Off Phorm!
I’ve been thinking more about this Phorm business and the more I do, the more I think that it will splutter and die from too-long-to-get-to-market syndrome.
The internet is a fickle mistress when it comes to creating the next big thing. If something is years in development, by the time it gets to market, the technologies that allowed the idea to be conceived in the first place will have been superseded so far, that a better idea that back then couldn’t even have been imagined, is now already born and up and toddling.
And Phorm is an idea born of a previous age. Behavioural targeting is a noble and proper concept but fatally flawed. Aside of the privacy issue which is enough it seems to kill it in the womb, the question should not be what have I done historically, but what did I do with my very last click.
Its all very well that I like sailing, rugby and history books involving as much blood and guts as possible. In reality however I get to sail once a year if I’m lucky, I hung up my rugby boots years ago and I’ve already got a SkySports subscription and each of the weighty tomes I read takes me at least three months to complete. I also research a huge amount of websites for my work, buy presents for my wife, children, staff and elderly relatives online, follow hundreds of random links from Twitter and generally wander around cyberspace in search of anything that interests me or looks pretty.
In short, targeting advertising based on my historical surfing to hit me at the right point in my purchase cycle is going to be a pretty wayward affair.
Last year I set up a number of spurious profiles in the main social networks as a 16yr old boy, 16yr old girl and 35yr old man and woman – purely for research purposes you understand! Anyway, the advertising I was served was so wide of the mark and so wholly inappropriate to my apparent profile at times that it’s a wonder that the networks aren’t regularly being sued.
In short, yes of course historical trends can be very informative, but the way things are going – and this brings me back to my speed to market point – is that the way it is going to be before very long at all, is the content and advertising I am served will directly and dynamicaly relate to my very last action and will serve to continue my online journey, not interrupt it.
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