If you ever wondered how come all the banner ads on your gmail, yahoo mail. live, or facebook are related to to something you have searched for or bought in the past weeks or so .. wonder no more ... we are being watched and there is little we can do about it......

Behavioral Marketing or Commercial Espionage

If you have not heard of the term behavioral marketing I don't belame you , there are a lot of terms these days in every industry and keeping track is just impossible since we are living in this age of information overload....
I have recently finished a long six month course in digital marketing and being in the field did not help seize my amazement towards how marketing and commercial companies are exploring more innovative and manipulative ways to dig into what consumers are doing. I understand that companies need to sell and buying will never stop for consumers.. But where did that idea of knowing what customers want before they actually want it came from.. and why would a report from Emarketer.com reveal that women tend to welcome targeted behavioral marketing driven communication from brands they came to know and use....? well , it deserve us right if we agree to this and let go of our basic rights of privacy mainly because we are too busy or lazy to make our own choices...

The ooghle effect

One topic that is directly related to behavioral marketing is how tracking is done.... What marketers are running after is ROI .. without ROI they can not go back to their CEO's and CFO's and ask for more money to spend .... The ooghle effect is a feeble attempt by technology to measure what happened along to cause an average unsuspecting consumer to buy that product. As marketeers we overpower the target (the victim) consumer with ads, emails, videos, sms, mms, and even calls, if we can, to talk about our products... The idea of that multi channel promotional mix is to light a bulb in that consumers mind about the availability of a product that might eventually lead him or her to purchase the product. The ooghle effect measures exposure and how it actively leads to a conversion in marketing terms or purchase in lay terms... When a campaign is launched on TV for example the time of that commercial is calculated and logged, and the traffic analysis on the company launching the commercial website is running 24/7. As such, if the target customer has just seen the ad and did a search on google or even better browsed directly to the company's website then some marketing manager will get a report from the website that he can easily match with his promotional mix and say that the commercial ad did it.... it caused the visit or the conversion...... 
If you are thinking this is not rocket science I would simply agree, it is not... it is basic and simple common sense and standard human behavior. Although we tend to say that we do not like to be told what to do ... we seem to be doing what is expected which leaves a lot of us open to be the target of yet another marketing manager.....!!!!!

My Advise ...

Do not login to any of your accounts while doing a search for a product.. make sure your Google , yahoo, or live bar are logged off while you search.... don't be a sitting duck for ads just because they can track you.. doesn't mean you should make it easy ....