Whether Will Contextual Ads Make You Block Adblock

What is contextual ads?

Contextual advertising is a form of targeted advertising for advertisements appearing on websites or other media, such as mobile browsers based on usage context. It could be divided into three categories—online behavioral advertising, social network advertising, location-based advertising.

Three categories of contextual ads

Online behavioral advertising (OBA) target users by collecting data of users’ browsing behavior, like webpage that users visit, to guess their profile such as gender, occupation and interest. Social network advertising/social media targeting (SNA) targets users by collecting the personal information linked with user account, users’ interaction with friends and shared content and categorizing them into different groups with different tags like “twenty-something”, “female”, “car” and so on. Location-based advertising (LBA) offering ads of nearby stores based on users’ location, which combines mobile advertising with location-based service.

Effectiveness of contextual ads

There have been too many articles on advertising excitingly discuss about how effective contextual advertising is to target correct audience and increase click through rate (CTR) for higher relevance makes ads less intrusive.

Privacy concern towards contextual ads

But when contextual ads getting common, users begin to have privacy concern and intendedly hide themselves from advertisers on the Internet by refusing tracking or using Adblock plunge-in.

Of course, users attitude towards three kinds of contextual ads are different because they have different characteristics and appear in different situations in which users have different needs.

A research on two case studies of LBS indicates that users are initially concerned with their privacy, but when actually using location-based services, users discontinue to have the same level of concern (Louise Barkhuus, 2004). In contrast, on social media, Consumers might see personalized ad content as more appealing and tied to their interests, but they might conversely see it as not only creepy but off-putting if they felt the firm had violated their privacy (Stone, B. 2010). As for OBA, a large group of people who are disinterested in better ads since their goal is to ignore ads in the first place. They see no benefit to targeted advertising, so they do not see reason to share data with advertisers. While they accept the idea that ads support free content, but do not expect data to be part of the exchange (McDonald, A., & Cranor, L. F. 2010).

Pull or Push technology

The term “push/pull technology” partly explains the reason for different attitude towards different kinds of contextual ads. “Push”, describes a style of Internet-based communication where the request for a given transaction is initiated by the publisher or central server, such as OBA and SNA. It is contrasted with “pull/get”, where the request for the transmission of information is initiated by the receiver or client, like LBA.

In other words, pull is 100% correctly targeted while push may have ambiguous targeting and arouse negative attitude from users. That is to say, the dilemma for advertisers is to increase targeting accuracy and not to read users’ privacy.

Suggestion

There are two ways to solve the problem. The first one is a tricky way and the second one is not less challenging than targeting correct customers.

1. Don’t let users know you are reading them

When will you feel horrible and be aware that advertisers are reading you? More personalized the ads are, more possible you could feel the existence of advertisers behind the screen. Simply speaking, if the ads show something that only you have (like your photo) or only you know (the website you have just visited). Obviously, for advertisers, it is not a must but a bad choice to show what user have on ads. But it takes some bravery to quit presenting ads based on viewing history, therefore, second suggestion is for this dilemma.

2. Don’t collect so-called “privacy”

Someone said, everyone must have something to hide that is why we care about our privacy. Few of us would feel offensive if someone said he saw you playing basketball yesterday but most of us would feel offensive if someone said he saw you playing a whore yesterday. Things relating to reality identity and sensitive affairs in real life like sex and financial status, would be considered private. What are sensitive affairs in real life is a difficult question since they are different among genders, countries and cultures. But advertisers could set up some basic rules and guess the rest part.

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