Note: This entry is a cross post from the Convergence Culture Consortium blog.
On Monday, Online Media Daily reported that Revenue Science, a behavioral targeting (BT) marketing firm, called for participants in an initiative it is calling the Behavioral Targeting Standards Consortium (BTSC), a group of industry practitioners and thought leaders that would define BT, set standards for data collection and use, define best practices, and identify some common metrics.
What does that have to do with convergence culture? I would argue quite a lot.
I am writing my thesis at MIT Sloan on targeted online advertising, so I have spent the last several months delving into the technology, techniques, issues and potential of the practice of BT. I am an MBA student, so my focus has been on the business and regulatory implications, but I would argue that, particularly as BT gets more sophisticated and the technology we use enables it to reach us through the internet on our computers, mobile phones, and perhaps eventually our televisions and other devices we haven’t imagined yet.
Advertising is ubiquitous in modern life, and has always been a fundamental part of mass media and entertainment industry economics, as has measuring and understanding audiences in order to couple advertising and content in a way that will attract their attention and generate sales. BT, however, enables a whole other level of targeting, based not just on what content is accessed, but on inputs provided by the audience itself on what they are interested in. It moves the currency of the media and advertising symbiosis from masses of eyeballs to smaller groups with specific needs and preferences, altering the message and potentially the medium. Read the rest of this entry »
