Facebook caught a lot of flack over Beacon, and the whole idea of behavioral advertising came under fire. The massive backlash over Beacon was not only a setback for Facebook, but for the whole social media industry, who have been building their networks to create the holy grail of advertising platforms - media rich, highly interactive and carefully targeted. This would be a huge win for businesses and unreal moneymaker for social media, but instead there appears to be fears about what “behavioral” would mean for consumers. And this is what confuses me. Who wouldn’t prefer to have some control over the advertising they are forced to look at? I like vintage Nike shoes, camera gear, and most gadgets. If I could be sure that I saw ads for these products, rather than Geico Caveman ads - I’d sign up in a heartbeat. Wouldn’t you?

According to Emarketer, over 50% of internet users (across all demographics) are either very comfortable or somewhat comfortable with behavioral ad targeting. So that means according to those surveyed, behavioral ads were no big deal. So, advertisers like the idea, social media firms like the idea, and many consumers are at least open to the idea - it’s not clear who is complaining? Am I missing something obvious? Was Beacon going to deliver my social security number to off-shore World of Warcraft gold farming operations? No, but it was going to deliver advertising that related to my interests, and I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t prefer that.

What do you think about leveraging the information collected about users in social networks to help provide more targeted ads?

Tags: behavioral advertising, behavioral_targeting, social media advertising, Social Media Marketing

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 31st, 2008 at 6:00 am and is filed under Social Media Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.