"Spotlight On The Target"

Targeted advertising targets everybody. It always has and it always will. Before television, a salesman would notice the scent of a perfume, or the style of shoe a customer in his store wore. He would store that information and begin a mental index of the tastes each of his customers leaned toward. He could pull that information from his memory, the next time the customer came in, to steer him or her to additional purchases based on what he had already observed about them.

When TVs began popping up in living rooms all over the country, the sales executives were ready to go. Kids watching The Flintstones were shown sugary cereal, and men watching sports saw commercials roaring with power tools and cars. The daytime soap operas kissed their audience with lipstick and cloaked them in seductive perfume, and lingerie. While everybody whined about the commercials, they all understood that the programming would not just appear on the TV set without somebody paying for it. Besides, the kids realized that a breakfast of Fruity Pebbles would be a great reason to get out of bed. The people who gathered to watch the World Series nodded sagely among themselves at the radial tires tested on beds of nails, and the women watching soaps found better, brighter finishes for their own sets of nails.

Along come computers, and the internet, and Targeted Advertising is a topic, once again. Instead of the high-powered ad executives of the past, now everybody is an ad executive with their own website. Targeted advertising is what drives customers, or these days, traffic, to their sites. Instead of The Wild, Wild West getting interrupted by a shaving cream ad, a person surfing a baseball website will find a pop up, pop in, or pop under, or, even a video offering him a great baseball glove at a great price.

In the old detective shows, a PI would often tell his partner, put a tail on him. Meaning that the partner should follow him and discover everywhere he goes, and everything he does. In the computer age, the computer puts a tail on us by placing cookies on our hard drive that follow us across the internet to find out what we see, and what we seem to like. Once your web browsing habits become familiar to these cookies, you will often get offered items matching your taste while you're on a completely different style of website.

Some people consider Targeted Advertising annoying, like phone solicitors, or cold calling salesmen knocking on their door. Other computer users are more positive. As one surfer in a forum noted, Ads need to be targeted so much, so that they become extremely specific and make us glad to get them. A child with a bowl of sweet, crunchy cereal wouldn't disagree; neither would his father with the brand new cross-cut saw.


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