Great Quote For Audience Based Targeting

“People don’t notice ads, they notice what interests them and sometimes it’s an ad.”
-Howard Gossage

I saw this quote while reading a post on my favorite advertising news source- adexchanger.com. Jonathan Mendez, founder of Yieldbot, related it to the emergence of audience selling. He has some great points on how publishers have the advantage when it comes to audience/data-driven buying and selling. Among them:

• “As all media becomes performance, publishers can thrive since they have better data, more ways to slice it and easier optimization.”
• “In Search, marketers first create segments based on the actions of the audience (in this case keyword queries). Only then do they match ads and landing pages relevant to the segment created. This is a much more effective practice than Display where the marketer first creates an ad then they tries to find an audience across the web that might respond. The starting point is what is critical and therein lies an insurmountable edge for publishers segments and audience selling. Starting with the ad is a strategic legacy of old media. Performance here is akin to finding needles in haystacks. Starting with people’s interests or intent is the unique advantage of a user-controlled medium. It is akin to shooting monkeys in a barrel.”
• “Publishers have two other critical performance factors in their favor mentioned above  (and also present in Search) — timing and context. With first party data- event driven ad targeting is reality.”

But who is this Howard Gossage fellow with the great quote?

Howard Gossage was an ad man in the 1950s and 1960s who pioneered “anti-ads” (ads that critique or mock advertising). He was committed to the common good, a brilliant writer, and a vocal critic of “advertising’s deleterious impact on the public–including public space”.  He wrote a lot about outdoor advertising/billboards and how he felt they were an invasion of privacy.

With all of the privacy concerns regarding audience targeting, Gossage’s concerns about the common good are still relevant today.  I think the big difference is this though- in his words:

[Outdoor advertising] is not an advertising medium; it is isolated advertising. An advertising medium that incidentally carries advertising but whose primary function is to provide something else: entertainment, news, matches, telephone listings, anything. I’m afraid the poor old billboard doesn’t qualify as a medium at all; its medium, if any, is the scenery around it and that is not its to give away. Nor is a walk down the street brought to you through the courtesy of outdoor advertising.   The Book of Gossage (Copy Workshop)

Browsing your favorite online publication is brought to you through the courtesy of online advertising though.  So does that mean Gossage  would support audience based targeting?  Or does this emerging capability violate a user’s privacy too much?  Given what I’ve read on the man, I think Gossage would support audience based targeting.  He liked to write about a consumer’s ability to exercise freedom of choice when it comes to advertising.  He said you can always close your magazine, change the channel on your TV, or skip past the advertising in a newspaper.  A billboard on the other hand can not be flipped over.

Well with online advertising a user can now control/influence how they are being targeted.  They can also skip to the next web page or simply shut down their Internet browser all-together.  Additionally- the more advertising mediums themselves start to call the shots on how their audiences are being targeted (ie publishers taking control of their audience/targeting instead of allowing the technology driven demand side platforms and real-time bidding agencies to dominate)- the better it will be for the common good.  After all, the public is supporting the medium when they choose to visit a website.  They are not choosing to support the advertisers that run on that medium (not directly- by choice- anyways).  And- as Mendez points out in his post- it will be the publishers who emerge as the best at marrying the interests of their consumers to the marketing efforts of their advertisers.  Publishers know what interests their audiences best…. and sometimes it’s an incredibly timely, behaviorally and/or contextually relevant ad.