Behavioral advertising to track book-buyers

Posted by: Stephen Baker on August 21, 2008

I came up with this idea a few months ago. Since my book, The Numerati, covers the tracking and targeting of people through their data, we could use the same approach—behavioral advertising—to target potential buyers of the book. I go in much more detail on my book blog.

As Jeff Jarvis notes, we’re eating our own dogfood. One fellow twitterer this morning called it “creepy and invasive.”

Well, we’ll see if that’s the case—and also if it works as well as advertised. I’ll be blogging about the campaign day by day as we try to figure out which types of Web surfers appear to be interested in the book, and which types of ads they click. I’m planning to cover the bare bones on this blog, and go into far more detail on the other one. If you think it’s creepy or scary, or if you have advice on how we should target readers, I’d love to hear your thoughts, either here or there.

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