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.