Criteo is a technology company which announces the 'Revolution of Pay Per Click Personalized Retargeting'.  I read this as a mouthful for 'Pretty Impressive But At The Same Time Quite Confronting Online Advertising.

They talk about their business as a tool that allows you to:
- find users who visited your site and left without making a purchase
- retarget each of these users with personalised banners
- bring users back to your site, where they can convert into paying customers

Sounds like a wet dream for most marketers right? The thing is that it actually left quite an impression on me today.

It managed to serve me a banner from one of the online shops I had visited earlier in the day showing me prominently the 3 products I researched on various different sites.
Curious to know more about the slightly confronting and persuasive manners of the cheeky machine, I clicked on the little ‘learn more about this banner’ button at the bottom of the banner.

This took me to a site that told showed me the last 3 items I looked at wiggle and also told me what most people had bought after considering those products. Next to this product overview was a clear link to the privacy policy of their cookie technology.

It reads

“We do not know who you are. We do not know your name. We do not know where you live, where you work, your gender, your age, your email address or any other personally identifiable information about you. We do not collect any information from the publisher website on which you may have seen our ads. We do not store your IP address".

"We do know that the Internet Browser you are using has visited one of our partner sites (probably an online retailer) in the last 30 days, and we have seen which products you were interested in on that site.”

At the very bottom is a paragraph

“If you no longer want to be exposed to Criteo personalised banners, simply click on the opt-out link below. Please note that this procedure will not block ads that are displayed on the websites you visit.”

And that’s the first opt-out of a cookie I’ve ever experienced.

And reading this article today, going through all this small print then pretty much is the future everyone's online shopping experience.

(via Paul B at work)

via Geenstijl

Every now and then I like to refer to Isaac Asimov or Philip K. Dick when it comes to discussing the implications a fully connected world or 'the internet of things' has on the way we interact and communicate with each other and with those machines.

Listening to the talk Russell Davies' recently gave at dConstruct, I thought he shared a nice observation about how more and more machines are now trying to engage and talk to us in a first person, rather bubbly style of writing or talking - supposedly so in an effort to make all these informationalised objects friendly and not scary.

And although I agree with Russell that we are seeing a lot more of this 'innocent-inspired' first person kindness in all sorts of brand communication, it also makes you realise how primitive and basic some of the machine-to-human communication skills are that we are experiencing. Enter Sainsburys self-checkout system.

When I was queuing to pay for some groceries at Sainsburys in Paddington station last week, there were at least 6 machines trying to communicate and interact with people in a cacophony of computer generated voices. In general these were quite unsuccessful attempts to explain to people which item to put in what bag, trying to be apologetic for the fact they didn't recognise the item and offering people a choice to pay cash or with a card. Combined with the automated queue management voice-over that was trying to direct people to the next available check-out, it made the whole experience very surreal and completely disconnected from any human interaction.

Now I am not suggesting more bubbly, first person style interaction into a Sainsburys self-checkout but the people responsible for it could at least start to think about a slightly more advanced style of interaction. I am sure one can develop some more sophisticated computer skills that allow those machines to recognise and deal with common actions of frustration and sometimes sheer anger of the average shopper to make the whole experience slightly more bearable (or even pleasant).

Image from http://www.carobinson.com/games/ATARI%20-%20I%20ROBOT.jpg

Last week I came across this article titled '5 Easy steps to stay safe (and private) on Facebook'. I sent it to a few people following various conversations about the increasing concern on how they appear on sites like FB without being able to control. Listening to the conversations, those concerns are mostly fuelled by the fact that not many people can actually be asked to spend a little time figuring out how to manage their online presence and/or identity.

This morning IAB research confirms that this assumption is very true for a bigger and more general part of our online presence stating that:

• 72% of internet users are unaware of online behavioral advertising – the practice used to deliver relevant advertising based upon previous web browsing activity

• 81% of internet users do not know the control they have over behavioral advertising, in particular their right to opt-out

• 74% of internet users are comfortable with behavioral advertising when given further information about what information is collected and how it can be controlled

Linking this to a new report from Ctrl-Shft titled 'The new Personal Communication Model: the rise of Volunteered Personal Information' made me think about how important skills and knowledge on managing personal data and profiles are becoming when one wants to get the most optimal experience from interactions with brands and their physical manifestations.

