I hope you didn’t eat anything questionable for breakfast, because the interactive advertising tale I’m about to tell is one of gut-wrenching torture sure to induce nausea in the fashion conscious and faint of digestive tract. I speak of:
Personalized retargeting. Shudder.
Not reaching for the Pepto just yet? Let me unpack.
A bit of backstory. Banner blindness has been a known advertising problem for some time. As the web developed consistent conventions—headers tell you where you are and where you can go, copy’s on the left, banners on the right—people quickly learned that a graphic banner ad was not the content they were there to see and was therefore to be ignored.
If one of the major avialable online ad strategies is practically invisible, it’s not living up to its conversion rate potential. It’s just relying on spray and pray—the hope that in a thousand impressions, a click would be wrung out of one or two interested/hapless people.
Lots of room for improvement there.
In my description of web conventions above, you’ll note the reason people started ignoring banners was because they were irrelevant. Exposure to irrelevance was the price people had to pay to get at “free” content. The technology at the time—show display ads to whoever showed up—created its own low value situation.
We have the technology.
Today, advertisers can easily follow you around the web, gathering behavioural data and spawning ads on the fly that hybridize your browsing history, shopping carts you abandoned before checkout, and items you looked at or people like you bought.
These genetically modified ads appear when you’re minding your own business, reading the news or what have you, and they contain stuff you actually want!
With 400-600% higher clickthrough rates (according to Criteo, a personalized retargeter), the ads handily overcome the irrelevancy problem of old school banners. They catch your eye, subtly inserting the items you covet into your information stream and rekindling the desire to purchase.
And now for the suffering.
While this ad strategy sounds like a marketer’s dream, I have to relate an unbelievably bad experience with targeted ads.
I live in Winnipeg, where real-life shopping is poor. I shan’t touch on the brutal shipping charges, duty, and brokerage fees that entails.
I found my dream pair of summer sandals on Zappos.com. Roxy Hydrangeas, so cute! I put them in my cart, only to discover my size was sold out. No problem, Zappos can email you when they’re back in stock.
The restock email transpired shortly, and I went back to score my shoes. Upon checkout, I was crushed to discover Roxy is on Zappos dreaded “do not ship to Canada” list. I may have choked back tears as I abandoned the transaction.
Exchanging hopeless Twitter pleasantries with @Zappos_Service, I tried to accept that my summer would never include these perfect, perfect sandals, and somehow I must move on.
Over the next few days, I began to see banner ads on the sites I visited. I mean, see them. My eye couldn’t help but notice these ads. Ads for the shoes I could never, ever have!
Why on earth was Zappos taunting me? Their customer service is legendary! But here I am, being haunted by Roxy ads. Tortured.
Like a knife in my heart, every day I saw the shoes scattered across the web. Hey Erica, why don’t you buy these shoes? Huh? WE KNOW YOU LOVE THEM!
Zappos eventually put me out of my misery and told me how to stop the ads tracking me, but the whole thing seemed hilariously cruel. That can’t be the desired brand experience.
A fix on the Criteo end would be to probe their clients’ shipping restrictions and not serve ads to potential customers who can’t buy the effing products*.
I’m not mad at Zappos for this, of course, and you should totally still shop there if they ship to your country. I understand that they weren’t doing it on purpose. If they want to send me a free pair of Roxy Hydrangeas to cap off the absurdity, that’d be fine. But not necessary. Size 8.
*Personalized retargeting, like all web personalization, has the potential to make your web experience suck less by saving you from enduring ads for products you don’t care about. Of course, the more accurate it is, the more of your personal data needs to be surrendered and aggregated by advertisers. So this whole story is a slippery slope of a complaint.
Research by TNS finds 65% of people see targeted ads as an abuse of their privacy, even though 64% welcome more relevant ads.
—New Media Age
Do racial divisions exist on a web where everyone’s whatever colour they choose to be, avatar-wise, at least? I’m picking up a bit of a racial thing in the social media zeitgeist:
● Slate digs into the culture phenomenon around How Black People Use Twitter, wherein I learned about the dozens, an important piece of African American history.
● I discover McDonald’s bizarre 365Black, a website where McDonald’s compares itself to the African baobab tree, nourishing African Americans with “opportunities”, basketball and “fresh” music.
● And the good folks at Pew Internet & American Life Project note that while broadband access has barely increased from last year among the general population, not so for African Americans, whose home access increased a dramatic 22% from 2009 to now, closing the high speed gap by 8 points to 67% of whites and 56% of African-Americans.
