Warren on Book Marketing, Social Media, Twitter and More

Saturday, February 05, 2011

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Creepy Ads Are Nothing New

More from the common sense department... where we learned earlier today that going places you don't want to be seen can be stopped by not going there...
Flash back 25 years when I got a letter in the mail (remember when you opened mail?) that had the make, model and year of my car plastered into a paragraph about my possible insurance needs.
That felt creepy.
Most people don't like companies to tout how much they know about you and soon the practice ended. Not because of legislation, not because of a revolt.. Smart marketing learned IT DOES NOT SELL WELL
We like that computers track what we do and make our experience more interesting. Frankly, I don't want to see the dating ads they show my daughter.. if I am going to use Facebook, I know there will be ads. Might as well make them something that a happily married boomer male might appreciate (nostalgia quizzes and mlm programs according to my screen).
Google reads all my email and most site drop a cookie on my computer. They could be creepy, but if they go that way, I'll delete the cookies or stop visiting their site.
I'm wondering if it's possible that the woman in the story below had those shoes ON HER MIND at least as much as the ads put them there. After all, they are what she asked for.
Amplify’d from www.nytimes.com
Retargeting Ads Follow Surfers to Other Sites

The shoes that Julie Matlin recently saw on Zappos.com were kind of cute, or so she thought. But Ms. Matlin wasn’t ready to buy and left the site.

Then the shoes started to follow her everywhere she went online. An ad for those very shoes showed up on the blog TechCrunch. It popped up again on several other blogs and on Twitpic. It was as if Zappos had unleashed a persistent salesman who wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Read more at www.nytimes.com