Prompt's TechBlog

Microsoft has been talking about using demographics to target people with web advertising. While current advertising is often based on keywords people are using in current searches or content they are currently reading, demographic profiling will enable advertisers to target the reader rather than the activity/content. That means that campaigns can follow readers across participating websites. It will also make it easier to conduct branding campaigns so people are aware of products before they go searching or even (shudder!) buying offline.

Through Hotmail and various other subscription services, Microsoft already knows a fair bit about its users. Now it's previewing a tool that it claims will enable you to predict what the demographics are for a particular website.

There are a few surprises in store. For example:

• Fiorelli (top rank in Google for keyword 'handbags') - is Male oriented, with .59 confidence.
  
• Maxim Magazine (a news-stand boys' magazine which has the page title 'Girls Sex Sports') - is Female oriented, with .55 confidence.
  
• Saga (tag-line 'serving people aged 50 and over') - has a peak audience of 25-34 year olds (36% of estimated traffic) with 18.27% of visitors being 50+
  
• David Gilmour (60-year old guitarist with rock band Pink Floyd) - Female with .87 confidence. This was the highest confidence we could get out of the tool.
  
• Shiny Shiny (blog about female-oriented gadgets) - Male with .61 confidence

There were also cases where it appeared to get the gender right, but not with much confidence:

• We tried a leading global brand of men's magazine, which is only for sale to tall people, and found it's Male oriented with only 0.58 confidence.
  
• Shopping site Handbag.com (.53), feminist blog Gendergeek.org (.54) - both Female, but with low confidence ratings
  

For over half the sites we tried, the results seem extremely counterintuitive. Even for the sites where the tool gets it right, it's with such a low confidence level that you can't use this to differentiate those it's probably got right and those where it's way off course.

The apparent quality of these results makes it hard to trust the results for websites where we have no real idea of what the demographic profile is.

Perhaps Microsoft is right about the surprising results. But if it is, it will need to educate its advertisers so that they come to trust its research over their own gut instinct. If it's wrong, Microsoft still has a lot of work to do in identifying dubious data in its database. Until it fixes that, advertisers are likely to be nervous about using demographics to target their advertising. That I can say with, ooooh, .73 confidence.

tags: Microsoft | Online advertising