To anyone who has browsed the Internet in the last ten years, you may have noticed the occasional advertisement appearing from time to time. They might be banner advertisements across the top of the page, or ads positioned vertically down the side also known as skyscraper ads. 

Unfortunately, very little in life is free, aside from the best things. Assuming that Sinatra telling you that the best things in life are free isn’t good enough, if you are going to ignore ‘Ol Blue Eyes and you are like many millions out there endlessly searching for more, you’re going to pay for it with advertising.

An increasing trend for the web is making the entire browsing experience more personal. Google’s latest algorithm changes are a major change where they are now factoring into your search results what your friends are recommending. Filtering your search results so that the results are based on your location is another, and sure if you’re web savvy you can turn this off, but most people don’t.

What you may have noticed much more recently, though, is contextual advertising where your browsing activity is monitored – yes, even that activity – and adverts appear contextually on other sites based on what you’ve been looking at previously. This is not a new technology, but it is certainly being used a lot more and this will become something to behold as, just like any statistics based information, the more data there is, the more accurate the statistics become. In the context of online advertising, the results will get smarter and smarter the more data the system knows about what you are doing.

It doesn’t always work though, which often leads to amusing results. I use the Internet to browse a whole range of different topics, some of which interest me personally, and some which I look up for work undertaking online research, or perhaps looking for information on behalf of others.

Recently, I spotted a good campaign for recruitment for Royal Marines officers, which has been done as an interactive video – good work WCRS – and the video plays, and you get a second or two to make decisions, which then play out as the success or failure of the mission. I qualified, and my team achieved the objective, but I guess, being aged 42, I wouldn’t get too far with the selection process these days, despite my being invited to apply at the end of the film. It would be a bit like the scene in Apocalypse Now where the dossier said that Kurtz completed airborne training at the age of 38 when he was twice the age of the other recruits, except in real life, this kind of thing doesn’t happen.

Some time later I was doing some research for a client involved in selling a cosmetic product – the name is still under wraps unfortunately, but it’s a new and exciting product that women (and some men!) are going to love – and I was looking at a parenting website to see if it would be an appropriate forum for advertising. Sure enough, contextual advertising kicked in, and it was decorated with the Royal Marines Officer ad that you can see on the right. In context with the parenting information on the left it didn’t seem to fit somehow!

While the ad displayed was entirely out of context in this example, on the website it was displayed on, the one constant that made it contextually relevant was me.

We will see a lot more personalised adverts in the future.  Rubbish Clearance in Surrey is running a range of personalised Facebook ads. These will be delivered to you in all forms, not just on the web. Imagine walking down the road and being greeted by a digital billboard, or walking past a crowded bar at lunchtime and having an advert with a discount code appear on your phone for lunch there.

I heard about an edgy ad campaign for a website that used data from web services. In it, a user ‘checks in’ to a real-world location to see if anyone nearby they know is there.

The agency behind this campaign used this information to phone the bar or restaurant where the person had checked in and they asked to speak with the person. Naturally, the person picked up the phone, intrigued to know who was calling them, only to be told that ‘Death could find them anywhere’ and asked to visit the website, which was a tongue-in-cheek site dedicated to leaving messages to be transmitted in the event of the user’s death! The controversy surrounding this led to $1.5m of free advertising as various news media throughout the US reported on the story and the reactions that the message provoked.