• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, April 3, 2006

News Item: German electronics giant Siemens AG has developed a flat electronic display that can be applied to boxes like a label, allowing for tiny lights, miniature games or flashing messages. "The idea behind it is to print on cereal boxes, for example, or anything like that, so when you go to the supermarket, your kids see some kind of blinking display. It catches your attention," said a spokesman for Siemens in Munich.

Clearly this idea was not developed by a parent, who would only see this as one more justification to risk a lengthy jail sentence by leaving junior in an enclosed car while grocery shopping. But it does speak to the idiotic lengths that some will go to make you pay attention to their brand. I could spend the next 1,000 words doing nothing but a roundup of asinine ways that marketers now think it appropriate to advertise, my favorite being pubic hairs cut in the shape of a brand logo (about which we can debate reach and frequency another time.)

But the end result is that consumers are simply tuning out of advertising--or worse still, are angered by so much of it, in so many places, they boycott or trash brands that piss them off. I recall a number of spots on the Super Bowl for which I felt a sound thrashing of the creative team and client was in perfect order.

This is not yet another polemic on the sad state of the creative process, either. Rather, we are gathered here today to talk about relevance and how it may keep the American public from blowing its brains out in ad-overloaded despair. I was raised to think of advertising as information that could be helpful to consumers---the element that kept my newspaper subscription at $250 a year instead of $25,000, and enabled me to watch TV for free before cable strung its way into my life. The funny thing about advertising is that when you are in the market for something like a car or new dining room furniture, you can't get enough of it, because it delivers ideas and options. Oh, and it is relevant to your needs at the moment.

The problem is that unless I win the lottery (aside from all the millions I apparently have won as a result of a "random selection of my IP address") I am only in the market for a car about once every five years, so I am annoyed by car ads for 57 months out of every 60. I try to buy living room furniture about every 10 years--but that timeline can be interrupted when one of my wife's designer friends poo-poos last year's fabric or curtain design.

So what are the odds that more than a very small handful of in-market buyers see those auto ads on televised golf or football, or dining room furniture spreads in Martha Stewart Living or the local newspaper? Does the term "incalculable waste" seem somehow appropriate? The proliferation of ads on everything from a streaker's backside to in-store TV only trains consumers to tune out or take action to avoid all ads, hence TiVo, etc. The only time they tune back in is if they are shopping for what you are selling. A low percentage game at best.

But what if there was a way to serve consumers ads they probably wanted to see, instead of trying to grab their attention with blinking cereal boxes and sky writing? Until TV becomes interactive (which is inevitable) your best shot is behavioral targeting. For a very long time the world has been built around demographic-driven contextual targeting (auto ads in auto buff magazines, kitchen care products on soap operas, dentures on the evening news, etc.) in hopes that the audience projections (and that is all they are, projections) are accurate and that nobody hops off to the potty during your pod. Now that the Internet has come into its own as an ad medium, advertisers at least can get a count of how many people react to their ads (and track from there what action they take). But there is only so much good contextual inventory around. Automotive vertical ad network Jumpstart, for example, is already totally sold out of all of its contextual inventory for the rest of the year.

Behavioral targeting doesn't rely on contextual inventory. It serves ads to people, not pages. Those whose online navigation clearly indicates they are in-market car buyers can be served auto ads when they are in the theater section or the recipe section of a totally different site from where they were IDed as car buyers. Because audiences perceive these ads as relevant to their interests, they click on them at a far higher rate than contextual or ROS ads, according to studies from TACODA, an ad network of about 3,500 sites.

Right now, the Internet has the market cornered on behavioral targeting (although snail mail has tried to reposition itself as "behavioral" based on past shopping data). It is the only ad medium that can deduce user interests and meet them with relevant advertising. The day will come when TV is interactive enough to do this, but by then, it will simply be part of the Internet anyway.