Targeting

According to Collective Media's "Ad Network Study 2008, the vast majority of US advertisers are using some form of online ad targeting to minimize waste. Demographic targeting remains solidly the favorite with behavioural catching up. Bizarrely (from my perspective at least), re-targeting is slipping year over year.

Tracking You At The Network Level

I wrote a piece a while ago about this troublesome little marketing nugget. Now a UK based company called Phorm (anagram of morph) is coming to the US. The three biggest ISPs in the UK have already signed up with the service that allows the company to track and report - anonymous - web surfing habits of 70% of UK households with broadband. Whilst requiring its partner companies to let customers opt out of the tracking, Phorm leaves it up to those partners to determine exactly how to tell people about the opt-out option.

One privacy body in the UK - Foundation for Information Policy Research, claims that the methodology is simply illegal and now a bill is about to be introduced in New York state which would severely limit such activities.

There is territory here that would provide advantages for all sides and frankly I believe that Phorm is a step in that direction but care must be taken and the company must be challenged along the way to ensure that all interests are truly protected.

Do We Still Need Agencies?

(Full disclosure; I work in one so yes)

In the growing world of customer generated media and customer generated content, what is the role for the traditional agencies (oh, and I include "digital" in the traditional category).

Those agencies that have or are willing to hire the right competencies can be signposts, Sherpas or translators. They can help derive meaning from the chaos by applying their understanding of consumer behaviour, attitudes and demographics to bring value to advertisers...

In an article in OMMA, Greg Verdino, chief strategy officer of Crayon says:

"There’s still a role for agencies as strategic consultants and as curators of all that consumer-generated stuff out there. “There’s a ton of consumer content created every day, from Tweets to branded items in virtual worlds. Agencies must help advertisers find and celebrate the best of what’s being made by consumers — in a way that supports both the brand and the person who created it."

They Know You Are A Dog

A new report conducted for The New York Times by the research firm comScore, provides a first broad estimate of the amount of consumer data that is transmitted to Internet companies.

See more of it here...

Smarter & Smarter

Since there will always be ads, at least show me those that I may be interested in.... and marrying offline demographic profiles with online behavioral data is the most intriguing way I know of being relevant to your audience. Remember DoubleClick buying Abacus Direct Corp. in 1999? They used direct-mail databases that enabled them to match ads with individual buying habits - a bridge to far then and still now.
More recently and to less general clamour Acxiom launched a product called Relevance-X, now, when you give your name and address to a site partnering with Acxiom, the company will match you against its offline records and tag your computer with a "cookie" identifying your life stage and match that with the type of site you are visiting to determine the best ad to show. The company is at pains to demonstrate that no personally identifiable information is collected or used, only demographic attributes for your particular "segment" of the population. Nor will the company create profiles based on an individual's browsing history. It targets ads only to the site the person's currently visiting. Finally consumers can "opt out" either at Acxiom's Web site or by calling a toll-free phone number.

Worth keeping an eye on....

Taking Behavioral Targeting Up A Level

... and down a knotch

There are a few companies emerging which are proposing alternatives to the traditional, cookie-based method of targeting relevant ads to consumers. NebuAd and Adzilla are competing to sign up ISPs to enable their deep packet inspection methodology. Both companies supply the software to the ISPs and then provide the surfing data to the ad networks. The argument for this approach is that more data can be collected since all activity can be logged, not just that within a given network, therefore more relevant, finer targeting can be achieved. Lots of concerns here; notably the fact that ISPs naturally have access to personally identifiable information relating to their customers - not hard to image the possible ill effects of merging the two. We are headed for a online privacy big bang here - I hope that we can save the baby as the bathwater disappears...

The Next 100 Years In Marketing Starts With A Press Release

Facebook and MySpace have both started to use profiles and community membership to target ads to their member base. Both are likely to suceed but for different reasons... MySpace's massive membership (growing at 5 million a month) and their innovative SelfServe system gives them enormous scale and a local footprint. Facebook is actively encouraging members to subscribe to a brand, so people who actually really like a brand can make a public endorsement of it and share it through their networks, brands can leverage the already established and trusted social relationships.
Here's an extract from the Facebook press release (the full release is here...):

Today, Facebook Ads launched with three parts: a way for businesses to build pages on Facebook to connect with their audiences; an ad system that facilitates the spread of brand messages virally through Facebook Social Ads™; and an interface to gather insights into people’s activity on Facebook that marketers care about. ...
Advertising messages will gain distribution through what Facebook has termed the “social graph,” the network of real connections through which people communicate and share information. When people engage with a business’ Facebook Page, that action will spread information about that business through the social graph.

Facebook's CEO prefaced his recent remarks at the New York ad:tech conference by saying modestly "the next hundred years will be different for advertising, and it starts today."

Having the Haystack Help Find The Needle

How advertising and marketing services agencies have changed:

• From brand and product centric to customer centric
• From a focus on awareness to a richer one on advocacy
• From shouting (even targeted shouting) to listening
• From artisanal to tech-savvy
• From intuitive to analytical
• From standalone to holdings to a networked eco-system

This (yet to be fully realised) vision is about better listening to and therefore better understanding the consumer and broader groups of consumers. Ultimately it is about, having the haystack that is the community help you find the needle.

Everyone Wants To Make Money

Fast growing Facebook is developing a new advertising system that allows marketers to target users with ads based on the personal data people reveal on the site. The company further hopes to refine the system to allow it to predict what products and services users might be interested in even.

