Profile based Ads

I had a very interesting conversation last week, with one of my friends, here, in San Francisco. We were actually discussing the facts that more and more ad-based webservices were trying to get more and more information on their users to provide them with better targetted ads. As a user, I really don’t want any webservice to “know” me, and I even think that it’s not that good for conversion rates. For me the best Ad system would clearly be able to understand what the user wants, not interpreting what he is, based on his friends, favorites movies, songs or websites!

Take Google Adsense results in the search engine: it’s not targetting the user, it’s providing accurate answers to the user’s query! If I type “Flight San Francisco“, Google Adsense really doesn’t care if it’s been the first time this year that I am going there, or if 6 of my friends live there. It gives me results on what I am looking for : links to merchants selling plane tickets. On the sames basis, itunes links displayed on Pandora or Last are anticipating the fact that I will buy a song, beause I am listening to it, and the next step is clearly to buy it!

My best dream would to have ads that correspond to what I am actually explicitly wanting, not ads based on what I might want! Of course, it’s a lot easier to say that to make…