Why Person-Based Advertising Is Effective and Not Creepy

When someone hears about Person-Based Advertising, many ask if it isn’t too invasive for the customers to see personalized ads. My honest opinion is that I believe online advertising overall is quite creepy; however, personalization makes it less so.

Things went wrong with advertising a long time ago. Advertisers spend millions of dollars on promotion, while customers are turning on ad-blockers, prepared to sacrifice their browsing experience, just to avoid seeing the ads. So, publishers starve not being able to generate enough money from the ineffective ad-based marketing campaigns.

Why do we hate advertising? Mostly, because it is irrelevant. It was supposed to be a useful piece of information. When a medieval shoemaker put up a shoe sign, it was a helpful piece of information helping consumers to find the product they needed. But now, when you see shoe advertising on internet banners, it’s either boring, or annoying, and rarely useful.

The best indication of irrelevance is a click-through rate (CTR). Yes, sometimes, people are too busy to click on a useful piece of information, which makes a 100% CTR unrealistic. Yet when did we agree to eat a humble pie of 0.005% CTR?

How can you live with the fact that only 1 out of 20,000 consumers is interested in your offer?

Probably that’s why people who hear about personal advertising envision getting constant, irrelevant communication that chases them everywhere – like a mosquito constantly buzzing in their ear.

Surprisingly, our Person-Based Advertising campaigns demonstrate the opposite. CTRs on personalized ads are 10 to 100 times higher. We enjoy 0.2-1% CTR on the per-impression basis, and 3-10% CTR on the per-user basis. We’ve even witnessed 40% CTRs for two test campaigns!

Imagine, you are a CTO of a large enterprise. What excites you more: an ad for a new razor or an article on a new AI-powered cloud backup? This is exactly how person-based campaigns are different from traditional consumer advertising.

Of course, there is standard hygiene: restrain from personal messages on banners, control the frequency of each banner and encourage diversity of messages by making them relevant to the person you are showing it to.

Ads can be more than just relevant if they are person-based. More than that, personalized ads tune down the annoyance factor and create an excellent experience for customers and better-performing campaigns for you.

To sum up, Person-Based Advertising is effective and creates a better experience for the customer, making it much more relevant and much less annoying.

What do you think?