Web and mobile are changing the face of advertising as we know it. Let me give you an exmple. I recenlty visted a website that sells a software product. Soon after that google ads for the site have been following me whereever I go. I see ads for this site on the blogs I visit, youtube videos I watch etc. It is kind of creepy. Google is tracking me with cookies and is serving me ads to the site since they know that I visited this site (so I must be interested in their product, in this case they are wrong). These ads have nothing to do with the blogs/videos they are being servied on. It is a new kind of contextual advertising. I call it customer stalking.
Whether we like it or not, companies like google know a lot about us. Soon most business will have access to such data. They can use it to sell you more effectively or annoy with offers you don’t want.
NY Times writes about how web and mobile coupons are used by companies to deanonymize their customers.
For decades, shoppers have taken advantage of coupons. Now, the coupons are taking advantage of the shoppers.
A new breed of coupon, printed from the Internet or sent to mobile phones, is packed with information about the customer who uses it. While the coupons look standard, their bar codes can be loaded with a startling amount of data, including identification about the customer, Internet address, Facebook page information and even the search terms the customer used to find the coupon in the first place.
And all that information follows that customer into the mall. For example, if a man walks into a Filene’s Basement to buy a suit for his wedding and shows a coupon he retrieved online, the company’s marketing agency can figure out whether he used the search terms “Hugo Boss suit” or “discount wedding clothes” to research his purchase (just don’t tell his fiancée).
Coupons from the Internet are the fastest-growing part of the coupon world — their redemption increased 263 percent to about 50 million coupons in 2009, according to the coupon-processing company Inmar. Using coupons to link Internet behavior with in-store shopping lets retailers figure out which ad slogans or online product promotions work best, how long someone waits between searching and shopping, even what offers a shopper will respond to or ignore.
The coupons can, in some cases, be tracked not just to an anonymous shopper but to an identifiable person: a retailer could know that Amy Smith printed a 15 percent-off coupon after searching for appliance discounts at Ebates.com on Friday at 1:30 p.m. and redeemed it later that afternoon at the store.
“You can really key into who they are,” said Don Batsford Jr., who works on online advertising for the tax preparation company Jackson Hewitt, whose coupons include search information. “It’s almost like being able to read their mind, because they’re confessing to the search engine what they’re looking for.”
While companies once had a slim dossier on each consumer, they now have databases packed with information. And every time a person goes shopping, visits a Web site or buys something, the database gets another entry.
“There is a feeling that anonymity in this space is kind of dead,” said Chris Jay Hoofnagle, director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology’s information privacy programs.
Welcome to wonderful era of customer stalking.