In my last post, I outlined my current plan for my thesis on targeted online advertising. This time, I’d like to answer what might seem like a very basic question, but it is still a very fundamental one: what do I mean by targeted advertising in the context of the web?
Targeting isn’t a new concept at all – marketers and advertisers have been finding ways to segment audiences for decades. What makes targeting in the context of the web so interesting to me is that it offers opportunities for near mass personalization from a variety of different angles and media formats in a very short period of time, and the capability to get real time data on how users respond to those changes. The flip side is the privacy issues that arise from those capabilities, which I will talk about in later posts.
I’ve divided online targeting into four categories: Read the rest of this entry »
