About the 4 Myths of Online Targeting

Photo by Artem Maltsev on Unsplash

You work with Performance Marketing at a brand?
(This is usually not for agencies.)
Welcome to a short online targeting fact check.

This is a “spin-off” of my articles:

• The new old Holy Grail of Marketing Targeting
• Performance Marketing. You are doing it wrong.

Myth 1

It is a new way to magically identify a specific person and his/her wishes.

What you can do with cookies, digital fingerprints, and the help of statistics: You can identify a specific machine (PC, Smartphone, …) and make some assumptions on how the average person behind it ticks.

Sure, the deeper you go, the closer it gets to the actual person. This is especially true, if you are providing information about yourself on the web.

• If you are telling Google that you are 20 years old, Google knows it.
• If you are filling out some psychological quizes like “Are you a cat or a dog person”, the hoster of this quiz can create some kind of psychological profile of you.

Of course, if you are going into creepy intelligence/blackhat tech, you will be able to surveil people in every detail of their…