Google Starts Serving Ads on Your Surfing and Searching Behavior
Posted by Brian Wong on Mar 11, 2009, under AerNews
Google is taking over the world – as in, they are now prowling through your search behavior and serving ads based on what you’ve seen and what you’ve searched. Creepy, yes, effective, yes (has some caveats though, for multiple users accounts) – taking over the world, yes.
Obviously, this is significant to internet marketers because now ads are served in an even more targeted manner. My problem with this, however, is that as much as we think that targeting ads more specifically and more intelligently is the way to go – it’s the nature and look of the ads that are desensitizing people to even pay attention to them in the first place. Google needs to work on refreshing the look of their ads to make them look more purposeful and useful – we know how design can be manipulative – design can play on the shallow-nature of the average schizophrenic internet surfer – and turn these ads into an item of interest once again.
Link: Google: Interest Based Advertising
