For this post, read this Press Release

There are a lot of reasons why I like this story:

1. As a marketer, I am a big fan of Apple’s marketing strategy. This marketing move for both companies is, what I believe, real marketing. Its not a fluffy super bowl commercial that makes an undeliverable promise, or a billboard that I cannot react to, or a banner ad on a site that I will never click on. This story, in a way, creates the demand in me to have that new iPod Touch or iPhone and enjoy my technology over a great Latte.

2. As a person with a digital life including smart phone, blog, iPod, website and web 2.0 social network, I like that Starbucks is enabling me to carry on that digital life at every one of their stores. Apple’s marketing team, I believe, understood an affinity in their target market (ie, that they frequent Starbucks for the coffee and atmosphere) and developed a strategy to leverage that affinity knowledge and create more iTunes sales at the same time. Beautiful!

3. As a gadget geek, I am a big fan of Apple’s products all together – although I only own an iPod. I like that Apple is working to make its products more prevalent, regardless of the PC vs. Mac debate. Apple, in other words, is not spending its marketing dollars just trying to convince me of why they win the PC vs. Mac debate, but rather Apple is making it more and more enticing for me to buy the Mac or next iPod because I know I can use it everywhere. I know my Mac product will be supported.

All around, I like this story. The marketing and economic implications is what makes me deem this story blog-worhty.

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Official Google Blog: Online ad-serving tests

Have you heard of Google’s new ad-serving tests? See the link above.

A couple of quick points:

I like that it is targeted. SEM should be a part of any company’s “meat and potatoes” marketing tactics.

I like that you can opt-out. Are people afraid of Google collecting data still? If so, they can opt-out.

I like that Google is attempting to ONLY deliver ads that are relevant and pertinent to the buyer in the context of that buyer expressing his/her own affinities. Meaning, if that buyer is on the sharperimage website, then Google only displays ads contextually relevant to what that buyer is looking at (if that user has cookies enabled).

Quote from the blog post above: “giving users the ability to provide feedback to us about the ads they like and don’t like.”

How often have you gone to a site just to look to see if their advertisements were posted? Have you done that with Apple’s ads? What if you could now choose which ads are delivered to you in the place you (probably) spend the most amount of time – the Internet?

It’s interesting food for thought and I seem to like what Google is doing here. So why does it feel a little awkward to have ads customized to me on the Internet?

…don’t know. Probably all of those years I have been told by marketers what I should like; now, evidently, I get to choose what I like.

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