Clark Howard's Tips

Online and cable TV worlds delivering targeted ads

June 13, 2008

Behavioral targeting for ads is all the rage these days among both online and traditional advertisers. When you're surfing around on your computer, a user profile can be easily built as you're tracked from site to site using cookies. Based on that profile, you can then be fed targeted ads.

The Washington Post reports that one marketer has fine-tuned this process to the point that they were able to identify 40,000 brides-to-be based on their visits to sites that had nothing to do with getting married. Of course, the surfers were then served ads related to their coming nuptials.

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The feds are trying to decide if these practices violate your privacy. The ad agencies and advertisers obviously don't want you to have anonymity on the web.

The cable TV industry, meanwhile, has a new $150 million initiative in the works called Project Canoe. The goal of Project Canoe is to come up with ways to feed targeted commercials to your TV based on your show preferences. So the ad spots you'll see may be completely different than the ones your neighbor sees. The hope is that you won't TiVo past the ads because you'll actually be interested in them.

Clark believes there's a serious creep-out factor here! What do you think?

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