development.
Self-learning onsite behavioral targeting systems will monitor visitor response to site content and learn what is most likely to generate a desired conversion event.
[41] Data from a visit to one website can be sent to many different companies, including Microsoft and Google subsidiaries, Facebook, Yahoo, many traffic-logging sites, and smaller ad firms.
This data is used by companies to infer people's age, gender, and possible purchase interests so that they can make customized ads that you would be more likely to click on.
Through the use of analytic tools, marketers attempt to understand customer behavior and make informed decisions based on the data.
One example cited in the Harvard Business Review is Vineyard Vines, a fashion brand with brick-and-mortar stores and an online product catalog.
involves segmenting an audience into more specific groups using parameters such as gender, age, ethnicity, annual income, parental status, etc.
The advertisements will be displayed across the user's different platforms and are chosen based on searches for keywords; appearing as either a web page or pop-up ads.
The main example of retargeting that has earned a reputation from most people is ads that follow users across the web, showing them the same items that they have looked at in the hope that they will purchase them.
[citation needed] Psychographic segmentation also includes opinions on religion, gender, politics, sporting and recreational activities, views on the environment, and arts and cultural issues.
The views that the market segments hold and the activities they participate in will have an impact on the products and services they purchase and it will affect how they respond to the message.
Consumers can benefit from targeted advertising in the following ways: Intelligence agencies worldwide can more easily, and without exposing their personnel to the risks of HUMINT, track targets at sensitive locations such as military bases or training camps by simply purchasing location data from commercial providers who collect it from mobile devices with geotargeting enabled used by the operatives present at these places.
[73] In targeted advertising privacy is a complicated issue due to the type of protected user information and the number of parties involved.
Targeted advertising aims to increase promotions' relevance to potential buyers, delivering ad campaign executions to specified consumers at critical stages in the buying decision process.
As of 2019, many online users and advocacy groups were concerned about privacy issues around targeted advertising, because it requires aggregation of large amounts of personal data, including highly sensitive data, such as sexual orientation or sexual preferences, health issues, and location, which is then traded between hundreds of parties in the process of real-time bidding.
[77][78] This is a controversy that the behavioral targeting industry is trying to contain through education, advocacy, and product constraints to keep all information non-personally identifiable or to obtain permission from end-users.
[79] AOL created animated cartoons in 2008 to explain to its users that their past actions may determine the content of ads they see in the future.
[82] In October 2009 it was reported that a recent survey carried out by the University of Pennsylvania and the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology found that a large majority of US internet users rejected the use of behavioral advertising.
[91][92][93] An alternative explanation for apparent connections between conversations and subsequent advertisements is the fact that technology companies track user behavior and interests in many ways other than via microphones.
