19 June 2014

MIS750_3: Strategy on Targeted Advertising

In MIS750 Chapter 7, we are exposed to a topic on “IT Strategy & Planning”.

In short, strategy is the direction of an organisation to achieve competitive advantage by allocating its resources for growth especially within a challenging environment. The organisation will then need to develop a strategy of performing activities differently than its competitors.
This includes making radical changes to the business processes for producing or distributing products and services innovatively which sometimes the fundamental structure of the industry.
For example Facebook has recently announced two major changes to its advertising policy that will let it track users across the web while giving them access to the advertising profiles created by the social network of their likes and interests. The site creates profiles in order to sell targeted adverts tailored to the individual but has never before let users view or edit the information in those files.
In addition to Facebook users, other web browsing activities outside of Facebook will also be added to this profile through the Facebook ‘Like’ button. Even if individuals do not click this on third-party sites it still registers their presence if they are logged into Facebook in the same browsing session.
Similar buttons from Twitter and Google have identical abilities, but this is the first time Facebook has chosen to utilise this wealth of data. If users don’t want to be tracked in this way then they can opt out via the Digital Advertising Alliance or for mobile browsing adjust their settings on their handset.
The strategy adopted by Facebook is via “targeted advertising” that the aim to make it clearer to individuals why they were seeing certain ads. It is anticipated that although Facebook is giving people more control over what sort of adverts they see they’re also becoming more aggressive regarding the types of data they collect.
Targeted advertising is a type of advertising whereby advertisements are placed so as to reach consumers based on various traits such as demographics, psychographics, behavioural variables such as product purchase history.
Most targeted new media advertising such as the one by Facebook uses second-order proxies for targeting, such as tracking online or mobile web activities of consumers, associating historical webpage consumer demographics with new consumer web page access, using a search word as the basis for implied interest, or contextual advertising.
A conducted a study on targeted advertising in 2009 revealed that targeted advertising has secured an average of 2.7 times more revenue per ad as non-targeted "run of network" advertising.
Sources:
New York Times, Wikipedia, Information Technology for Management 6th Edition

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