Facebook eventually plans to grow the sophistication of the offering using algorithms to learn how receptive a person might be to an ad based on information about activities and interests of not just that given user but also his friends -- even if the user hasn't explicitly expressed interest in a given topic. Facebook could then target ads accordingly. A concept called network neighbours which I have mentioned before.

More here on the Facebook moves....

Behavior Modification

In an attempt to provide more advanced targeting for advertisers AOL has agreed to acquire online behavioral targeting advertising network Tacoda. An interesting marriage, as Tacoda Chairman Dave Morgan explained, his firm has found a media platform large enough to deliver on the promises of behavioral targeting.

And promise there is. In June, eMarketer predicted that the behavioral targeting market would increase to $3.8 billion by 2011, from $350 million in 2006.

More here...

Targeting on Yahoo

Yahoo released on Monday its new SmartAds technology that allows advertisers to automatically compile and present ads based on a Web user's profile, including such data as their location, recent product searches and, in some cases, age or household income. Behavioural targeting married with demographics and the ability to create relevant banner ads on the fly... Certainly one to watch over the coming months. According to eMarketeer, the market for such targeted ads is expected to nearly double to $1 billion in 2008 from this year, and grow to $3.8 billion by 2011.

More here.

How To Be Relevant

We in the Direct and Relationship Marketing industry have long understood that the more relevant an ad can be the better. There is increasing debate on the best way to be relevant to our audiences. A recent study (May 2007) from Jupiter Research and AOL compared contextual with behavioral approaches:

• 74% of frequent ad viewers stated they would pay more attention to a contextual ad vs. 89% who would pay more attention to behavioral ads


• 63% of online consumers say they pay more attention to ads that fit their specific interests vs. 49% who pay more attention to ads that are directly related to their current online activity; that data could be interpreted as more attention for contextual (specific interests) than behavioral (current online activity)


• 67% of online shoppers — defined as those who research and/or purchase online — notice behaviorally targeted ads vs. 53% who notice contextual targeted ads.

So, while behavioural advertising is harder to deliver on effectively - it is more rewarding if you can get it right...

Behavioral Targeting & Jean Cocteau

What on earth does Jean Cocteau have to do with behavioral targeting? Read on.

As the founder of my company, Lester Wunderman says – the beauty of the Internet is that it connects advertisers with customers directly – evolving targeting techniques are making this more of a reality day by day. I spent a few days recently at ad:tech in San Francisco. In all, I attended 8 or nine panel discussions on various topics around marketing in the online world. The one theme that kept coming back to the surface was that of behavioral targeting. As defined by Wikipedia:

Behavioral Targeting is a technique used by online publishers and advertisers to increase the effectiveness of their campaigns. The idea is to observe a user’s online behavior anonymously and then serve the most relevant advertisement based on their behavior. Theoretically, this helps advertisers deliver their online advertisement to the users who are most likely to be influenced by them.

To underline this, consider the difference between behavioral and contextual targeting - Behavioral considers how someone acts not just once but over an extended period of time and, as such requires a collection of data and the construction of a progressive profile based on that activity. Contextual targeting on the other hand involves showing someone an ad that is relevant to what that person is doing at that point in time. This is the way Google’s Adsense product works – it displays an ad relevant to the page on which you find yourself with no regard to where you came from. In a straight comparison to search data – and what John Battelle famously called “the database of intentions”, behavioral targeting by its very nature creates a database of attentions…which we can interrogate to help us uncover our prospective customers’ mindset and motivations and therefore engage with them in a relevant and meaningful way.
Within behavioral targeting itself there are two possible approaches; extended content targeting - an advertiser will be targeting a prospect who has looked at a particular type of content (i.e. a review of the latest Ford crossover vehicle) by presenting an ad to that person when she on a different type of content (i.e. a banner for the Ford Edge on the New York Times site). The second type, purchase intent targeting, - more truly behavioral, used when an advertiser identifies somebody within a purchase cycle. They are looking for someone who is actually researching a product or talking about buying. Think of this as climbing the sales funnel to identify prospects as they approach the point of purchase. This is an interesting way to take advantage of a much broader reach, because sites like automotive are quickly out of inventory.

Concerns
Understandably, there are privacy concerns around doing this type of targeting. The industry is trying to minimize such concerns through education, advocacy & product constraints to keep all data collected non-personally identifiable.
Furthermore, overlaying behavioral targeting with other types of segmentation could be problematic – if you have a specific demographic or geo that you want to focus on, then you could seriously limit your exposure. Another possible weakness is around working out what content should be targeted - Because I read an article about driving in the Swiss Alps, is that an indicator of my desire to visit Switzerland or to buy a car? And how should similar content on different websites be categorized? Does it mean the same thing if I read an article about crossover vehicles on caranddriver.com as it does when I read a similar article on the New York Times site?

All of this brings me back to the second part of the title – Jean Cocteau the French poet and sometime Boxing manager once said:

“Les miroirs devraient réfléchir plus longtemps avant de renvoyer les images “

(Mirrors should reflect longer before returning our images). The quote seems perfectly appropriate for the future of behavioral targeting as a discipline and the way advertisers should approach using it…..

Behavioral Targeting For Avatars

Inworld Advertising Network and German targeting specialist nugg.ad have got together to demonstrate real-world behavioral targeting capabilities on the Second Life platform. Depending on the interest-profile and journey (path) of an avatar, personalized and relevant ads are shown immediately on billboards. A couple of privacy issues perhaps but then again it's an avatar and not a person, right?...


More here