Ask Your Audience What Ads They Want

Posted by: Matt Shanahan

Twitter recently began a new service called @earlybird. The service allows Twitter to deliver offers – think ads – directly to a user’s client. People are proactively signing up to receive ads! In the FAQ for @earlybird is the question “what if I’m only interested in offers for a specific category, let’s say fashion or music?.” The response is “We’re thinking about you, too.” The performance of advertising is high when you combine opt-in and intent. Twitter understands that and will be asking the audience “what ads do you want?”

So why not do this for display advertising? Personally, I like a good ad (e.g., Super Bowl ads). It’s the bad ones that I would like to filter out. If a publisher gave me an ad “tuner,” I’d use it. If the ad tuner allowed me to opt in to skiing and my other interests, I would get value versus what I currently get. Additionally, I would like to specify ads to be either funny or have great photography/cinematography. But alas, I don’t have that control.

Yet, my predicament could be changing. This week the NY Times published an article on Bynamite. Bynamite wants to put control of advertising back in the hands of users (FAQ). They want to become the control center of permission advertising on the Web.

@earlybird and Bynamite are examples of asking an audience what ads they want. So why shouldn’t publishers do the same, getting a clear understanding of intent and improving response rates would seem like excellent foundations for ad revenue optimization.