Since marrying my iPhone I’ve become a bit of a mobile evangelist and can’t wait for the day everyone is thusly enabled, so we can all tattoo QR codes to our forheads and freely peruse each other’s Flickr streams when we’re bored in line at Starbucks. We’re not quite there yet as a society.
With the early adopters perhaps getting over the novelty of checkins sans widespread fat rewards from participating brands, and Facebook yet to deploy anything super cool in the location-based sphere, I’ve been waiting for a GPS development that’s useful enough to catch on, thereby spurring mainstream use.
Grindr is on the social news scene today, and it does sound pretty useful*: a mobile gaydar. Local gay men can check each other out, chat, and hook up based on who’s nearby.
The app has thousands of reviews and over half a million members, so obviously it’s doing the trick using local/mobile technology to help people socialize. Identifying people with similar interests & allowing them to get together is the best case scenario for mobile social.
Does broadcasting gay men’s GPS coordinates strike anyone else as a bit scary in terms of personal safety, though?
I’m not even going to type out the methods by which I think the gay-unfriendly could use this app for violent purposes, lest Google serve it up to would-be criminals. Let’s just say letting people know you’re around, available, and, ahem, feeling sociable (regardless of personal orientation) might be an open invitation to weirdos. Nearby weirdos—the worst kind.
This type of app seems particularly sensitive because the goal is IRL meetups. You can block a user who’s acting creepy, but a skillful “predator” would take pains to appear to be someone you’d want to meet.
(I guess I just described the entire internet. Except this branch of it knows where you are).
It also seems like a privacy issue to have the general public be able to identify you as a particular sexual orientation, but I guess that’s the user’s decision when he signs up for the service.
I contacted the guys at Grindr to see if they’d had reports of any trouble of this kind, and what they suggest people do to protect themselves. They haven’t replied yet, no doubt swamped with media attention (deserved, IMO. It’s a good concept for an app). If they respond, I’ll update.
UPDATE: The good folks at Grindr have replied, and they do indeed take safety & privacy seriously:
In the year and a half that we have been available on the iTunes App Store, Grindr has fortunately not encountered any known user safety issues. Grindr currently has over 900,000 users (over 230,000 of them use Grindr daily) in 162 countries, and to our knowledge none have used location information maliciously.
Grindr takes user privacy and safety very seriously. As with any online service, we encourage our users to be smart and use common sense when chatting with new people. We offer two features that let Grindr users manage their location privacy:
1) Hide Distance: A user can hide his distance from others by changing a profile setting. This setting prevents other users from seeing his exact distance information.
2) Block User: A user can block other Grindr users, preventing them from viewing his profile and contacting him.
There is an added benefit to location based services – location identification. If someone engages in illegal activity on our network, Grindr cooperates fully with authorities to identify and locate the offending user.
*I lolled at the App Store review “Two months with Grindr and I think I have already slept with 12 different guys!” If those aren’t metrics of platform success, I don’t know what is.
Over the weekend I was ambushed by a question about my job. Namely, why does it exist.
“You do Facebook for a living? And how does that benefit your employer?”
My social media position at United Way of Winnipeg is a newly-created one, and while it’s obvious to me why the work I do is important, I didn’t have a glib (or even very useful) answer at the time. Here’s what I would have said if I’d had it written on my hand.
Marketing, communication, engagement and customer service have undergone a profound shift in the past few years, as people have developed an expectation of instant, transparent and helpful interaction with organizations through the internet.
Once faceless companies now need a faces, with voices and brains behind it.
People expect their opinions to be heard—to comment, “like”, contribute and criticize. This is eminently valuable to the organizations they’re trying to talk to/talking about, because it’s honest feedback. It’s an instant, free focus group that actually cares about your company. Or at least has pretty strong feelings about how their experience with you is going.
It’s the chance to talk to people who are sincerely interested. It’s the chance to make things better. And in the case of a non-profit, it’s the opportunity to ask people to share your good work with others who’d be excited about it.
Social media is now the dominant mode of online communication, with 22.7% of our computer time devoted to it. There are 377, 220 Winnipeggers age 18+ with Facebook profiles, or close to two thirds (wow!). Fish where the fish are.
After a week of serious discussion, soul-searching, and near-marital discord (my husband is an interactive producer and has strong feelings about these things ), I’m reasonably sold on the idea of a microsite to host “the promotion”.*
My vision for doing it “all-Facebook” was something like IKEA’s “Showroom” promotion, where the first user to tag themselves in photos of new IKEA furniture won the piece they’d tagged.
