Hasta La Creative!

Alaska Airlines is introducing a system to create unique ads for consumers. From The New York Times: “The company is combining data from several sources to paint a picture of the consumer sitting on the other side of the screen, clicking past the airline’s ads. Then, as each Web page loads, an ad is swiftly assembled.” This is literally rocket science, because the company’s online marketing guru is a former engineer at NASA. The space administration never has any problems with its flights, so I’m sure the Alaska program will go smoothly. An example of how it works: “Someone who had visited Alaska Airlines’ site frequently but then abruptly stopped visiting it might be greeted with [a] $200 Hawaii offer.” So, consumers like cheap flights to the the tropics, instead of, say, to Juneau or Nome. Did they really need high-tech individual profiling to figure that out?

—Posted by David Gianatasio