Hasta La Creative!

Stanford professor Itamar Simonson talks about a conundrum that hits today’s marketers right in the gut: Consumers (despite what many will claim) dislike personalized ads. A great deal of interactive marketing technology is built around the premise that personalization is a good thing. In theory, it should make marketing and advertising more relevant. Yet when consumers detect that a brand has made crude assumptions about them, they make a few assumptions of their own. Namely, that an offer is too good to be true, not actually relevant or just plain creepy.

The problem begins when marketers rely too much on simple behavioral observations to try to infer what might be relevant. While that approach might have been novel in the 1990s with the rise of email marketing and CRM, consumer expectation has changed considerably. In fact, you could argue it has reversed.

Mining the curated web

Continue reading at AdAge.com