Digital Home Thoughts: Advertising in the Information Age

"Advertising is one of the few industries where it’s virtually impossible to know if money spent is money well-spent. Is a Super Bowl commercial really worth $3 million? Is Tiffany & Co. a more alluring brand if its ad appears in The New York Times instead of USA Today? And what makes a good ad, anyway? These and other questions have plagued marketers for decades as they seek to refine the murky art of persuasion."

I think the writer of the article either has a thing against Google, or is just using the Google name to try and gain a few eyeballs. Google, while excellent at its job, is not the only company that participates in data collection and data mining. In a world where things are increasingly personalized, it seems only natural that advertising takes advantage of that individual connection to improve whatever it is advertising. At first, I worry about privacy, but am I not participating in this voluntarily? When I go to Tim Horton's, the server already knows what I want to order. How is that any different that Google knowing that I like searching for the latest gossip about the next Sex in the City movie? It is only that now becoming economically feasible and technically possible to collect all that data together to create a unified profile of who I am. Something about that still makes me a bit uneasy, but I just cannot put my finger on it. I really do hope that all this will help advertising. The ones that show up for me can sometimes be really laughable!