25 TECH FEED Audience Data
WHAT’S MINE Feel like you’re being targeted? Just wait until AI- charged advertising gets hold of you Words by Adrian Pennington
MINED interest in buying a new deodorant, and I support West Ham.
anonymised ads, but that’s not where things are going. Social media networks in particular are already finessing ways to predict our every desire. It gets them closer to the holy grail of serving up ads that don’t feel like ads because they’re useful. None of this is new, having been core to the work of marketers and Mad Men since the dawn of television. But when you apply it to a technology that is the centre of almost everything we do, suddenly the scale is totally different. “With the advent of digital streaming services, TV has become an increasingly individual affair, and therein lies the challenge that all content providers now face – if a viewer isn’t watching TV with others, why should they be offered the same viewing experience, content and promotions as everyone else?” observes Ron Downey, CEO of multiscreen video developer Massive Interactive. The power to leverage data and deliver truly tailored consumer experiences is made possible when broadcasters shift their
ecently, while watching Homeland on catch-up via my Virgin box, I experienced something that is increasingly
The same programme viewed as a live stream increasingly serves up more of these ‘personalised’ ads, which are even more jarring in their incomplete knowledge of me. I may have signed up to Channel 4’s digital service to occasionally stream one of my favourite shows, and I understand the bargain struck by trading my data to ultimately pay for ‘free’ content, but such targeting still remains, to my mind, an uncomfortable experience. Perhaps it’s just that I’m used to
familiar to TV viewers. In the ad-break a commercial appeared which clearly thought it knew something about me. It was an ad for deodorant and featured players from Liverpool FC in the club dressing room extolling the virtues of the product. This really irked me. I may live in Liverpool and I fall into the male demographic, but the ad was skewed for a younger person than me, I have no
WITH THE ADVENT OF DIGITAL STREAMING SERVICES, TV HAS BECOME AN INCREASINGLY INDIVIDUAL AFFAIR
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