Over the past week, Twitter has recently updated their privacy policy which allows users to view information about themselves that are available for advertises to see and potentially target in an attempt to be more ‘transparent’ to users. Such information include, age, gender, language, device type and the users interests that Twitter thinks you have which are generated from your search history. This allows advertisers to gather information about certain segments to better target their campaigns in a more effective and efficient manner. Resourceful or creepy?
As many of you already know, this is nothing new. Same thing happens when you Google for example, ‘Beats Earphones’ and for the next 4 weeks as you are scrolling through Facebook, every other post is a sponsored ad from a retailer that quotes to have the best price. The only difference here is Twitter allows you to see what they suspect are your interests.
Twitter allows you to turn off this feature if you want through the settings menu but it puts forward an interesting concept. What if we can control which ads we can see on the internet (not only on Twitter but also on YouTube, Facebook etc) and we have the option to fine tune our interests so that ads we see are actually ads we want to see opposed to what the site thinks we want to see. This imposes benefits not only for the user but also for the advertiser in the sense that products advertised are ones that the targeted audience actually wants to see and therefore may be more inclined to pay attention to.
The pitfall of this ideology are yielded by organisations as it raises their level of competition. If marketers know that an individual has an interest in earphones for example, numerous of companies that sell earphones will be targeting that same customer and therefore arises competition in the market. This is however good for the consumer in the sense that companies will demonstrate how buying their product will provide most value for the customer respective to their costs/sacrifices yielded by the consumer.
Regardless on whether other digital platforms will allow individuals to fine tune their preferences of ads, marketers should conduct a thorough customer analysis to better meet needs of customers. If your business happen to be there at the right time that customers are looking to buy products that you offer and you can demonstrate that it provides value to them better than competitors can, they will likely buy your products.
What are your thoughts on a digital world where the ads exposed to us are ones we implicitly asked for?
Source:
https://mic.com/articles/177578/how-to-find-out-which-advertisers-are-targeting-you-on-twitter
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2017/05/18/twitter-privacy-update-called-creepy/
Digital Marketing 