Do Consumers Really Want One-to-One Marketing?
A recent New York Times article raised serious issues about the viability of one-to-one marketing. Citing a survey of consumer attitudes commissioned by professors at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Berkeley, the article reports that a clear majority of Americans (66%) reject the whole idea of tailored ads and personalized news, even without being told how their own interests are being tracked online.
But this survey is deeply flawed and its authors' conclusions are biased (they're professors, they should know better). This would be an irrelevant non-issue, not worth my time and trouble (or yours), except for the possibility that a survey like this could inflame public opinion enough to encourage some sort of ham-handed government regulation of online advertising and marketing. Other bloggers are already worried about this.
The survey was conducted by telephone. A thousand adult Americans were interviewed, and each interview began with three basic questions, asked in a random rotation:
- Please tell me whether or not you want the websites you visit to show you ads that are tailored to your interests.
- Please tell me whether or not you want the websites you visit to give you discounts that are tailored to your interests.
- Please tell me whether or not you want the websites you visit to show you news that is tailored to your interests.
The problems with this survey should be obvious:
First, people really don't like advertising and marketing messages in general. (Is that a surprise to anyone?) Of course they don't want tailored advertising, and they don't want untailored advertising either. Consumers are, in general, suspicious of marketers' motives and hostile to being "sold" things. But that doesn't mean they reject personalization. They reject all the loud, interruptive messaging out there, ceaselessly clamoring for their attention span.
Second, these questions present no alternative. If the authors are going to conclude that consumers prefer not to have tailored ads, they have to say what they don't prefer them to. The only way to understand consumer preference is to compare consumers' desire for one thing relative to their desire for something else. That's part of the very definition of "preference." However, that would have required a question like the following:
- Please tell me whether you would prefer the websites you visit to show you ads tailored to your interests or, instead, to charge you a small fee for viewing them?
And of course we all know what the answer to that question would be. You don't need a survey to demonstrate it, because the history of the Web already makes it very clear that free, ad-supported content will triumph over paid content at least 90% of the time.
But third, any rookie market researcher can tell you that consumers who are asked generalized questions like this often have difficulty visualizing the actual situation. The right way to have asked this question would have been to demonstrate it to the consumer directly. For instance, prior to asking these questions, what if the interviewer had first asked:
- Please tell me whether you prefer diet drinks or non-diet drinks?
And then they could ask:
- Please tell me whether you would prefer the websites you visit to show you ads for diet drinks or for non-diet drinks? (pick one)
There is still, however, a very important lesson to be drawn from this survey: The fact that consumers don't see any benefit to tailoring is an indictment of most of us marketers, because we have done such a lame job of tailoring our messages and making them genuinely relevant to our customers. I am not amazed that ordinary consumers would have difficulty visualizing personalized advertising messages, because even today, with all the computer powers and interactive technologies available to marketers, most consumers have very rarely witnessed personalized ads that are genuinely relevant!
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I think Don brings up a good point in his comment, "Tell me about something that might be of interest to me, for real, and that will be fine." This is the epitome of the reciprocity principle. If the consumer feels that you are benefiting them, they will be more responsive to your pitch, and more willing to do business with you.
Most users don't even realize it, but Google does this on its Gmail service. If you write an email to someone about an upcoming vacation to the Bahamas, you'll have ads on the right column for hotels, airlines, and cruises to the Bahamas.
This can also lead to some fairly comical personalization, especially with chain joke emails passed among colleagues or friends.
It's still debatable whether those ads are effective or people just tune them out completely, but when done correctly personalized ads aren't a nuisance at all.
Jody, I could not agree with you more. You are SO right! The faux intimacy of a hard sell is a dead giveaway for me too. But just because they use my name, I don't consider the message very personalized, probably for the same reason you don't. Tell me about something that might be of interest to me, for real, and that will be fine. Otherwise, don't waste my time, right?
I have to admit that when businesses started sending me letters saying "dear Jody" it felt a little creepy. I understand the world is more casual now, but I guess I still feel like I should be given the chance to say how casual the interaction is going to be. I would rather my name was kept off of things and just tell me what it is you want to sell. If you are doing it right, those ads will still be tailored to me even if you don't call me by name.
Part of it is that salesmen that learn your name tend to say it in every other sentence during a hard sell, like at the auto dealership. So, in essence, a company sending something to me and addressing me by name, I am predisposed to feel like a high pressure salespitch is about to be made.
So maybe the way personalization is approached, even in the small details like whether to address someone by their name or simply send an ad, needs to be looked into more closely. Maybe I am the only paranoid that feels this way (I know, I know, it doesn't mean they aren't out to get me anyway), but maybe I'm not. How will we know? If the person is made uncomfortable she simply won't look at the ad. You'll never know why she isn't responding to your overtures.
ofcourse.
Wow, that's a shocker.
The way to tell if users really like personalisation or context in their ads isn't to ask them, it's to watch what they do. We'd need aggregate data from Google to answer the question "do more people click when ads are personalised/in context vs non-personalised/out of context?"