Stop Showing Me Ads For Things I’ve Already Bought
I’m tired of looking in my rearview mirror
Targeted advertising promises a future of improved personal relevance for consumers and improved effectiveness for advertisers. That’s the theory at least. However, today’s reality falls far short and it needs fixing fast.
History Repeating:
Recently I was in the market for a standing desk. I browsed a few web sites, failed to find what I was looking for and moved on. I ended up driving to a local furniture store, where I tried out a couple of options and made my choice. Three days later the desk arrived, I became a happy user and I erased thoughts of desk choices from my mind. In short I had moved on.
However, that’s not what my Chrome browser thought. Over the next few days I was bombarded with ads touting desks of various shapes and sizes from several different vendors.
Now, I understand why the ads were appearing. And I understand that statistically they made a lot of sense for the advertisers who were buying the inventory. However, they felt completely irrelevant once I’d actually bought my desk. In fact they felt rather intrusive — a bit like a car salesman pursuing me down the street as I drove by in my newly purchased (competitor) vehicle.
Looking to the Future:
So what’s to be done? In order to make this type of advertising acceptable (and useful) we need to see improvements in three key areas:
1) Deeper Relevance:
Algorithms that infer purchase intent have a long way to go. In order for them to reach any useful level of personalization they need to get smarter about likely product interest (deeper knowledge) from a broader set of signals (breadth of information). That may well mean an increased level of intrusiveness (across desktop, phone and tablet browsing for example), but it’s hard to believe that a useful level of targeting can appear without it. Of course, anything that comes with the hint of reduced privacy must come with better user controls…..
2) Improved Controls:
There need to be clearer opt-outs, ideally from within the browser, to determine the level of targeted ads that are turned on. For example:
- You should be able to opt out from entire product categories that are erroneously suggested based on the browsing habits of another member of your household. (The classic shared desktop problem has not been solved).
- You should also be able to deselect product categories that were relevant to you in the past but are no longer relevant today. The toddler gift from two years ago for example, which your child has grown well beyond, and which will never influence your buying habits in the future.
3) Additional Feedback:
The concept of a feedback loop is entirely missing today. You should be able to provide direct feedback on any of the ads that you’re seeing. In an age when thumbs, likes and shares are almost ubiquitous across all other content types it seems curious that they are missing from ads. Direct feedback will make you the consumer feel more empowered over the ads you’re seeing, and the advertisers will receive valuable additional data on what’s working and what isn’t.
The sooner the ad platforms start making progress in these areas, the sooner users will feel a little more friendly towards targeted ads in general. And that will be good news for everyone.
