Behavioral targeting advertisements, which are tied to Website visitors' online habits, have been catching on a more strongly this year on the mainstream Internet. These so-called "follow-me" ads have been getting mixed reviews thus far, between privacy advocates who think the practice is a little suspicious and Websites who say they can use them to deliver ads their readers find more relevant.
The thing of it is, the adult Internet tried something similar several years ago – and gave up on it, mostly, because it didn't work as well as anticipated in that time and place.
ESPN began selling such ads late last month, while MarketWatch.com is talking about the idea with a reported half-dozen-plus advertisers. Both companies use the services of Revenue Science Inc., a marketing company based in the state of Washington.
One report suggested the ads' increasing usage sprang from the success of Google, Yahoo, and others have had delivering keyword ads alongside their regulation search results, according to CNN, which said keyword ads accounted for about 35 percent of 2003 ad revenues, more than double the 2002 accounting.
"The problem [with this style of advertising] was – the linking, the opt-in, did not meet industry standards," Danielle Simons, president of adult marketing firm Detour Interactive, told AVNOnline.com. "The information could not be shared or used. And a lot of money was spent doing this type of targeting, and a lot of money was wasted."
Revenue Science seems to be conscious enough of the possible privacy discomfort. The company told CNN they could do a lot more with the behavioral targeting concept, but they won't until consumers show they're more comfortable with the idea. "We can't afford to rush…and then have the privacy backlash," senior marketing vice president Omar Tawakol told the network.
Indeed, Junkbusters president Jason Catlett said he feared a consumer backlash when the practice becomes more common and Website visitors catch onto just how much profiling is involved. He told CNN that online advertising giant DoubleClick took a heavy volume of heat four years ago, when they said they cross-referenced information believed to be anonymous with consumer information gleaned from a database company that DoubleClick had purchased. DoubleClick backed away from that technique under the barrage of protests from privacy advocates and the public.
Another variation of behavioral targeting was dreamed up by Vibrant Media, whose IntelliTXT technology includes one for targeted ads. The service scans Web pages for keywords and highlights some of them, throwing up a rectangular box with a text ad when a surfer clicks on certain highlighted words.
"We can pull out three, four, five different concepts from an article and find relevant advertisers," Vibrant Media co-founder/chief executive Doug Stevenson told the Washington Post.
These links are similar to what's found at many search sites, with the difference being that they blend into the page rather than show up on the side. But Columbia University new media professor Sree Sreenivasan told the Post his concern is that the technique continues to blur the line between editorial and advertising content.
Based in San Francisco, Vibrant Media says their IntelliTXT ads are marked clearly as sponsors' links, after Website owners made requests for the distinction, and Stevenson said these links are double-underlined to further distinguish them.
IntelliTXT users so far include The Motley Fool, The Auto Channel, Experts-Exchange.com, and Computing.net.
Why would mainstream now find something viable that the adult Internet couldn't make work the first time around? "We don't have proof yet that they're making it work," Simons said, adding that all we know is that they're trying it and seeing it build up a little more.
The problem, she said, is that they won't look at the adult industry's experience and use the lessons learned "because adult's not viable to them.
"Will it work for them? It might," she said. "They don't have to follow the patterns that adult does, in that the privacy is a lot more lenient in the mainstream world than it is in adult. We just can't go around and just give out people's information. Can ESPN give to Homeowners of America information on someone typing in 'football'? Absolutely. They're not breaking any rules, they're not saying, 'This guy came to look at naked women, you want to sell him a house?' Anybody who's been in this business long enough to collect a paycheck knows mainstream does not take us seriously. Anything we do, it's still a taboo industry."
Simons also suggested that mainstream Internet advertisers could well enough prove that "follow-me" and similar online ads do work, then "prove" why adult couldn't make the concept work the first time around. "And we're not going to get credit for trying it first, but it'll be brought up at a later time," she said.
"It's been a few years since it's been tested," Simons continued, "and it could work again in adult, or better than before in adult. We don't know. And if adult is as smart as it's proven to be, we'll sit back, let them work it out, let them work out the kinks, then we'll go back and test it again."
