New research undertaken by WeSEE, the ad and content classification company, has drilled down into the perception of online advertising by UK consumers; concluding that half find online advertising targeting is too simplistic, a proportion which rises to 70 per cent amongst 18-25 year olds.
Highlighting a growing clamour for increased personalisation the research found that an increasingly digital savvy populace is growing ever more demanding, particularly in the realm of video advertising, where 70 per cent stating that they actively skip content which hasn’t been properly targeted at them.
Noting that half of all consumers spend in excess of 15 minutes per day browsing online images and video, WeSEE point out that brands and marketers are losing out on clicks and brand loyalty by poorly targeting their online advertising.
Adrian Moxley, WeSEE co-founder and chief marketing officer commented: “One huge reason that consumers are saying that ads are untargeted or simplistic is because advertisers are only interpreting some of the data available to them when working out what a user might be interested in. Images and video content are completely ignored by advertisers unless they are properly tagged with keywords. Add to this the fact that such a large portion of the web’s visual content is now user-generated and unlikely to have an accompanying text-based description attached to it; you potentially have an advertiser’s nightmare – the web is full of content that cannot be interpreted.
“Advertisers need to target ads in a more sophisticated manner – consumers are willing to share data on their likes and dislikes online but when this is not properly interpreted it causes annoyance. Not only do brands which don’t target ads effectively for the ever-evolving ways in which consumers are using the internet stand to lose out on potential revenue, but poorly targeted ads are actively annoying consumers, so the damage to the brand could be longer standing.”