talking web X.0

Online advertising has been through several changes over the last years. In the early days of the internet there was only one way advertisers and agencies could think of doing advertising on web pages: by the placement of animated graphics in different sizes. The most popular format was an animated gif in the size of 468×60 pixels called “Full Size Banner”.

With the degrading interest of the users in these flickering images the formats got bigger and also smarter technology was used. Doing ads in flash or dhtml allowed the agencies to use new optical tricks to catch the eye of a potential customer.

But all this wasn´t something really new in the sense of bringing more targeted and interesting information to the user. This changed with contextual advertising, a technology - as far as I know - invented by overture and successfully copied by Google (see “The Google Story”).

Whereas in the first evolutionary phase of online advertising media agencies tried to reach the appropriate audience by “guessing” that an ad, placed in the right website content, would probably reach an interested user, in the second evolutionary step an automatic analysis of the webpage content led to a more precise targeting.

But still the advertisements we see on the web today are website centric, not user centric. For example: If you visit mytoys.com to look for a soccer ball for your son, the adserver of the mytoys site delivers you an ad for the new playstation III. Why? Because it is assumed that everybody who is on the mytoys website must be interested in this brand new gaming console. But what if you are absolutely no gamer? What if the only things that interest you in the moment are getting the gift for your son quickly and then head on to planning your next business trip? In that case the advertisement for the playstation is useless information for you, even disturbing and annoying, depending on how aggressive it is promoted.

Enough clever people out there have already realized this drawback of classic advertisement and try to develop online advertising to it´s full potential. Or do you believe Rupert Murdoch has bought myspace.com just because of being hip in the teen world? The first steps into a user centric direction are already done in myspace.com and other similar sites, but these are all “closed containers”, which means that your digital profile is not portable to other sites.

By the way: To my opinion myspace.com is a perfect playground for Google to test new, user centric ways of advertising. And nobody even notes that they are part of an experiment. Or do you think that two different (registered) myspace users would care or even think about why they see two different Google ads even if they visit the same page? If Murdoch gives Google access to the profile data of his myspace users things like this could happen. You don´t believe? Think of Googles ads in your Gmail account - now do you still doubt Google is on its way to user centric profiled ads … ?

This next technological step in online advertising, powered by profiling, is bringing a big change in the quality of the ads we will see: as long as users feel comfortable about the security of their data they will experience ads as some useful information, not a pressing sale. Just imagine: you are the owner of a leased car, knowing that the leasing will end next month. What if some weeks before the leasing contract ends you are getting an unbeatable quote for exactly the new car you are interested in - without searching, comparing prices on different sites, contacting a lot of dealers? Saving you a lot of time and money? Cool, isn´t it?

This kind of user centric advertising will bring a whole new quality to helping you find the products and services that you are interested in. Even more: products and services will find you! You don´t have to search anymore, you don´t even have to know that a special product exists - an intelligent software can reason by your profile that you WOULD like to have more information about that!

So the benefit you get from this new technology ist more like having your private butler: it knows what you like and don´t like, what you need and don´t need, what you are heading to and what could be useful on the way there. It communicates with the appropriate services without any effort for you. And like a good butler it is always there when you need it, stays in the background and keeps your privacy like the worlds biggest secret.

You think this is still science fiction? Well, all the necessary technology is already there. Read on in part II (coming soon) …