How automated personalization can save online advertising from itself

It seems like marketing professionals have been talking about personalized, one-to-one marketing forever. All talk and no action, so far!

Consumers are fed up with random ads

All the fancy talk about personalized advertising has been in vain as marketers still choose to engage in mass marketing, where hardly any thought is wasted on whether the message is significant to the recipient or how it affects customers. However, these customers are increasingly showing insignificant marketing activities a cold shoulder.

A recent study by the AIMA Group found that 69 percent of consumers unsubscribe from commercials while service providers like Disconnect.me are growing at a rapid pace with more than three million users. Marketing professionals are (rightly!) worried that so many consumers are saying goodbye to communicating with their brand.

Advertisers are also aware of this issue and use frequency caps to limit the insertion rate as the effectiveness of an ad gradually declines. However, in advertising, frequency caps are mostly used for cost-benefit reasons, not because it could influence the customer experience. For example, by retargeting on the Internet, customers are often followed for months by advertisements that simply are no longer relevant to them. The longer-term consequences are grave: The advertising medium is perceived as irrelevant and annoying and automatically ignored via so-called banner blindness.

Why is mass advertising still a thing?

So why do marketing professionals who know this issue both personally and professionally continue to bombard their customers with largely irrelevant advertising messages?

Because bombarding customers at random is easy, while relevant marketing is not.

Automation solutions in marketing are at the same time “too simple” and “too difficult”. By “too simple” we mean that it is too easy to flood millions of customers with an ad campaign and accept a 2% conversion rate as good. But how does the advertising affect the 98 percent of the recipients who did not react as desired?

”Too difficult”, in turn, means that many marketing professionals struggle to launch as many advertising campaigns as the management would like. Imagine any retailer that sends five or more emails per week, in addition to other ads in other media. Alone to create such a volume of campaigns every week is a difficult task. The result is that the additional effort required to precisely formulate the advertising messages falls behind. Many marketing employees feel trapped in a hamster wheel: doing the wrong thing, but as long as the sales match, it’s hard to stop, because the next campaign is long overdue …

The solution: Automated personalization

BehaviourExchange was created exactly with this problem in mind; marketers today have to address consumers in a one-to-one manner to get their attention, while at the same time they have to address millions of them to achieve the desired sales results. The platform enables just that: an automated yet personalized communication with target audiences.

HOW DOES IT WORK? BehaviourExchange uses sophisticated AI-based software to analyze Big Data, create user profiles and adjust the content of any website according to the predicted interests, wishes and needs of a visitor — in real time.

The platform uses a wide array of Big Data to create user profiles and ‘recognize’ a visitor the moment he enters a website, making it possible for a website to automatically adjust its content and ads to the visitors interests, personal characteristics, likely needs and preferences.

In a time when users are constantly bombarded by countless ads on every website they visit, all trying to sell them something, this approach offers a much less invasive means of consumer communication. Users get to see more of what they are interested in and less junk advertising, not aimed at them in the first place. They can immediately find relevant products and services, tailored to their needs, instead of getting bombarded with irrelevant content and ads.

For B2C businesses this means they can address their consumers in a more direct and cost efficient way, without shooting in the dark with ad campaigns, based on unreliable targeting. With BehaviourExchange, B2C businesses will know the demographic and psychographic characteristics of their customers so they can create a positive, targeted, proactive and consequently much more successful interaction with them in real time.

Websites that decide to participate in the BehaviourExchange network are offered a free service of exchanging traffic with thousands of partner websites, which hugely expands their reach.

This way, BehaviourExchange proves that Big Data, when used responsibly and transparently, can benefit all parties involved in the process — and not only the tech giants, as is the case with Facebook, Google and Amazon.

With your help, BehaviourExchange will shape the digital future and create a more satisfying online experience for businesses and customers alike. Become part of the project:
BehaviourExchange is offering a limited number of BEX tokens to early contributors in a pre-sale. If you wish to be a part of the project, you can whitelist on the official BehaviourExchange website.