Yahoo's Ad Interest Manager: Permission Marketing By Another Name

Ad Interest Manager from Yahoo!

Yahoo's new Ad Interest Manager tool (beta stage) allows users to adjust and manage the kinds of ads they see.  For example, if you're not a homeowner, you can shut off home improvement ads.

In my last post, I talked a bit about the problem of privacy expectations in the display advertising space, and how to balance these with business opportunity.  Yahoo's tool really speaks to that issue by addressing both the advertiser and user's needs.  It offers the user control while at the same time it increases the value proposition of that user as an impression deliverable for Yahoo!  What's the point of burning up an impression in an automotive campaign on a user who doesn't drive a car? Users who have alerted Yahoo! of their interests are helping themselves by curtailing ads they have no interest in while at the same time helping Yahoo! and advertisers target better.

These principles remind me of Seth Godin's now ten-year-old book Permission Marketing.  That book hammered home the realities of the digital advertising space and talked a lot about the need to involve the user in the decisions concerning what messages they see.  A decade later, Yahoo!, Hulu and others are using the ideas, which says volumes about a healthy future in digital display advertising.  Not only is it not going away, it's getting more participatory, smarter and more effective.

Comments

[Another Blog Title]

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Very insightful post. I am going to link to it in my new blog....

[Fred]

I haven't checked out the product, but I've long loved the concept. In fact, I've often imaged it applied to television, perhaps via a Netflix/Roku kind of arrangement where the viewer could select the categories of commercials they wanted to see. Generally though, I think there is under-appreciated value in a mass audience. First, though the viewer may not be actively in the specific market at the moment, they will be eventually, and when they are, there is is comfort and reassurance in the name recognition. But tools like the ad internet manager would be great uner many circumstances,obviously, including promotions, which might be a valuable use for brands that also must advertise ubiquitously.

[steve]

Fred - Thanks for the comment. I could not agree more with what you are saying. Giving control to consumers is one model and in the long run good for publishers and good for advertisers. I think one of the affects of Paid Search and the "immediate" results mind set is that advertisers are, as you say, under valuing mass media and name awareness. Paid search is good (I am not saying abandon or reduce) but there are only so many consumers "in market" at any one time. I think display advertising is going to become something that starts to get appreciated more as advertisers budgets come back and they have to market not just for today but the following two quarters.