Behavioral Targeting

Behavioral targetting is an advertising method, used to create advertising messaged directed at an audience based on the sites they visit and collecting information from their browsing history.

Advertisers can use behavioral targetting in many different ways: they can use information based on the site a person visits, key word searches, and what a person does on the site that they visit.

For example, if I go to www.imdb.com, which is a movie database website, an advertiser can see that I love movies, what kind of movies that I like and how often I spend my time going through that site. They store the information in a list of cookies. The next time I visit IMDB, there may be pictures of the movies that I like, or several different links to movies that are similar to the genre that I like. For example, I wanted some information on Sin City for a movie review I was doing in a class, so I spent quite a bit of time looking at that site, the actors in it, and other films in that genre. The next time I looked at the site, there were movie suggestions that were similar to that plot; like Pulp Fiction. There were also listings of other movies that the certain actors I searched for were in. There were also listings of movies by the director of Sin City.

Based on my screen browsing history, I would say that most of the websites I visit are hotmail.com, imdb.com, facebook.com, amazon.com and myspace.com. According to this information from my PC, certain advertising products that are targetted to me are
1) posters,
2) movies,
3) books,
4) textbooks,
5) poetry,
6) novels,
7) college loans and
8) how to save time.

Many advertisements that pop up on my computer are for books, student loans, credit card approval, movie tickets and concert entries.

Before this assignment, I really didn't notice it too often. I didn't realize how much I was actually being targetted as a consumer. The feeling is a little scary. I noticed when I went to Amazon.com to search for textbooks, the next time I went on there, a list of books came up similar to that topic. I guess to an advertising perspective, they are meeting my needs, interests and consuming habits. However, there is the issue of personal security that still bothers me quite a bit that I am being watched. For example, posting a screen capture of all the information on my home computer really bothered me. Due to someone else living in the house, I posted it from a classroom after I spent the normal amount of time browsing, searching and doing what I normally do. It really bothered me and I believe it is an invasion of privacy in many different ways.