Over the years, marketeers have found more and more sophisticated ways of targeting individuals out of a broad base of customers.

In the excellent book ‘Super Crunchers’, Yale Professor Ian Ayres shows how advances in technology and statistical techniques have allowed organisations to number-crunch massive data sets to identify trends, to target customers in ever more clever ways and even to predict their behaviour.

For example, back in 2000 some Amazon customers noticed that they were being charged different amounts for the same products.  The company was accused of ‘price targeting’, an economic technique to leverage more money from certain types of people based on their shopping habits.  It was thought that established customers would be likely to pay more than new ones and were being targeting accordingly.  This was denied by the company who claimed that they were doing “random” price tests.  However a 2005 study from the Annenberg Center at the University of Pennsylavia showed a number of similar cases of internet price targeting.  The same study showed that 87% of people strongly object to this practice, so it is clearly a contentious issue.

Google’s entire business model is based on keeping people coming to its site because it is the best place to search the internet.  Remember how quickly we all switched from Yahoo! or AltaVista simply because Google was simpler and quicker.  As such it spends a huge amount of money on improving the relevance of its searches.  Since 2005 it has included ‘personalised search’ technology which remembers where you have searched in the past and uses this to rank the search results by ‘predicting’ which ones are more relevant to you.  So Steve Jobs will get different results when he searches for ‘Apple’ than an orchard owner would. 

Online news providers are using similar technologies to target the news to their readers.  In 2005 MSNBC.com launched a personalised news section which would contain headlines selected according to the types of stories you read most often.  Findory, launched in 2004, was a similar concept expanded to be a personalised online newspaper.  Unfortunately it was not successful and folded in 2007

More recently sites such as DailyMe and Feedly are offering personalised news and with the latter integrated with social networking (including Twitter) so that your friends and contacts can recommend stories to you.  Sites such as Digg.com provide news stories recommended by potentially millions of people.  iGoogle and MyYahoo allow you to customise your home page with relevant RSS feeds and there are numerous 3^rd party RSS readers and aggregators.

All of these innovations are leading news to be consumed in a different way and so many of the metrics that have traditionally worked in mainstream media now fall down.  Kristin Wadge posted earlier this week about the massive discrepancies between online readership data from the various auditing bodies.  Ultimately what does it mean if we have got the number of visitors for the Guardian.co.uk if a load of people are reading Guardian stories without visiting the website (or indeed buying the newspaper)?   As measurement guru Katie Paine points out its “yet another reason why we should be focussing not just on eyeballs but on outcomes”.

And that is the final irony - the same technological advances that have brought the new media environment can help us to measure it.  Advances in databases and data collection as well as the statistical advances in econometrics have enabled us to be able to link PR efforts with business outcomes be they, sales, customer behaviour or website traffic and to be able to disaggregate other factors such as contemporaneous marketing activity, seasonal effects, pricing and competitor activity.  We can build systems that allow us to analyse coverage more or less in 'real time' and can create online portals and e-mail alerts to feed tailored measurement dashboards to the stakeholders that need them.  How does that suit you, sir?!