Posted by Gregg at 10:03 AM in Information Industry I open my browser when my home page loads and I'm astonished to see a tower ad on my Yahoo home page advertising search tracking software for Executive Recruiters - hey, I'm a recruiter, this must be "it" - the targeted ad. Nine years of browsing pages and finally here it is - I click, yes an honest to goodness "click through" and instead of taking me the software company's site I end up at a search engine marketing company. I hit back thinking it must be a mistake - nope. I guess the advertiser is on to something but the logic is too circular to unravel. The holy grail of on line marketing is the targeted advertisement - the one you see and want to click on it. The promise of the ad showing up at just the right time to just right person is the reason for an estimated $7.2 billion being spent in 2003 on internet advertising. Excluding the revenue of all the ad serving, SEO Companies or creative fees to agencies. I still have yet to see one of those ads - the one for the car when I'm researching cars, the one for the computer when I'm buying a new one. You'd think if the monkey can type Hamlet by hitting random keys given enough time that after nine years with a browser I'd have seen at least one of these mythical targeted marketing messages.

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