Ryan's Marketing Blog

I bumped into some recent news today about twitter launching a new marketing tool: Geo relevant ads. This new tool is said to enable marketers to effectively target their ads geographically, and provide advertisers more detailed user analytics that will allow them to adjust their tweets in response to their followers and find out who exactly is paying attention to their tweets. Also, even if a user listed San Francisco as his location but sends most of his tweets from Los Angeles, a Los Angeles-based company would be able to identify this user and target him on Twitter. This new tool enables advertising to perform at its maximum efficiency and target all its potential clients. This may be  a ground breaking technology for marketers but as a customer, I don’t like the idea that advertisers are developing new ways to bother me.

I believe this technology will really change how people use twitter. It would surely attract a lot of advertisers but may not appeal to some users. Advertising has been evolving too fast and soon enough, people may lose their sense of privacy. The idea of targeted ads and advertisers gaining information about a customer’s profile, likes, dislikes, and even location is threatening in some ways. Majority of the public try to avoid advertising as much as possible, like when making up excuses to prevent telemarketers from wasting our time or when viewers rant about Youtube ads popping up before you can watch a video. I have nothing against advertising but its just something we need to keep in mind since Advertising is evolving and consumers are starting lose their privacy. In one of my recent posts, I discussed about Facebook’s new advertising strategy, in which they are developing a way in which they can target users in a real time basis based on keywords from their wall posts. The competition between these two social networking sites are the causes for the success and evolution of online advertising. This idea may be revolutionary for the advertising industry but they will need to understand that privacy is still vital to consumers.