Despite its recent management shakedown, Yahoo takes advertising and behavioral targeting up a level today. Dubbed SmartAds, these creative deliver on a very old promise of the web: deliver the right product, to the right person, at the right time. The idea is to bring targeting into the ad itself as opposed to merely using demographics, geographics or any behavioral target as a parameter for serving the ad.

Essentially, this means that Yahoo! can, based on the info it has on me, serve me an ad that only I will see. Mass customization in action.

This is not new.

Direct Marketers have tried to make advertising personalized and as relevant as possible for years. Remember the Reason magazine covers with a photo of your house on it, warning that "they know where you are?".

In my early days as an online advertising professional, back in 99, I was sending out email newsletters that would promote, say, a travel offer. It was a time where we had a database of over 1 MM members. We had their first and last name, their wife's, kids, their zipcodes etc...The mailing would be dead simple: target the chicago area in February (rainy, cold, miserable) with a personalized message. The subject line would read:

Dear <insert first name>, take <insert wife's first name> and the kids to sunny Orlando?

The open rate, response rate and conversion we had were through the roof. And that was in 99. So yes, personalized advertising works. But what next?

We are reaching a point where scale is no longer an issue. Google, Yahoo! and all the big players have the ability to customize ads to death, for millions of users, in real time. It is a milestone. This widespread use of the technique means that users will feel empowered, as in - wow this is cool and will gradually overcome their fear of lack of privacy etc... Having ads calling you by name will almost become routine.

But at some point, users (you and I) will realize that the information used to target them so precisely is actually theirs. It's their attention data, behaviors, demographics, clickstream etc...and this will open the floor to new business models I have blogged about here previously: models that involve the user as a partner. Models that evolve from a publisher/ad serving centric model to a user centric model. Models that tell users: here's your cut.

Given that Google is commited to data interoperability (as in: Google lets you take your data to go to a competitor - see this Eric Schmidt interview, scroll way down), I would not be surprised if these models were appearing within the next 18 months. Watch this space.

Two related pieces caught my eye on techmeme yesterday. One by Mike at techdirt wondering why people are such jerks online and the other by Vint Cerf, the resident evangelist at google.

Whereas Mike believes that the lack of visual cues encourage people to let loose and act like trolls, Cerf argues that the web is merely a reflection of society and that no technology can fix it. He says:

If you stand in front of a mirror and you don't like what you see, it does not help to fix the mirror.

Boy do I agree with this. It reminded me of the blogstorm Mena Trott faced a couple of years ago when, in a keynote asking for bloggers to be more civil to each others, she ended up calling a participant an asshole! Sweet Irony huh? (read the insulted account )

The medium is not the point. Bloggers, surfers, economists...it's just people. There are good people, bad people, smart and dumb people. People full of love and others full of hate.

Ultimately, it will come down to this: We are increasingly empowered as commercial, social and politic beings but, as spiderman would say, with great power comes great responsibility. The web, by shifting the power to us is also shifting the responsibilities. Are we up for it or do we just want the good part?

In 10, 15, 100 years from now when all is known and connected, what will the mirror reflect?

A responsible, ethical society who cares about the future or a cutthroat "every man for himself" jungle? It depends whether you believe that men are good by nature or not. What do you think?

This is a new category. When I started this blog, I wanted to focus on the incredibly personal aspect of the web (personomies) and how in turn, it will help us create extremelly meaningful and tight communities that will affect the fabric of modern's society, hopefully for the better. I call it communITism: IT powered communism. I know it's a provocative title. But let me clarify something.

Communism has different meanings depending on which side of the atlantic you stand. In the US, it's McCarthy, the cold war, and represents a generally flawed regime that killed thousands. In Europe, and particularly in France, it still represents the idea of solidarity, conveys a sense of togetherness. It might be an utopia but there is, indeniably, a certain attractiveness to it.

When I was studying law on the french riviera (sounds weird huh?)...I became really interested in one particular concept in commercial law: Affectio Societatis. After a bit of research to find the english equivalent, I found this document (ctrl+f' it) that describes it as the "spirit of cooperation". It goes:
The combining of contributions and the sharing of profits are not always enough to distinguish a contract of partnership from other juridical acts, such as association and indivision. The courts and legal authors have therefore added an indispensable subjective criterion: the intention to be involved in a partnership or affectio societatis, which is enshrined in the new Civil Code by the expression «spirit of cooperation».