Well no. No one wants better ads. People don't like ads. People don't like being sold "stuff."
I've been thinking about this lately, and it's lead me to do some research into trends in behavioral marketing. Generally, what I've found is that generally, the term is very general. It's one of those new, hot terms that has yet to have accepted, defined boundaries (sort of like umm, Web 2.0). At any rate, in the broadest sense, most people are using it to mean, "tracking what users do/have done on your site" and using that to market to them, as opposed to demographic or lifestyle data.
Ok, got it. So sometimes this behavioral data is multi-session, sometimes it's one session, sometimes it's anonymous, and sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's really just data mining and eCRM and sometimes it's really just web analytics. We can swizzle it many different ways, but in the end... it's what people have done or are doing on your site (or maybe your network of sites).
Ah, but here's the rub. When I'm on the internet, I don't always have the same purpose on the same site. Therefore, targeting content and ads to suit what I've done in the past, well that's not really the best way to go. I might just find it limiting and frustrating. Also there's the issue with the household computer. Your teenage son does not want to see ads on Amazon about self improvement books. And this just barely touches on the whole thing of privacy... Now, your teenage son might guess that Mom and Dad are having relationship issues. Bad news.
Here's an idea... what if marketers quit thinking about the best way to sell us more junk, and started thinking about how to optimize the user's experience online. Now that would be something. No one wants to trade their privacy for better ads, but we might trade it for a better experience.
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