Bill Gurley Quotes

As late as 2007, Facebook was still trying to figure out what it wanted to be when it grew up. An advertising space seemed to be the obvious answer, but how that would tap into the massive value of the personal data uploaded to the company every day remained a puzzle.

It is probable that Facebook boasts the broadest, deepest, and most comprehensive dataset of human information, interests, and activity ever collected.

Advertisers don't want to be ignored, and they are drunk on our data, which is what Google and other large networks are really selling. The ads are almost a by-product; what companies really want to know is what antiperspirant a woman of 25-34 is most likely to purchase after watching 'House of Cards.'

Direct Marketing

The liberation children experience when they discover the Internet is quickly counteracted by the lure of e-commerce web sites, which are customized to each individual user's psychological profile in order to maximize their effectiveness.

There is no such thing as a Mass Mind. The Mass Audience is made up of individuals, and good advertising is written always from one person to another. When it is aimed at millions it rarely moves anyone.

Google and Facebook, each in their own way, have revolutionized the delivery of advertising based on search and social networking, creating a sort of anti-Spam: targeted, relevant ads that a consumer might actually welcome rather than spurn.

If you go to a paintball subreddit, paintball companies can advertise to you.

In the digital universe, our personal history and its sense of narrative is succeeded by our social networking profile - a snapshot of the current moment. The information itself - our social graph of friends and likes - is a product being sold to market researchers in order to better predict and guide our futures.

Through sites like MySpace, people coalesce into interest groups, and this gives me the opportunity to do vast mailshots to people who like similar things.

Facebook is uniquely positioned to answer questions that people have, like, what sushi restaurants have my friends gone to in New York lately and liked? These are queries you could potentially do with Facebook that you couldn't do with anything else, we just have to do it.

The Internet and Yahoo are firmly established as 'must buys' for brand advertising.

At any time of day, hundreds of different versions of Facebook are running on the Internet - with a changed color here, a moved button there - and the user response to each variation is measured. And the same is done with advertising.

Advertising isn't just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data.

In the Internet economy, information is everything: The more a company knows about a consumer, the more carefully it can tailor its advertising to that customer, and the more revenue it can generate in return.

Starting with politics, we'd like to replace blanket advertising with individualised targeted and engagement ads.

Advertising in the past has been predicated on a mass market and a captive audience.

There is a calculus, it turns out, for mastering our subconscious urges. For companies like Target, the exhaustive rendering of our conscious and unconscious patterns into data sets and algorithms has revolutionized what they know about us and, therefore, how precisely they can sell.

The advent of Google+ and the emergence of the personalized web means this is more true than ever. Brands, and their advertising partners, must wake up to this challenge and define themselves with clarity, consistency and authenticity. Otherwise they just might find themselves shouting in a ghost town.

When advertising is involved, you, the user, are the product.

Facebook and Myspace are the U.S. audience, which is tried and true when it comes to being susceptible to ads.

The Internet is really about highly specialized information, highly specialized targeting.

Marketers use big data profiling to predict who is about to get pregnant, who is likely to buy a new car, and who is about to change sexual orientations. That's how they know what ads to send to whom. The NSA, meanwhile, wants to know who is likely to commit an act of terrorism - and for this, they need us.

Before Google, and long before Facebook, Bezos had realized that the greatest value of an online company lay in the consumer data it collected.

In order for a service to be social, you've really got to start from the ground up. The fact that almost a third of the U.S. population have even heard of Spotify is really because they've seen it on Facebook and friends have been sharing.