Hello World. I am here today to pitch you my idea, and I am going to talk to you as a consumer. The thing I never thought that I would want to be… until I realized that I could have it the way I wanted. We can change the game.
Like you, I am sick of the irrelevant and senseless ads, the pop-ups, and the loud late night commercials. But instead of blocking these out of my life, I am going to change the game to meet my needs, and I am going to start by telling the world exactly what I like.
I wear Adidas soccer shorts, and Prana pants are exactly my style. My favorite salsa is Mrs Renfro’s medium corn salsa. The only eggs I eat are cage-free, with no added hormones. I play the guitar. I like jam, bluegrass, and electronic music. I don’t always drink beer but when I do.. It’s a micro-brew. For some reason Banana Republic button-down shirts and slacks fit best on me. Are you listening here? I’m telling you the brands and products I want to advertise to me.
Do you have the new line of world cup soccer apparel Adidas? Yes? Let me know about it. Want to give me 10$ off? Fantastic! Mrs Renfro’s do you want to give me a coupon for a few bucks off one of your new salsas? I will gladly accept that. Are you a brewery? Why should I like your micro-brew more than Broken Halo IPA?
Do you understand? We are not going to fight the marketers anymore. And, we aren’t going to accept the sneaking around that they do trying to learn from our search queries and status updates.
What I’m saying is that we need a place to help us represent the brands and the products that we love in this world. We need to make them come to us. We create a space on our terms where they are welcome to give us offers and incentives. And we will look at them too, because we are genuinely interested.
How To Implement This Idea
Phase 1 – Website with Consumer Profiles
This change could first come in the form of a website, new or part of an existing community. Facebook, Google, and Coupons.com are in a great position to create consumer profiles. Brands will then have the ability to claim their products with restricted access to messaging and marketing to the interested consumer. The website also uses the consumer profile database to advertise on the site using this pyramid model, creating revenue for the site.
Phase 2 – 3rd Party Sites Use Consumer Database
3rd party sites gain access to the consumer profile database through an API for ads displayed on their site. It would use the same pyramid model with revenue sharing.
Phase 3 – Google Ads Opt-In
The best case scenario would involve a check box in your Google profile opting in to the consumer profile database. Any site using Google Ads would then be tied to your consumer profile and display ads using the pyramid system shown above.
Conclusion
This is a win-win-win for everyone involved. The consumers are happy because the ads are more relevant and content, offers, and deals from their favorite brands are coming to them. The brands are happy because they are connecting with their target. And, ad sites are happy because their click-through rates improve dramatically.
It is time for the consumer to take charge in this social internet age, and this is exactly the way to do it. What do you think? Can you see this future?
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
Brilliant idea. If done right, I’d sign up because this is like a universal “customer loyalty” program at your grocer where you get coupons and other deals in exchange for your consumer information.
However, there are subtle and thorny privacy issues. Unlike a walled garden of juicy data about you held behind the firewall at the grocer, your idea has the potential of exposing all kinds of relatively sensitive information you to a much wider audience. That’s because any one piece of information (“I like Adidas”) doesn’t reveal much but the collective sum of your preferences becomes a consumer dossier.
Granted, you’re saying that you get to choose which brand preferences you broadcast but you won’t get wide adoption if consumers only expose their top 5 brands, say. If that doesn’t include toothpaste, the Colgate’s of the world won’t sign up, for instance.
So, what to do? You want a good deal on things you buy. But, do you really want people knowing that you use whitening toothpaste, bad breath gum, vitamins for active seniors and hair dye? Maybe you don’t care if companies know but would you want anyone looking over your shoulder at the browser to see those particular products’ ads targeted directly at you?
Here’s a possible solution: When you sign up for the service, you are not assigned an individual ID but a group ID that you share with 20 random strangers. All your preferences are dumped in this pool. Marketers can still market to the pool (or all groups that buy whitening toothpaste, for instance) while consumers have plausible deniability (“I don’t know how that adult diaper add got there, it must be someone in my pool.”).
Stephen, thank you very much for your lengthy reply. Getting others opinions and starting the conversation about this is exactly what I wanted.
I think your privacy concern is very warranted, though a younger generation might see things differently due to their increasingly public digital life already, and the fact that they are not using Rogaine, Whitening Toothpaste, and Adult Diapers yet. (Although now I am thinking about acne medication..)
I think another work-around for this could be that you could set your brand and product “likes” to be private. It would not show that you like the product publicly and deals, coupons, would come only to your inbox. You could also set products like whitening toothpaste to simply like the brand and not the specific product. Allowing for more obscurity.
