The flaws in behavioral targeting or Please stop retargeting me

I am just getting a little tired of retargeting. I mean if I happen to visit brand website for whatever reason; blog mention, twitter mention feed or whatever, it doesn’t mean that I want your brand in my face everywhere I go.

Retargeting is simple, basically you are an animal and the targeting network “tags” you. They follow you and put advertising in your “way” based on where you have been or what you have seen. I don’t necessarily like “Brand X” or want to ever buy anything from them, I just visited their site. Targeting companies don’t know intent or why you were there; they just know that you were there.

Things need to change, customers are getting annoyed and advertisers aren’t getting what they paid for “target advertising to consumers that are open to my brand”. I have seen a few up and coming companies come up with new ways to target. They are using Claritas Prism or Mosaic cluster to better target based on lifestyle. The flaw there is that this is extrapolated from IP and some computer based information and you are going to tell me that because I own a Mac I am 18 – 25 Male with an HHI of 65k – 85K and belong to the green segment. Um, no that isn’t me; sorry. It is better than the basic targeting but not quite there.

Targeting companies need to build out preferences and allow the customer to be able to pick which content to serve to the consumer. Google is the first that I have seen doing this, but someone need to create a service of global preference that is an open api (OpenID’ish) that all the targeting companies can access. But the preference need to be more than lifestyle, demo and Geo they need to be “hey don’t follow me if I visit your site” and “if I type these keywords don’t serve me ‘relevant’ ads”. It should list out the brands that are following you and you should be able to say “no, I don’t like that brand”. This method will also help with the impending congressional hearings around targeting and how it can or cannot be done.

All I ask is to present advertising to me that helps me and stop being a nuisance.