Today’s consumers want it all!
They want to enjoy special deals and promotions, but they do not want any ads to interrupt their social media news feed. They want to know the release dates of the newest products, but they do not want to have to sit through video advertising while they are on the internet. They want to be able to get front row tickets to see their favorite country music star, but they do not want to pay for the music that they stream.
They want it all.
And they want it now!
Unfortunately, in this world where print and television advertising are decreasing there has to be a way for merchants and suppliers to pay for the advertising that they need to promote the products that they want to sell. As a result, many of the largest and most successful companies are relying on targeted marketing strategies to make sure that they can make the most of their advertising dollars. This targeting, of course, means a loss of privacy for the consumer. For example, you agree to share your location so you can find directions to your favorite athletic wear store and that athletic store uses name matching tools, entity extraction, sentiment analysis, and identity resolution software to make the most of your one simple search.
Interestingly enough, if you think that this targeted marketing approach is already invading your privacy more than you want, you will likely be frightened to know that the International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that less than 1% of today’s digital data is ever analyzed. With the use of text mining, however, companies hope to bridge the gap to the missing 99%. In fact, it is very safe to say that as digital targeting continues to increase, consumer privacy will decrease. And if you are a consumer who is unsettled by that, you might want to ask yourself if you are willing to go back to listening to commercials on the radio instead of streaming your music or if you want to go back to the days before DVRs and on demand programming to when a 30 minute sit com required you to sit through 12 minutes of television advertising.
The fact of the matter is, some one has to pay for advertising and if consumers are no longer patient enough to watch or listen to an ad on television or radio, we should not be surprised when new marketing tools enter the digital arena. Social media users want to see the latest posts and updates from their friends, but are offended when a push notification for a product interrupts the screen. Someone, however, has to pay for the development of the apps and the social media sites that we have all become accustomed to.
Name Matching Tools and Other Marketing Strategies Help Target Specific Kinds of Customers
Producing an enormous amount of data every second, Facebook has 1.97 billion monthly active users worldwide. This large social media provider, however, has come under fire for many of the ways that they have allowed information to be used. Both propaganda by a foreign government and the release of information to various companies have all come back to haunt Facebook. The fact of the matter is, however, every free social media site that we use and every free game that we play online has to use something like name matching tools and other strategies if they are going to entice advertisers.
Research by Ken Auletta, the author of the newly released book Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business (And Everything Else0, indicates that 95% of Facebook revenue comes for ads and that 90% of Google revenue is also ad generated. If internet and social media users are not willing to sit through generic ads on these sites, why should it come as a surprise that marketing teams are using name matching tools, text analytics, and other digital marketing strategies to get a return on their investment?
You may want it all, and you may want it now, but how much are you willing to give up?
To see more, read this. Find out more about this topic here.
