Google Moves toward Behavior-Based Targeting

First of all, apologies for my less than prolific output recently. Working on a book on social media marketing and it's taking a lot of time. Hope to have it finished in the next 30 days.

In the meantime, news out of Google that they are working to introduce behavior-based ad targeting. They made the announcement very quietly. Perhaps they fear a backlash from privacy advocates.

I could see that backlash coming, but frankly I don't get it. As a marketer, I look at behavior-based targeting as sort of the holy grail. Advertisers get to reach the people they really care about, but equally important, the ad recipient sees ads that are most likely to interest them. Lots of surveys have shown that people use ads to help them make purchase decisions. They like ads about stuff they like. They don't like ads about stuff they don't like. Easy enough. Behavior-based targeting does exactly that.

Maybe privacy advocates don't realize that they are already leaving big, giant, easy-to-find tracks all over the web. (Look at all the murder trials where they go back and reconstruct exactly what the person did on their computer after the crime.)

Good for Google. We can already do behavior-based targeting in TV, radio, print and direct mail. A few firms have it for the web. Good to see Google in the game.

Google Gets into the Radio Business

So the folks at Google now want to help you create, plan and place your radio ad campaign. Google Audio Ads lets you create radio ads, set a budget to air them, pick your geographies, the time of day the ads run, and the radio station format (i.e., country, adult contemporary) that they run on.

This is all part of the democratization of communications. Now anyone can make a video and share it on YouTube. Anyone can build a website. And, as this very site proves, anyone can have a blog.

This isn't new. Pagemaker brought desktop publishing to the masses in the 1980s. It was going to mean the end of design firms everywhere with it's simple templates.

Audio ads should help certain people without a lot of money get on the radio. And marginal advertising is, I suppose, a bit better than no advertising. SpotRunner does the same for TV advertising. It's a good thing, truly, to have this option. The average TV spot made today costs over $300,000 just to make it!

Democracy is good. But for most clients, having professional help should pay for itself.