The report talks about a shift from the Traditional Customer Interaction (TCI) method - a flow of information between an individual and an organisation where the latter party manages, gathers, stores and uses information and is the primary initiator of an interaction - and a Volunteered Personal Information (VPI) flow - a flow where individuals are also data managers who collect, store and use information about themselves and the organisations they deal with. In essence a communication model based in TCI revolves around organisations gathering information about individuals and sending messages to them, a communication model based on VPI revolves around organisations gathering relevant, timely information from individuals and then responding appropriately to these signals of demand to deliver mutual value.

Planning forms of communication between people and brands using a model of VPI again confirms the requirement of a true real-time understanding of and insight into the behaviour of the target audience - much more than what most marketeers currently have to their disposal.

The arrival of the real time web must be something those people don't even want to think about (or deliberately pretend not to understand) I guess?

James at work kindly pointed me in the direction of this article from Ctrl-Shift about a new research project that looks at the many ways in which consumers, customers and citizens are changing the way they make decisions. It obviously takes into account the role technology plays in the way we make our decisions but focusses more on new insights into how we make decisions in the first place.

The hypothesis that will be explored in the research is that "far from ushering in a new era of consumer control where organizations can wield new-found insights of psychology, neuroscience, etc to get consumers to do what they want them to do, the net effect will be precisely the opposite: to focus society's attention and scrutiny, increasingly, onto how good organizations and brands are at helping individuals make (and implement) better decisions."

What I like about the research is the idea that it looks at consumers as human beings rather than simplified 'rational economic agents' and encourages (or forces) marketers to think about the sustainability of their business. A fascinating idea that could give the whole advertising and communications industry a bit of a wake-up call. Its no longer about inciting consumers into making decisions which are bad for them but profitable for the organisation. Instead its about helping individual people to become aware of their predictable irrationalities so that they can avoid them or counterbalance them to make better decisions.

Watch the video below and you get a pretty good impression of the awesomeness and power of the real-time web.

Bizreport sparked a thought this morning by asking me 'Do you know the value of non-clicks'. To be perfectly honest with you, the answer must be 'No I don't' most of the times.

The fact that we should look beyond the CTR of a banner to determine the effect of the campaign isn't new. And all sorts of people have been trying to build a case for a different way of analysing the effect of an online campaign. However, I feel that we are still not doing enough (read: I am not seeing enough of it in my direct environment and in the wider industry) to understand how different online touch-points work together in influencing people's behaviour.

Facts like display ads generating up to 60% lift in click through rates on search results are interesting thoughts to completely re-work the way we design our on line campaigns. If more and more print campaigns are urging people to search, why wouldn't a banner reinforce that thought?

link: via Bizreport
image: CC via  JP<3! on Flickr

An unpublished study by MIT has found that homosexual men can be identified just by looking at their Facebook friends.
When I first read the headline I was keen to learn more about what other data and privacy issue Facebook was getting itself into just after it announced it is shutting down its controversial Beacon platform. Luckily for Mark Zuckerberg this time round it all looks rather innocent, or does it?

2 students at MIT spent a lot of time and energy analysing data to come to the conclusion that if as a man you have proportionally more gay friends on Facebook, chances are very high you are gay yourself. Wow, could this be the reason why this study is still unpublished?

However, what is interesting about those type of studies is that we are starting to use social media behaviourial data to learn more about people. Its no longer only about your personal clicks, what you write or what other's say or show about you that creates a digital footprint of an individual, its also who you befriend and hang-out with online that says more about you. If our friends reveal who we are, that challenges a conception of privacy built on the notion that there are things we tell, and things we don’t.

link: via @jowyang on Twitter
image: CC via Moktoipas on Flickr

Last week Twitter changed it's Terms of Service. What I like about the changes is that they are presented in a very straightforward way, all focussed on how people behave using Twitter and aimed at improving the overall future Twitter experience. Obviously there is a strong focus on preventing spam and an effort to crackdown on the annoying bots that send automated tweets. However, the one thing that stood out most for me was the bit on ownership:

Ownership—Twitter is allowed to "use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute" your tweets because that's what we do. However, they are your tweets and they belong to you.

This has led people to talk about a Twitter code of ethics that now makes it unacceptable to use other people's tweets without correct attribution. I like the thought, might be a bit difficult to police but its a good start and I think it has potential to survive in an environment with transparency of information and the speed with which info travels.

More on the Twitter blog

According to a recent report, click-through rates on Facebook are nearly 10% higher on Tuesdays than on any other day of the week. Why are Tuesday's better? That is still unclear. Perhaps it is because we have cleaned up any left over business from the prior week, or maybe we have finally managed to clear the weekend hangover. For whatever reason, click throughs on Tuesday's are simply higher.

Something to keep in mind for the next status update.

Full article is here