I was at the Ad Tech exhibition this month. I am not a big fan of conferences and found the overall attendance appeared down. The usual big SEO agencies were there and it was good to speak to some of our competitors. It is always good to have a good snoop at what they are doing and nice to see that their service is not as good as ours!
There seemed to be a number of American companies there pushing Behavioural Targeting (BT) that collects information on user’s preferences through their browsers and then targets ads to them accordingly. They were really pushing it along with email marketing. I think there are some real privacy issues with this. My feeling is that users don’t necessarily like to be targeted; I don’t and don’t know anyone who does.
I also had a chance to catch up with a few old contacts, one from my affiliate days. We talked about the ‘good old days’ of the Web back in the ‘90’s! If we were BTed I suspect we might be served up with ads of Saga holidays and Zimmer frames!
