Don’t bombard me with ads that are not relevant

Short interview with Esther Dyson:

I have to agree with what Esther said in this interview. Advertising will have to go into direction of becoming very subtle and unobtrusive and will have to find a way to enter the conversation. This is undoubtedly true, it’s evolution. Ads integrating with the community.

Search advertising, although very efficient, has its limits. Its use is limited to what people are entering in search box. The recommendation value is low because of this. Classifieds vs. Information.

Contextual advertising is going great and it has bright future in front of it. Getting context out of text works pretty well, image and voice recognition are improving. Nice idea for matching pictures with ads has been mentioned today on techcrunch.

Mixing social data with context. Facebook has some sort of contextual ads, where you can target by demographics and keywords. Keywords are somewhat limited, but this will improve. Google has demographic bidding available for some sites (list). This are experiments into the right direction.

I think the wining combination for ad targeting in more complex environments (e.g. social networks) hasn’t emerged yet, but we do live in fast times (R. Kurzweil would say exponential). When you see some new technology emerging you can bet that this same technology will improve very quickly and be a lot better in one years time. Of course if must solve some problems or be at least fun to use…