Targeted Advertising via Social Network Analysis
Football is known for its fantastic advertising campaign. Many great commercials are first aired during the Super Bowl. Now that media coverage via the web is becoming more popular, advertising agencies are looking for better methods to target football fans. This article discusses how agencies want to focus on advertising for specific fans based on which teams they support. Google is helping advertising companies by analyzing social networks to target specific fans with specific ads.
The ads are targeted by looking at social networks and isolating a giant component that consists of football fans. That giant component is then split into smaller components that represent different teams. These components can be determined based off of geographic location and recent searches. For example, a football fan living in Washington State who is looking up statistics on Russell Wilson will be a part of the Seahawks component while other fans will be placed into their respective components. These components can then be used to tailor ads to the fans like the Bud Light ad mentioned in the article. All football fans will see the same ad but the team mentioned in the ad will correspond to the fans of that team. As a result football fans overall will respond better to the ads and be more likely to drink Bud Light.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/08/business/media/marketing-to-sports-fans-online-with-help-from-google-and-social-networks.html?_r=0