Re: ONLINE ADS>> Is personalization really personal?

From: Tom Hukins <tomh_at_spira.co.uk>
Date: Mon, 9 Aug 1999 14:04:52 -0500 (CDT)

TIM LEE WROTE:
>"So, you're a frequent flyer. A very frequent flyer. You
>travel one airline at least 10 maybe 12 times a month. You
>always request the same onboard magazines, a vegetarian
>meal, and you order the same drink."...
>Do you believe anyone will want the same food, drink and
>magazine 12 times a month? But it is the necessary condition
>for one to one marketing mechanism.

Well, most vegetarians always want a vegetarian meal, but
it's easy to forget to mention this when booking a flight.
In my experience, airlines tend not to have spare meals for
forgetful vegetarians. It would be great if an airline could
think, "Person X always asks for a vegetarian meal when
they're on a plane. Person X is booking a flight now but
hasn't mentioned she's a vegetarian. Should I ask if he/she
wants a vegetarian meal?"

Tim, I followed the long thread on I-Advertising a few
months ago, and I thought you raised some interesting points
contrasting segmentation and one to one marketing. However,
if one to one marketing is about treating a person as an
individual rather than as having similar characteristics to
a group of people, I don't see what's lacking in this case.

I've been considering this issue from a Web perspective:
Imagine a popular database-backed Web site. The database
contains information about the site's visitors, used to
display customised pages. The database also contains
information about what visitors search for and which areas
of the database they show an interest in. This data is
analysed by the site's marketing people. However, this data
could also be used as a predictor.

Whenever a visitor comes to the site, you can often make a
good guess about which areas of the database they will
access during their visit. Some of these accesses will be
complex, maybe taking a couple of seconds to complete. We
expect that the visitor will want to access this data, so
why not perform the complex database lookup as soon as the
visitor's session starts instead of waiting for them to
trigger it? This means each visitor can sometimes access the
site faster.

This line of thinking could be extended to serving banner
ads: Instead of waiting for each request for a banner, why
not figure out the next 2 or 3 banners you'll show to a
visitor?

I think this is an interesting idea, but I've never heard of
anyone doing it. Has anyone got any real-world experience of
this?

Tom

--
              Tom Hukins SpiraHellic Multimedia
Designing effective communication systems for the Web and CD-ROM.
tomh@spira.co.uk +44 (0)1908 367327 http://www.spira.co.uk/


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Received on Mon Aug 09 1999 - 15:41:32 CDT