Last week, a coalition of advertising industry organizations announced the privacy “i”: a symbol that will ride on ads that have been targeted to the viewer. The symbol is expected to appear wherever ads are targeted. Clicking on the “i” symbol will lead you to information about why you were targeted for the ad.
Google and Yahoo already share this kind of targeting information, except that they show you your overall ad profile, not how they matched you to a specific ad.
Your Google ad preferences
Your Yahoo! ad preferences
If that was your first time seeing your ad profile, chances are the experience was surprisingly ordinary. Has Google decided you’re interested in air travel and jobs? It’s hard to get angry about that. Taking the mystery out of such things is good for all parties.
However, there’s something important about configurable ad preferences. Allowing users to indicate what kinds of ads they’d prefer to see (even if ultimately they’d prefer to see no ads at all) is a first step in bringing brands and consumers closer together.
Imagine that ads are conversations between brands and consumers, not just one-way messages. Consumers’ ad profiles make them visible to brands that match their interests. In that context, the brand’s ad feels less like an unwanted interruption and more like an invitation to connect. Increasingly, platforms are building functionality for consumers to respond to brands directly instead of being mediated by a website (such as Google’s click-to-call functionality).
Platforms that were built around communication are well-positioned for this change in the industry. Facebook has made strides around integrating social actions into advertising. The biggest opportunity, though, lies in Twitter, which was built for conversations.
Twitter is ideally suited for a brand that wants to show a message to millions of users and get an instantaneous response. With the addition of consumer-influenced targeting, brands that choose to advertise on Twitter have a better chance for engaging customers than they do in most other mass-marketing contexts.
