Discourse targeting

 

Thanks to Eric Fredine’s blog I found Microsoft study on the Behavioural Targeting. The report is interesting to me because it clearly proved that tracking short term behaviour is more effective for targeted ads delivery than tracking long term behaviour. For me, it is one more proof that “context is the King”.

For some years, my research is focused on specific context – online discussion. The context is extremely rich of thoughts, dreams, emotions, attitudes etc., and all this wealth manifests itself in the discourse of discussion. The discussion within online community is much more rich than the context of online purchase, browsing, search,…

The main general conclusion of my research is that discourse is granulated. For expample, there are big differences between the topics discussed by active and passive people.

For targeted ads delivery, probably more important is the statement that there are specific patterns of topics discussed and attitudes towards various subjects (products, institutions, other people etc.). For example a car.

On automotive discussion forums people are looking for the advice what car to choose or for the bargain new tires etc. But the idea of buying new car most often is born on… family forums! The difference is so big that sometimes I poke fun saying that “a car is a member of family”.

We can say that in the context of online discussion a car is often associated with another element of this context – a topic about family.

Why not to target the car ads at the family discussion forums?

Above result is valid for Polish discussion forums, and I’m not sure if French, German or American forums are similar. And, of course, there are much more pecularities of the patterns of attitudes towards particular products associated with other elements of the context.

The idea of discourse targeting is stunning, isn’t it?

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