More Details on Yahoo’s New Ad Sales System, AMP!
Posted on Monday, April 7th, 2008 at 11:10 amYahoo has issued a press release on their new ad sales system, AMP! that provided a few new insights into this “powerful new online advertising platform.” The New York Times broke this story earlier, which I blogged about here.
Interestingly, the Yahoo release avoids using the phrase “behavioral targeting” (which is mentioned in the NYT piece), and instead note how the system will allow publishers to connect with “their exact target audiences across the increasingly fragmented Internet” and enable “precise geographic, demographic, and interest-based targeting.” Given the rising anxiety about the widespread monitoring of users’ online activities, perhaps Yahoo is trying to find softer ways to describe their own role in this surveillance of Internet behavior. You can put lipstick on a pig…
The release also points to a short video plugging AMP! It gives a peek into AMP!’s user interface, including a section where advertisers can “select the targeting categories you would like to search.” A drop-down list is shown with “Demographic Targeting” selected, along with sex, age, and income variables. A link is also provided to a page “About Behavioral Targeting,” which presumably describes how this works:
The other options in that drop-down box are visible in a later screen bragging about AMP!’s behavioral, geographic, and demographic targeting. The blurry drop-down box in the background shows each of these targeting options, which likely come with their own screen of variables.
This is all we know about AMP!’s behavioral targeting at this point, but hopefully more information will continue to come.
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disciplinary Perspectives
April 17th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
What is new with this sale system?
Google offers similar demographic targeting and let advertisers target audience based on ethnicity.
IMHO it also raises serious problem about discrimination: if your ad is a job offer, you can target the people you’ll hire based on their ethnicity…