Is Ad Targeting All It's Cracked Up to Be?

Ad targeting is all the rage these days and Jay Schwedelson, founder of WebConnect, has an interesting take on the subject in an article in ClickZ.

“Advertisers are revving their engines in anticipation of what seems to be the next big thing in focused Internet media placement. As many of the major closed networks race to accumulate as much individual user information as possible, some fundamental marketing principles are being left behind,” he writes.

“It is more essential to place media on a site where an affinity exists between the visitor and the site, rather than the visitor’s demographic data, which places no value on the distinct aspects of that particular site. Advertisers should realize that it is more important what a person may be doing, rather than how a person is defined.”

“My demographics (or psychographics) may reflect that I am a good target for an advertisement of some new piece of software. But right now I’m checking out the leader board of a golf tournament,” he writes. “If my thoughts are somewhere else, then it’s the advertisers job to understand that.”

The full text of the articles is available here.

Schwedelson is the founder of WebConnect of Boca Raton, FL, a media placement and tracking service and vice president of Worldata, a high-tech direct marketing services firm.