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Google introduces 'Customer Match' – target web ads to email addresses

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Re: Google introduces 'Customer Match' – target web ads to email addresses

#61
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are prohibited from creating ad content which implies knowledge of personally identifiable information or sensitive information about your customers ... Sensitive information about your customers can’t be used in Customer Match campaigns or ads. Additionally, you can't use data from your Customer Match campaigns to identify sensitive information about your customers. Sensitive information includes: Interest or pa…

There is actually a creep-out effect with taking this too far I think that drives people away from ads that are too stalkery. Consider the case of target who toned down the exactness of some of their targeted mailer ads to women likely to be pregnant after accidentilly kicking off the outing of a pregnant teen to her family. Perhaps we should be more creeped out by the more subtle personalized ads than the clumsy att…

The creep-out effect depends heavily on whether you're a company with a reputation to protect (like Target)

As for the more subtle way of using this personalization will be to stick more ads in the faces of people that once signed up for a service but don't use it as much these days and don't open the reminder/newsletter emails that end up in their "social" or "promotions" tabs. I found this sort of badgering with traditional ad retargeting creepy enough to drive me to install an ad-blocker, but it undeniably works and is heavily used by companies that care about their reputation.

Re: Google introduces 'Customer Match' – target web ads to email addresses

#63
The adtech term for this is call "CRM onboarding". This technique was actually around for a while and popularize by 2 independent companies, Datalogix and Liveramp (founded by Auren Hoffman). Both of these companies exited with Datalogix (sold to Oracle) at around $1.2b and Liveramp (sold to Acxiom) at $310m.

Re: Google introduces 'Customer Match' – target web ads to email addresses

#65
post #59

What's the implication here for sites wishing to monetize by selling (hashed) email lists of their users? Take Reddit for example, it could make a lot of money by selling the (hashed) list of users subscribed to /r/travel (or almost any other sub). Suddenly all those users with adblock who won't fork out for subscriptions would be generating income. I know most TOS's say they don't share email addresses, but sites co…

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Re: Google introduces 'Customer Match' – target web ads to email addresses

#67
post #3

Get ready for ads to start addressing you directly by name and doing other like things to get your attention. Google isn't usually _too_ overt about these sort of things but the less savory ad networks could get really unpleasant. "Hey there George Thompson, click to see one weird trick to hide your arrest records from your wife Mary"

Far more sinister would be "Your wife Mary has an arrest record, click to see it!" (but of course, she doesn't - they just want the click, and get to imply validity by means of knowing other personal details). As you said, I doubt Google would try/permit this, but this will certainly come through.

Wouldn't that be classed as defamation?

Re: Google introduces 'Customer Match' – target web ads to email addresses

#68

Want to get the US government to push for regulation of marketing? Create ad campaigns targeting legislators. I fail to see how this will not eventually backfire eventually. This feature is ripe for abuse from spearphishers.

> Want to get the US government to push for regulation of marketing? Create ad campaigns targeting legislators.

That's already been invented. It's been a fairly big business for quite a long time.

Re: Google introduces 'Customer Match' – target web ads to email addresses

#69

This is nothing new as FB has had Custom Audiences available for a while now, and you could also do this with 3rd party audience lists via cookie onboarding services like LiveRamp, etc. What I'm wondering here is if Google will provide any way to upload this info to them anonymously similar to how Liveramp does it. I personally won't be running these, but I'm curious if others are really comfortable with the idea of…

People send around plaintext files of email addresses all the time. Every single CRM, marketing automation, and ESP make it very easy to do so, and there are hundreds of reasons why you might.
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