Are you ready for hyper-targeting?
Advertisers are using your contact information for contextually relevant ads...but not here at FastAs
Personal details like your name, address, phone numbers, email addresses, date of birth, passport numbers, national insurance numbers and so on, are being sold to companies to use for marketing purposes. Contact details are a valuable commodity in this new age of social networking where you create personal profiles...
The unhappy news for many Internet users is that the social networking sites that they have come to love are succumbing to the lure of the big dollar. Progressively it seems that those websites who have successfully led us into a brave new world of social interaction on the Internet definitely have their feet in the old world of money-making marriages with advertisers.
You don’t need to look further than the two leading sites – MySpace and Facebook – to understand the position.
In July 2007, MySpace allowed advertisers the use of personal details such as your email addresses and phone numbers on users' profile pages to assist their ad targeting. They initially allowed more than 50 leading advertisers, including Procter & Gamble Co., Ford Motor Co. and Yum Brands Inc.'s Taco Bell chain, to target any of 10 interest groups – including ‘movies’, ‘travel’ and ‘auto’. Then it added an 11th category, ‘television’, along with hundreds of subcategories, like ‘horror movies’. And then even that category is further subdivided into "teen screams," "satanic stories," "vampires" and others.
Like other social-networking sites, MySpace offers an exciting and liberating mix of messaging tools to encourage its visitors to expand their social networking. Central to this engagement model are personal profile
pages where users can post personal details, photos, video clips, calendars and various other clues to their status, plans and interests. To an advertiser, this is a treasure trove of targeting information that can turn conventional mass advertising into highly targeted and lucrative campaigns. MySpace, a unit of News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media, said many advertisers improve response rates fourfold through its targeting program, which also includes segmentation by location and age groups.
Facebook has decided to take things even further. By accessing the social networks developed by its subscribers Facebook advertisers now enjoy implied subscriber endorsement as they present ads – mentioning Facebook subscribers by name – to their friends and family. And it seems there are no plans to allow anyone to opt out of this arrangement.
Perhaps they would do well to remember that, when it introduced a feature last year that allowed users to more easily track the changes made to friends' profiles, many users denounced it as stalking and threatened protests and boycotts. Facebook had to quickly apologize and agree to let users turn off the feature so that others can't easily see what they do.
If we pause for a moment to consider consumer acceptance of this direction we see that they clearly want a say in it. Facebook certainly got the message (even if they seem to have forgotten it). Adam Bain, executive vice president for products and technology at Fox Interactive, said the company spent a year developing its program and created user panels to study privacy and other issues. "The thing we heard from them is they wanted advertisements to be more contextually relevant to them," Bain said. "If they have to live with ads, they want an ad to be engaging."
So, there it is again. Consumers want a choice. From Adam Bain himself: “If they have to live with ads!”
FastAs CEO, Carl Peatman, views it this way.
“The advances in targeting certainly mean that Internet advertising will become ever more relevant and more engaging to their audiences over time. It is in the commercial interests of the advertisers to ensure that this is the case and it is in the commercial interests of websites reliant upon advertising revenue to find better ways to help the advertisers to target their audiences.”
“For those people who are unconcerned about privacy issues this is all just good news. However, those people who object to the trading of their personal information for someone else’s commercial gain can only be concerned at the overall direction. There is a consumer groundswell demanding to have some choice in the matter – not least because there is abundant evidence that advertising is not only very powerful but that a significant proportion of advertisers think nothing of preying upon the weak in search of sales. No amount of regulation can overcome the fundamental commercial imperatives and our experience shows that commercial interests will easily overcome any self-regulation initiatives.”
“We, at FastAs, believe that social networking is one of the major benefits of the Internet. Alternatives must therefore be made available to ensure that the consumer has the choice to pursue these benefits without the constant advertising barrage.”
“FastAs has been specifically developed to offer such an alternative. The personal information of our subscribers will never be shared with anyone and is not available to assist advertisement targeting. All our facilities are designed to serve the interests and preferences of our subscribers and to protect their privacy.”
FastAs - a revolutionary solution to getting in contact. Use our worldwide phone book, email address directory, or people search to find the contact you are looking for. If you are an individual, a business or an advertiser and you want to be contacted, pre-register with us to help people find you faster. With FastAs you will be able to take full control of your contact information and tell the world exactly how you want to contacted – with complete protection of your privacy.