Whilst I agree with pretty much everything he says about Facebook and targeted ads, I'm surprised that the article makes no reference to Amazon - which is the one place that, at least for me, targeted advertising works brilliantly.
There's a few reasons why it works for me
- I'm going there to buy or at least thinkg about buying something, and when it comes to things like books, I like to browse for something interesting so being prompted to look at books that I might be interested in seems entirely appropriate
- they are entirely open about why a particular product has been recommended to you, and you are able to pretty easily fine-tune those recommendations.
- when I buy something from them, or even browse on their site, I'm not particularly shocked when they remember that next time I visit. They don't seem to be secretly collecting stuff behind the scenes, sniffing around what I did on a random 3rd party site etc.
Facebook, and Google mostly (although they are at least slightly better off on the first point than FB) fail on all three of these. They are giving me messages about things that I'm not currently planning on doing, based partly on some secret info they've gathered from god knows where.
There's a few reasons why it works for me
- I'm going there to buy or at least thinkg about buying something, and when it comes to things like books, I like to browse for something interesting so being prompted to look at books that I might be interested in seems entirely appropriate
- they are entirely open about why a particular product has been recommended to you, and you are able to pretty easily fine-tune those recommendations.
- when I buy something from them, or even browse on their site, I'm not particularly shocked when they remember that next time I visit. They don't seem to be secretly collecting stuff behind the scenes, sniffing around what I did on a random 3rd party site etc.
Facebook, and Google mostly (although they are at least slightly better off on the first point than FB) fail on all three of these. They are giving me messages about things that I'm not currently planning on doing, based partly on some secret info they've gathered from god knows where.