Member Article

How relevant is “relevance” beyond personalised re-targeting?

As a successful online banner advertising producer, Kino Creative have commissioned a series of articles on the future of display advertising, summarised here for Bdaily by Ann Winter.

How relevant is “relevance“ beyond personalised re-targeting? Is it serious competition for non-dynamically generated display ads?

The personal is powerful

Personalised re-targeting can seem like déjà vu, or someone reading your mind - depending on your point of view. Either way it’s a powerful tool for some direct-to-consumer markets. Research shows that personally relevant, or behaviourally re-targeted ads are 25% more attractive to consumers than non personally relevant ads (defined as non behaviourally re-targeted). Consumers’ pupils were shown to increase dilation by 27% when seeing “personally relevant ads, with their “first fixation” increasing by 15%. [Source](http://www.bizreport.com/2011/04/yahoo-study-connects-relevance-to- advertising.html retrieved Feb 22nd 2012).

Spooked? Don’t be

Personalisation and interactivity drives Web 2.0 and as privacy policy analyst Jim Harper observes, “the cost of interactivity is privacy”. Google’s blog champions an “open eco-system” of data storage, with obvious commercial benefits for them.

Harper goes on: “privacy is a value that varies from person to person and context to context”. Simply by moving about in the world we give up information about ourselves all the time, directly, indirectly, deliberately and by accident. Sometimes we mind and sometimes we don’t, and this can change also, depending on how things turn to our advantage.

Context is all

Given a particular context, and an individual with an ambivalent sense of privacy, which is positively affected by behaviourally re-targeted advertising, sales shoot up. It’s not a likely sounding constellation, but the success of dynamically generated ads in general and personalised re-targeting specifically shows how regularly it occurs.

Pile ’em high, sell ’em fast

Personalised re-targeting works best with high turnover, low value goods. The focus is on one impulse buy, multiplied by millions. It shifts large amounts of small purchase items, shoes, accessories, event tickets, treatments, holidays. It’s great at influencing the quick-click purchase, and that’s why it’s big news for retailers and their ad serving platforms.

Does “relevance“ have limits?

Kino Creative came up with a list of scenarios where dynamically generated ads won’t work for their display advertising clients:

• Offline environments, including our own websites
• Where branding is key, where brand is the message
• Business to business marketing aimed at innovators and decision makers
• Media rich solutions, including pitches, keynotes and pressy presentations
• Big national campaigns with a key message

What’s next?

Read our next post on how Flash banner advertising is adapting to survive in the constantly evolving web ecology.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ann Winter .