The other option for denying the adult diaper ad was for you, would simply be that it was part of the 30% of standard ads that I would want to incorporate into the plan.
The hope would be that a brand would get a report while building an ad, coupon, or deal that says something like: “With this ad you will reach 4,000 fans of this product. 8000 fans of your brand. 20,000 fans of related products. 50,000 impressions blasted at random.”
As for myself, there are not so many brands and products that I would put on my coat of armor and fight for. I certainly would not list every item or product purchased from the grocery store each time.
William,
When doing something new, the most powerful thing you can do is ask the right questions. Thusly, I apolgize in advance for the length and number of questions in my comment. I don’t expect you to answer them all or even most of them, but rather it is food for thought.
Your last comment brings up a couple thorny issues about the data to be stored. When or how does the data get into the system? If a consumer falls out of favor with a brand, _when_ is that reflected in your preferences database? Do you ask or force them to regularly update their preferences? Do you ask about each preference periodically? How often? How long does the process take? How old is the data that you do have? What about customers who don’t want to see specific ads, but rather are only are looking for general coupons or discounts (which essentially, is a different type of ad)? What about differentiating between brands and companies ; companies and conglomerates? If a company has 20 brands but you don’t like their business practices, could you block or dislike the company itself or would you have to block each brand and be wary of new brands from the company? Would this information be aggregated onto the “consumer wall”? If so, how? Would you let the company remove this information or would you leave it to the users to flag and report this kind of inflammatory data? Even if it’s accurate? Even if it’s _not_ accurate?
There seems to be plenty of reasons to attract advertisers, what incentives are you giving to consumers aside from coupons and targeted ads? I can find coupons on many websites and ads are everywhere. If you wanted to design a new killer ad platform, what really are you giving to customers that they could _not_ find elsewhere? What about gathering product information that consumers can’t easily find? Plenty of websites offer customer or editor reviews. Perhaps a products estimated carbon footprint; recycled and recyclable content; Yearly power usage or cost; Or country of origin? Getting this type of information, that users cannot easily find elsewhere, would add additional incentive to bring consumers in. This kind of information is especially relevant if a user could window-shop a specified scope of products ( only local companies, only food locations, only within 10 miles of my stomping grounds). How about a cut from the ad revenue? If not direct reimbursements, how about a points system?
Privacy is a bigger concern than you might have imagined. You obviously have no problem with using your real image and name on this website. However, other people feel differently. Much differently in some cases. Simply setting your preferences to private only works as well as the infrastructure behind it is secured ( facebook , myspace ). Data that has any value will be stolen, sold, or re-purposed ( wikileaks , apple ), often in a manner not authorized by the origin. I second Stephen Jones’ idea about having anonymous pools and disagree with your idea that many of the younger generation will want to have an “online presence”. It may be “cool” now, but in five years (after numerous and various website leaks) which will be cooler : Being able to pull up your life story through a search engine or no results found?
Aggragating the data would greatly help with privacy. This aggregated data may include the standard affair of age, sex, generalized locale (zip code), earnings and any other data the user is willing to provide. I believe this gives more benefits than the idea of an unique advertising experience. My peers may know about products, brands, or categories that I may not know about, a reason to opt-in to the program. This is especially true about local products and services and it would fall into the “related products and services” category in your triangular diagram. The groups themselves shouldn’t be (for example) only one age within the same zip code, but there should be both an upper and lower bound set for the range of each group’s attributes to allow a varied, but targeted experience.
Of course, for every solution new problems arise, such as migrating users. Should they automatically be matched to the pool (demographic) that best matches their interests? If so, how do you move data from one pool into another pool without uniquely identifying the relevant data? After rereading Stephen’s comments, I noticed that his pools would probably be forever static. That is, if 20 users is the max and no one could switch pools, then you’d have issues with dead or nearly dead pools with 20 people’s worth of aggregated data but only one or maybe two active users. If you only store demographic information on the users profile while keeping preferences in the aggregated pool, when users are switched between pools (automatically or manually), they retain basic information but loose any specific preferences. This seems to go against your core ideals. There might be some aggregation maths that might solve this (such as a preference value, to add and subtract from), but then you are moving a subset of the aggregated preferences, not necessarily the preferences themselves. Alternatively, you could go meta with preferences and have users in multiple pools which would allow for far more precice aggregated preference data.
In conclusion, I appreciate the idea and attitudes behind it, but really, this sounds like a startup venture that would be quickly bought out (google, microsoft, any large data broker) and/or never heard from again. I would recommend you familiarize yourself with current market trends on consumer targeted websites, such as the consumerist or reddit.
