Tuesday you were online looking for a new purse or Wednesday looking for new paint and the following Friday an ad for Coach, where you sought a new purse, or Home Depot where you hunted out a nice gray-blue paint shows up on the right hand side of your screen. Ever wonder how that happens? It is a form of internet marketing that I like to call Cookie Marketing. No, it’s not about the search for the world’s best chocolate chip or snicker doodle treat, but about following your search habits.
A cookie in laymen’s terms is information collect by the stores website from a person hard drive. It then records where you’ve been, what you’ve bought and the probability of returning to that site for a second purchase. So what does this mean for you? Well, it has turned the “like” button on Facebook into a ubiquitous way of collecting ad information. However, it is not just the infamous “like” button but any post, comment, picture or place check-in that mentions a brand’s name. For example if you check-in at CVS, you might see a CVS ad the next day while checking your email.
Even better, the next time you are on Facebook an ad unit that shows up on the right-hand side of the screen it calls "sponsored stories." The benefit for advertisers is that this runs twice. Once as a free news feed and another as a paid advertisement via Facebook even though it still only comes off the users news feed.
The drawback to such doing this is that there is no filter for marketers to filter negative comments. The most they can do it solely pull the positive comments and push the “likes”.
Social marketing is the new version word-of-mouth advertising and anything that helps a brand amp up its word of mouth is a good thing. The ad units allow brands to leverage their investment, making it louder and more noticeable.
Some may say that this is an invasion of privacy but thanks to the internet nothing is private anymore.
1 comment:
Ah, if only viral marketing weren’t so much like tracking the case history of a rampant outbreak of some venereal disease. Am I still allowed to call it a disease, or are the politically correct police going to jump out and spew about the use of STI rather than STD because disease has too many negative connotations...correct me if I’m wrong but since when are chlamydia or ‘cookies’ for that matter a good thing?
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