Can you afford to see my adverts?
In a move that is gong to incur that wrath of privacy campaigners, Google is planning to look at people’s credit scores before deciding which adverts to show them.
This addresses one of the key issues faced by marketers of luxury items, in that they need to know the person they reach can afford the products that they are advertising.
A Google spokesperson confirmed this week that they had been working with research firm Compete on whether it would be possible to add credit score targeting to adverts on the Google content network.
Google might be allowed to identify consumers with good credit, based on information they submitted when applying for credit cards online.
This information would be made available to advertisers on an aggregated basis so they could better reach their target market.
“Let’s say we have an advertiser who wants to reach consumers with a high FICO [credit] score who applied for mortgages in the first quarter,” a spokesperson said. “We can provide the advertiser with a list of websites on our Google content network that index against this segment.”
However, any move to make use of this data could be met with fierce resistance by groups wishing to preserve online anonymity.
In November 2008 NebuAd – who target users based on their web surfing habits, information purchased from ISPs – were sued by web users of felt their privacy rights had been violated.
And of course here in the UK behavioural targeting company Phorm has run into resistance whichever way it has turned, and is yet to launch at all.
Would you mind being targeted based on your credit worthiness? Do you sell an upmarket product and not want to waste your advertising on people who can’t afford the product? Leave us a comment below.
Tags: google
This entry was posted on Thursday, July 16th, 2009 at 4:23 pm and is filed under PPC, Search Engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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