Online marketing has gotten personal.
That's right — the ads that football fans see for ESPN on Facebook aren't coincidental, nor are the ubiquitous Wizarding World of Harry Potter plugs that float across the screens of Hogwarts buffs.
The presence of advertisements on websites viewed by specific people is the result of meticulous research and monitoring of an individual's Internet use by companies looking for potential customers.
"Big media companies have developed systems to track this Internet usage," senior Caleb Zimmerman, president of Imaginet, the pre−professional marketing communications club for Tufts students, said.
The products and phrases that consumers search for on Google and other websites all contribute to the information advertisers consistently gather about individual Internet users.
"Marketers are trying to match the right people with the right message," Julie Dobrow, director of the Communications and Media Studies program at Tufts, said. "Clearly they can target consumers more narrowly than ever, hone their campaigns more finely and collect valuable information about consumers and potential customers."
Personalized online marketing relies on a long−used marketing technique known as retargeting. Retargeting, also known as remarketing, involves the use of browser cookies to transfer information about consumers from one website to another. That information is then used to formulate ads specific to the products or categories in which that the consumer has shown an interest.
"The Internet makes it so easy to target customers, and that is both a benefit and a disadvantage," sophomore Nika Gokhman, vice president of operations for Imaginet, said.
For advertisers, the ability to know exactly which shoes a potential customer was looking at on Zappos.com is something of a godsend.
Consumers, on the other hand, may feel that their privacy is being violated, according to Zimmerman.
"The inverse of [personal marketing technology] is that people find it intrusive or creepy," he said.
While having companies essentially stalk your online shoe−shopping habits may be somewhat unnerving, consumers are also worried about just how much of their more personal information is being traded by online companies. News stories such as the recent kerfuffle involving Facebook applications allegedly providing user names and IP addresses to third−party advertisers, according to the Wall Street Journal, have fueled this anxiety.
"If people are concerned, it's valid [anxiety]," Dobrow said. "I know that sometimes I find it a bit creepy to see the ad bar that appears next to Gmail, even though I know that it's a computer program that's reading my e−mails."
According to Zimmerman, online privacy is a more nebulous concept than most people would like to think.
"Being a modern−day user of the Internet, people need to understand that there are certain privacy privileges they give up by simply by searching," he said.
Still, more personal information, such as what users post on their Facebook pages, can be protected through means as simple as adjusting privacy settings.
"It just comes down to people being careful with what they're publishing about themselves and use as much privacy control as they can," Zimmerman said.
As pervasive as the Internet is in day−to−day life, it is difficult, if not impossible, to avoid personal marketing entirely, according to Zimmerman.
"Advertisers have already embraced this idea because people are using the Internet so much," Zimmerman said. "[The Internet] is going to be the most important tool [in marketing] because everyone [will do] the majority of their shopping online and [use] the Internet in the majority of their free time."
Gokhman pointed out that what is and is not okay with regard to accessing people's personal information online is murky because the practice is largely uncharted territory for the advertising industry.
"The Internet provides tools and capabilities that marketing has never wielded," she said. "I do know that what we are experiencing now is unprecedented."
