msn adcentre

how do they know who's searching

[briggidere]

Hi everyone,

I have a question that might stir a few thoughts.

How does MSN adcentre know who is doing the search to be able to let you bid by gender, age etc.

I am not talking about your home pc users now, i am thinking about the millions of people who are in offices that maybe have 500 people on one network. They too, search from work during lunches. are they going to be seen as 1 user or 500 different users.

could it be based on the individuals pc somehow, when they last logged into hotmail, messenger etc?

any thoughts welcome.

briggidere

[Kevin French]

as far as I know...MSN is attempting to target by demographics via MSN Passport profile. So, IF a user is logged into their passport account and IF their Passport data is valid, and IF the person that is logged into the Passport account is the person who "owns" the Passport, then demo targeting is achieved.

Its a great concept, but I wonder how effective it will really prove to be.

Kevin French

[Receptional]

When you start using hotmail... passport and other bits of Microsoft, you start giving things away about yourself. Usually you want to give the information up at the time, not reading the small print about how it will be used in the future.

Passport (hotmail users) is the main obvious way you give up personal data. However - consider these ideas (Not saying they ARE being used, but they are the sorts of thing I would investigate in the path towards personalizing search....)

* The licensing information on your copy of Windows or any other product download.
* A Personality profile cookie, which is an encoded cookie - as you travel around the web visiting sites that are identifued as targeted at specific demograpics, your cookie gets updated to say (for example) 20% of this user's visits are to sites designed for men, 30% designed for women, 50% no preference. Same for age ranges, Geotargeting and social economic groups. Won't take long for your results to be personalized to you.
* the way you set your own search preferences
* Your IP address (School / corporate / home user)
* Data shared with ISP partners.

The personality profile cookie looks a rather GOOD idea to me. Can I copyright that? Ah - I already did by making it public on WebmasterWorld. Sadly, it's probably already been nicked. Infact - mindset.research.yahoo.com/ pretty much does that idea, just not on an ongoing basis.