by Bob Hoffman (@adcontrarian) In the past I’ve written a couple of posts (here and here) about the lousy record of “hyper-targeting.” My bottom line on this has been…
“As we have developed the ability to target people more and more precisely on the web, click-through rates of these hyper-targeted ads have dropped dramatically.”
The question is, why? If you believe conventional advertising wisdom, being able to target people based on individual behaviors, attitudes, and demographics ought to make advertising substantially more effective. And yet no one’s smarter than the facts. It hasn’t made online ads more effective. So what’s going on?