Personalized Ads, Grouping Personalized Services and State Of the Industry
I think the future of advertisement is Personalized Advertising: where the advertisements are dynamic and are user specific ... kinda like in the movie Minority Report. This advertising can be realized by extracting personalized information in ways I've described in my previous blog posting.
You can already see numerous companies grouping many of the personal services (ie. blogs, messenger, photos, interests, subscriptions, etc) together and in many case under the same login/passport. I think the latter is very important, if you are to have a complete picture about the user and personal information relating to him/her; at the very least you need to be able to somehow tie the information gathered from these different services, for a particular user, together.
Done properly, such information can then be used to effect advertising in Search Engines, in email (ie like Gmail), on blogs, etc. However in these mediums it will not be the only factor, since relevance of data/searches must still apply. But there may be new and existing mediums (eg. online shopping) where such personalized advertisement will be the dominating factor.
When I look at the industry, it seems to me that Yahoo is in the best position for this: with Yahoo 360, email, My Yahoo, Shopping, Travel, Photos, Games, etc all connected under one login and therefore can potentially extract enormous amount of user specific data and use this data for personalized advertising. What also helps is that Yahoo has a lot of services (ie. Shopping, Travel ...) to actually sell stuff to you unlike many of their competitors.
I have to say Microsoft also seems to be in a good position for this, since they too have things connected under one passport, but they may lack the infrastructure for this: since they are late comers to some of this space.
On the other hand, Google has many of the services Yahoo has (ie. Gmail, Orkut, Search Engine, Groups, Froogle) but in it seems a lot of them are not connected directly with one passport. Therefore, I think it would be more difficult for them to get a complete picture of user specific information at this time, but that could change in the future or if they found other ways already.
All I can say, its going to be very interesting in the coming months and years!
Tags
Personalization Ads Personalized Services Technology Yahoo Google
You can already see numerous companies grouping many of the personal services (ie. blogs, messenger, photos, interests, subscriptions, etc) together and in many case under the same login/passport. I think the latter is very important, if you are to have a complete picture about the user and personal information relating to him/her; at the very least you need to be able to somehow tie the information gathered from these different services, for a particular user, together.
Done properly, such information can then be used to effect advertising in Search Engines, in email (ie like Gmail), on blogs, etc. However in these mediums it will not be the only factor, since relevance of data/searches must still apply. But there may be new and existing mediums (eg. online shopping) where such personalized advertisement will be the dominating factor.
When I look at the industry, it seems to me that Yahoo is in the best position for this: with Yahoo 360, email, My Yahoo, Shopping, Travel, Photos, Games, etc all connected under one login and therefore can potentially extract enormous amount of user specific data and use this data for personalized advertising. What also helps is that Yahoo has a lot of services (ie. Shopping, Travel ...) to actually sell stuff to you unlike many of their competitors.
I have to say Microsoft also seems to be in a good position for this, since they too have things connected under one passport, but they may lack the infrastructure for this: since they are late comers to some of this space.
On the other hand, Google has many of the services Yahoo has (ie. Gmail, Orkut, Search Engine, Groups, Froogle) but in it seems a lot of them are not connected directly with one passport. Therefore, I think it would be more difficult for them to get a complete picture of user specific information at this time, but that could change in the future or if they found other ways already.
All I can say, its going to be very interesting in the coming months and years!
Tags
Personalization Ads Personalized Services Technology Yahoo Google
posted by Alex Pilchin at 9:47 PM
7 Comments:
Interesting ideas,
however one needs to wonder about privacy issues. Think of it. Microsoft got into hot water for it at the time with their Passport initiative.
BTW: have you seen the new MSN Messenger? it does exactly as you said, MS-Space (Blogging, Pictures) and MSN-Search are extreemly tightly integrated..
Again MS is following exactly the same model, however their motives are not as pure, as I'm sure everyone understands. Nevertheless the end consumer will benefit from the integration, since they are getting a single experience.
No, I haven't seen the new Messanger yet. I can't say I'm surprised about Microsoft integrating things together ... they've always seemed to follow that model for other reasons, but it puts them in a great position to do personalized ads if they can/have built a system capable of mining all that data.
I came across this interesing interview with Gary Flake who was the head of Yahoo Research Labs until recently.
Here are some exerpts from the interview
What's going to be the "next big thing" in web search?
I believe that the next big thing in web search will be a form of personalization that is simple, unobtrusive, intuitive, and almost without exception better than the non-personalized version of web search.
Here is the link to the interview
Don't forget another useful tool that could be used by MS, Google, Yahoo, Amazon etc to gather personal information: Browser or Toolbar. MS oviously has the advantage here, with Google far behind(rememember, they've had their toolbar for quite a few years now) and Yahoo/Amazon not even visible on the horizon.
Regarding the Browser:
I've considered that before, but I think that in itself will be a huge privacy issue (ie kinda like the outroar w/ Media Player gathering some info a few years back); especially since the browser is used for secure transactions: purchases, banking ... if MS was monitoring that, it would not sit well with the public.
Regarding the Toolbar
Yeah, Google had it longer then the rest, but Yahoo and A9 also have a toolbar out and certainly in the case of Yahoo it's been out for a while.
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