Chocolate Cubed

A couple of weeks ago, I was sitting in a meeting at my client’s office discussing their different marketing campaigns and how they support each other.  During this conversation, the CEO used the phrase “Scientific Marketing” to describe how we were trying to analyze the different customer segments and market them more efficiently.   I immediately took note of the phrase and moved on, but I have been thinking about it since.  Is scientific marketing like marketing psychology? is it just another name for behavioral targeting?  should the privacy advocate in me be afraid of it?   Read the rest of this entry »

Yahoo! announced on Thursday of last week that by the end of August everyone will have the ability to opt-out of customized advertising on their network.  For those of you who may not know what “customized” advertising is, it is their behavioral targeting and remarketing advertising options.  To put it another way, Yahoo!’s systems track you on their network and deduce what you are interested in buying.  For example, lets say Yahoo! figures out that you are interested in buying a car (you visited a lot of car sites) and then you visit the Wall Street Journal’s site.  Since WSJ has many ads on the site, it is fair to assume Yahoo! has access to at least one.  Now that Yahoo! knows you are looking for a car the system displays a car ad to you.  So in essence, what this new opt-out tool will stop the car ads from being displayed.  My problem is that although you can opt-out of seeing the ad, Yahoo! still knows it is you because you can’t opt out of being tracked in the first place.   Read the rest of this entry »