Personalized Ads - Yay, or Nay?
Here comes yet another controversial topic: Personalized Ads. Such ads are the literal epitome of good branding and effective use of marketing dollars, leveraging on the use of data information and technology’s efficient ad targeting. Be it the advertisements you see on Facebook, or the videos you see on YouTube, online advertisements make use of your search engine to provide personalized ads for you, and to maximise the marketing costs from companies and firms.
However, with personalized ads come a stream of complaints from naysayers, repulsing the use of personal information for advertising intents, purporting the lack of privacy and an invasion of data utilisation. Conversely, as aptly stated in an article by AdWeek: Consumers don’t notice when it’s there but are highly sensitive to its absence. McKinsey refers to it as a “hygiene factor.” You might not notice that your partner brushes their teeth every morning, but you’d certainly notice if they didn’t.
Antagonism aside, personalization of ads has been widely supported, as we see most companies - big or small - utilising targeted ads for potential consumers online. Here are the key traits of personalized ads that reinforce the practicality and effectiveness of it:
1. Saving on Marketing dollars
Imagine spending a bunch of money on your housing advertisements, only for them to be mostly viewed by 10 year olds playing games on Facebook. From a firm’s point of view, personalization of advertisements and the targeting function of marketing has probably been the most useful thing not just in terms of cost, but data analytics.
2. Catered to Your needs
Who doesn’t like freedom of choice? Even better, the freedom to choose between things you are genuinely interested in. It is inherently the same as the booming DIY concept in the food industry - being given the choice to choose your favourite ingredients in your bowl.
3. Efficiency + Effectiveness
Putting two and two together, other than concerns about data privacy, personalization of ads really created a win-win situation for both firms and consumers.
While data privacy is indeed a huge concern for many and the lack of it can have immense influence on the reputations of online/communication platforms such as WhatsApp or Facebook, the onus to protect your data and use it in the most appropriate manner is on them. Undeniably, most of us in first-world countries have become accustomed to online shopping and even simply just searching for information - we can no longer escape the use of technology which inherently comes with the use of our data.
We may assert that compromising a portion of privacy for personalization can sometimes be inevitable, but at BCD we aspire to cater to your needs whilst protecting privacy as much as possible. After all, at BCD, our focus is YOU.
