Illuminating Marketing Blog

Marketing online means that you can tie your message to whatever content a user is viewing in their web browser. You can pay to have your ad for umbrellas show up on pages that forecast rain. Or you can market that house you're trying to sell on every article that mentions a specific neighborhood or town. Targeted ads mean that the user is confronted not only with the article they wanted to read, but also with some kind of marketing message that relates to that article.

And that can be a great thing. The ability to target opens up the door to focus your marketing just on those people who are most likely to be interested in what you're selling. Unless, somehow, your marketing finds its way onto an article that goes against what you're trying to sell.

Take, for example, the problems that occurred online during the Eliot Spitzer scandal. Users looking to learn more about the former New York Governor's relationship with a high priced call girl were automagically linked to websites that played to more prurient interests.

The takeaway here is to make sure that when you're targeting your ads, you're doing it in a way that's not going to link your company to anything that's going to go against your brand. Targeting is only as good as your targets.