Hello Jack, thank you for such a detailed comment. I probably won’t be able to answer all the questions, and some of the answers are a bit above my head I’m sure, but I will take a stab at it here.
I think immediately it should be reflected just as if you were unfriending the brand/product. I don’t think there should be a list of hated brands/products, only liked ones.
I don’t think we would ask or force them to update anything, but at any initial sign-up there should be suggested brands or products. The process by which people add brands and products to their consumer profile should act the same as friending someone in a social network.
In my vision, you search for a product, lets say a specific adidas soccer ball. If you don’t find it you can add it to the database, if you do find it though, you click the like button, and a small pop up comes up that asks if you like the brand Adidas,and the category soccer also.
I see a vertical list of brands and products you have previously liked. Next to each is a number of checkboxes in a row where you can click send me coupons, send me offers, send me ads, etc.
I think that for a successful business model you would need to simple let the unfriending/unliking of a brand to go silent. If you no longer like a brand then it just disappears from your list. You could still express your displeasure with a brand on the brandss wall (which they control) or your friends wall (which your friend would control).
This would give consumers near complete control over their ad experience online, assuming that there was an API to tap the database and know the user on a specific site. (Example: I am on nytimes.com and they use this consumer profile API to give me the most relevant ads when I visit their site.) There are sites where you can get coupons, there are sites where you can follow deals from brands, but there isn’t one that does both with a social network built in.
I can get coupons from the newspaper, but the ad won’t say “Your friend Jane likes this product also!” I can “like” a brand on Facebook, but they won’t automatically start sending deals, and coupons to my wall with ads on Facebook starting to reflect that I have liked that brand.
I think this is hugely important but might clutter the initial mission of the site. On a side note I really wish Amazon.com had a buy this product locally. I live in Wyoming and would rather a product ship from Denver, then from New Jersey.
Location based applications are taking off and I don’t see a reason that when searching for brands the options should include a radius around your location. My search bar would pick up on the Lander Bar’s Rockchuck Rye, and I would “like” that immediately.
This is one area of focus that might be entirely over my head. But the way I see it is that I am willing to stand at the top of the mountain and yell out all the brands and products that I am passionate about, in exchange for my ad experience being tailor-made for me, and my communities. My dollar is my vote and I should not be ashamed of any product, or brand that I purchase or stand behind.
That is kind of my hope. I think that Google, Facebook, and a few coupon sites out there are in a good position to implement some of these ideas.
Hi William!
You will appreciate this since you are in the marketing dept at NOLS (I also work in marketing, but for a non-profit in NC): I found my way to your blog in a round-about way: On my Facebook page, I followed a link that NOLS posted today about a blogger called GoGirlGo (maybe it was you that posted it?). I read her posts, commented here and there, and saw you were a fellow (and one of the lone) commenters — and so I clicked your name and here I am! Social Media whiplash!
I love this because being lucky enough to call myself a two-time NOLS grad, I am now — in one sitting — connected to two other NOLSies via the web! How cool.
Great to find your blog — will certainly read!
Hello Stephanie, which non-profit do you work for in NC? I was born in Atlanta, and grew up playing in foothills around Brevard, and Highlands, N.C. I have to confess that it was me that posted the GoGirlGoBlog story on the NOLS facebook page. Part of my job is to scour the internet looking for NOLS stories. Even though it doesn’t paint NOLS in the prettiest picture, it was too funny and true not to share with the NOLS community. It is always nice to meet a fellow NOLSie, I consider myself a grad before an employee, something about that keeps me in check with my job I think.
Hi William,
I was doing research on the launch of our new contest and saw that you happen to like Prana- which is one of our prize sponsors! If you’d like to participate, for a chance to win ANY item you choose in the store, just become a fan of our page :) http://www.facebook.com/adventureswithinreach. Cool articles.
Hello Liz! I do love Prana. I will check out the contest now. I hope that you were able to find some good info from my sight. Let me know if you have any questions with the contest. I would love to know how your contest turns out.
Hi William,
I was forwarded a link to your consumer manifesto. Very interesting ideas. I’ve been working on an idea along these lines and I’d love for you to check it out. http://www.gomper.com. I’m essentially trying to apply the laws of supply and demand to the buying and selling of advertising. Marketers spend $3 billion per year on their demand for consumer time, attention, and personal information. I believe the supply of these assets belongs to consumers, who deserve the compensation rather than the media companies that aggregate us.
If you get a chance to check Gomper out, please let me know what you think.
-Dave
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