There were a number of reasons Facebook wasn’t the right place, user experience and functionality-wise, to host the promotion:
I imagined a user receiving an email with a link to the promotion. Wouldn’t they have a better (read: less confusing) experience clicking through to a site who’s clear visual design leads them through the upload and share process? Being dumped on a Facebook fan page, even on a nicely laid out static FBML tab politely explaining the process of uploading and tagging a photo, depended on the user taking the time to read the instructions. We know where that goes.
Experimenting with fan-uploaded photos, I couldn’t get them to congregate in one promotion-specific “album”, which gets even more complicated when there is video and text-based content thrown in. I fantasized Facebook would be a tidy destination in which to keep all this fan content wrangled, but there was no way to see it all easily.
That was enough push me away from Facebook as a home for this promotion. We’ll still leverage the Facebook news feed to viralize the goings-on of the microsite, but will end up with an aggregated destination that’s easy to use and peruse.
Thanks to all the good peoples (and there have been more since this tweet) who commented & tweeted about this…your input helped me make a (hopefully) non-disastrous tactical decision.
*Without going into the weeds (my current favourite office-speak expression), the promotion consists of people being asked to share an inspiring photo, video, or story about their personal philanthropy, and sharing that story among their friends. Each donation of inspiration will yield, if all this works out, a matching monetary donation to our non-profit.
Here’s the deal. In support of an upcoming campaign, we’re considering a UGC promotion. I’m torn whether it should be conducted entirely within Facebook, or if we should build a microsite to host it.
The market is local (Winnipeg), so broad reach is less important than participant’s social influence on each other.
Desired outcomes include brand awareness, engagement, and viral sharing. The lurkers—people who don’t contribute content, but passively receive it through sharing—are almost as important as the participants.
Facebook seems like fish in a barrel (easier to reach because they’re right there), whereas a microsite seems like fish in the ocean (more of them who travel farther).
What do you think? Is it a better idea to run a UGC promotion inside of Facebook, using the built-in network & functionality there, or would you build a destination to aggregate submissions & let people share from there? Please comment below whether you favour Facebook or a microsite, why, and if I’m overlooking anything.
Experience Path of a Facebook-based UGC Promotion
Experience Path of a Microsite-based UGC Promotion
Entry Points: Facebook
Fan Page asks for participation
User sees friends participating
Facebook ads
Entry Points: Advertising
Main company website
Email promotion
Sponsorship partner promotions
Twitter
Print promotion – newspaper, flyers
Local radio promotion
Entry Points: Sharing
News feed publishing
Content upload
Content tagging
Facebook “Likes”
Facebook “Share this”
Facebook comments
Entry Points: Microsite
Blog
Entry Points: Advertising
Facebook Fan Page promotion
Facebook ads
Organic Facebook (staff status)
Main company website
Email promotion
Sponsorship partner promotion
Twitter
Print promotion – newspaper, flyers
Local radio promotion
Flickr
YouTube
Entry Points: Sharing
Option to “like” Fan Page
Option to email
Option to “Share this” to other social networks
Option to share on Facebook
Option to tweet
Activities:
Click through to Fan Page
Upload content
Tag content
Comment on other content
Share
Activities:
Click through to microsite
Upload content
Comment on other content
Share
Pros:
“Forced” sharing through news stream publishing
No web development required (faster & cheaper)
Viral is built in; all user’s connections are there & are notified when user does something
Ads can be very targeted
Friends more likely to be local & strong ties, so more likely to be influenced and be from local market
Pros:
Users don’t have to be Facebook members; can share outside Facebook easily
More sharing options; broader reach of social networks
Aggregating content across networks
Full branding & user experience control
Cons:
Content is locked down
Must be a Facebook user to participate
Less control over look & feel
Cons:
Users don’t have to share
Development time & cost
Need videos to come from YouTube to avoid hosting & streaming; potentially complicated
Social shares go out as a link to content, not published as an action
Here’s the deal. In support of an upcoming campaign, we’re considering a UGC promotion. I’m torn whether it should be conducted entirely within Facebook, or if we should build a microsite to host it.
The market is local (Winnipeg), so broad reach is less important than participant’s social influence on each other.
Desired outcomes include brand awareness, engagement, and viral sharing. The lurkers—people who don’t contribute content, but passively receive it through sharing—are almost as important as the participants.
Do racial divisions exist on a web where everyone’s whatever colour they choose to be, avatar-wise, at least? I’m picking up a bit of a racial thing in the social media zeitgeist:
), I’m reasonably sold on the idea of 
