WunderLoop: a new dimension in targeting

“Integrated targeting”. All options on a single platform.

INTEGRATED TARGETING DEMO GRAPHIC HERE

* Unites all proven and new real-time targeting methods in one system.
* Integrates the most prominent web analysis and
market research applications.
* Is open for integration of customer-specific data from
CRM and Web/data mining.
* Flexible usage options: on-site, cross-site, as a local installation
or ASP, as a standard version or completely personalised.

wunderloop web site
wunderloop's new web design

With the development of the new Integrated Targeting Platform we have redesigned and updated our website at www.wunderloop.com. The site includes useful facts, figures and data and an improved look and feel.


Latest Innovations
Taking Targeting to a New Dimension:

Behavioural targeting is fast becoming standard practice worldwide. But with new developments come new challenges. Our clients now need to combine a range of different targeting techniques.

With wunderloop’s new Integrated Targeting Platform, for the first time, they can.

The unique platform now incorporates all targeting methods, both new and established in one modular and intuitive framework. Key features include:



- Generic Tagging
- Auto Categorisation & Keyword Extraction
- Predictive Targeting
- Typology Targeting
- Geo Targeting
- Standardised Campaign / Brand Impact Studies
- Reaction Analysis
- Relevancy Weighting
- Two options for accessing the wunderloop Integrated Targeting Platform



Generic Tagging:
wunderloop technology enables amazingly quick and simple integration and categorisation of all websites via a single tag.

Auto Categorization & Keyword Extraction:
Manual site classification used to be a long and laborious process. Not any more. wunderloop technology can now classify every web page automatically, yet allow you to specify your own changes. Article keywords are automatically identified and can be used to target specific interest profiles. Whatever your target identification characteristics, they are automatically ready for use. As results are generated, and users interact with those results, the profiles become more and more exact.


Predictive Targeting:
By cleverly correlating market research and real-time online user data we can create ever more precisely defined target groups while at the same time maximising reach.

Typology Targeting:
wunderloop’s tools allow you to connect behavioural and socio-demographic data to target standardised or individually matched target types. Relevant data from analysis of user and client databases can also be added. The types of clients are defined by a comparison of "average" online and offline client data.

Geo Targeting:
Users can be targeted right down to district and city level, without threatening data privacy - wunderloop never saves an IP address.

Standardised Campaign / Brand Impact Studies:
wunderloop’s integrated standardised analysis enables straightforward assessment of advertising effectiveness. Net result: you can spend the time you save further optimising profiles and making your campaigns still more effective.

Reaction Analysis:
With wunderloop you can now analyse who has actually reacted to an ad and therefore which of the characteristics of your target groups are really important. Similarly, a Pre-Flight allows you to check out different configurations in advance in order to find the most effective formula.


Relevancy Weighting:
Alongside the new, tried and tested wunderloop features such as relevancy weighting are of course still available. The relevance of current user behaviour is assessed and weighted in relation to historical data and in real-time context. Relevancy weighting can be used in targeting to define the strength of interest e.g. in the purchase of an automobile

Behaviorally Targeted Online Ads Get Better Reception than Contextual

Online consumers are consistently more receptive to behaviorally targeted ads than to contextual advertising - with behavioral targeting (BT) outperforming contextual by as much as 22 percent in some categories - according to a recent study on consumer receptivity to online advertising, writes MarketingCharts.

Moreover, the behavioral-targeting-receptive audience is a higher-value segment than contextual-targeting-receptive consumers, according to the study, which found that 93 percent of the BT-receptive audience have shopped online.

The study was commissioned by Revenue Science and AOL and conducted by JupiterResearch.

"We're glad to see that the voice of the online consumer echoes our position that behavioral targeting is more effective - for advertisers, publishers, and for consumers - than contextual advertising," said Marla R. Schimke, VP of marketing at Revenue Science.

Among the key findings of the study:

• Overall, two-thirds of online users have taken actions as a result of viewing online ads.

• Across all advertising, 14 percent more online consumers are more receptive to behaviorally targeted ads than to contextual ads - 63 percent vs. 49 percent of the total audience.

• BT outperforms contextual advertising in terms of consumer attention by at least 10 percent across 14 major product categories, from Financial Services to Consumer Electronics to Pharmaceuticals to Fashion and Style. For example:
  • 17 percent more online purchasers of computing products are more receptive to behaviorally targeted ads.
  • 18 percent more online auto purchasers are more receptive to behaviorally targeted ads.
  • 20 percent more online telecom purchasers are more receptive to behaviorally targeted ads than to contextual ads.
• Attention-getting behavioral targeting is preferable because more than 75 percent of online shoppers shop only once per month or less - and the majority research a product only once or twice before buying.

"Due to the level of consumers' online activity, marketers have to maximize a limited opportunity to move consumers through the purchase funnel," Schimke said.

The study also found that BT-receptive consumers are a higher-value audience:

• Behaviorally receptive consumers are more likely to have a higher income, spend more money online, and shop online more frequently than others.
• Behaviorally targeted ads fare better among both high- and low-online spenders:
  • Among people who spend more than $500 online annually, 10 percent more were defined as behaviorally receptive.
  • Among people who spend less than $500 online annually, 17 percent more were defined as behaviorally receptive.

Textwise.com Semantic ad targeting

http://www.textwise.com/semanticSignatures.html is a very interesting page with interesting info. Espcially when you scroll over the images on the left hand side that show data regarding the difference between "contextual targeting" and their "semantic signature matching". Interesting use of the word DNA in reference to content and ads. Similar to our use of

"Dynamic triangulation = particles (behavior,context,tags,keywords,attention data etc) = digital DNA = content/user/ad = relevance targeting "

for the new version of advario to be released going into adtech NYC. Below is some further info from their site.

Semantic SignaturesSM are TextWise's patented contextual targeting technology. They innovate beyond simple keyword-based or category-based models currently used in so-called "contextual advertising" and deliver a new level of context-driven advertisment matching. MEET YOUR PERFECT MATCH, EVERY TIME, AUTOMATICALLY Semantic SignaturesSM is the only contextual advertising solution with: Precision that outperforms our competitors to obtain significantly higher ad-to-web page relevancy Speed/Scalability powering real-time placement Automation to support a dynamic environment Universal Appeal going beyond the English language to capture the global market Semantic SignaturesSM capture meaning through concepts, not keywords — including multiple meanings and topics within a single document. As a fully automated and real-time contextual targeting system for both advertisments and web pages, they provide a robust, scalable, and easily maintainable solution for advertisers. Request a White Paper

Pingology - a Skill-Based Alternative to Pay-Per-Click Search Engines

http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=109&STORY=/www/story/07-12-2007/0004624397&EDATE=

GOLDEN, Colo., July 12 /PRNewswire/ -- Pingology,
http://www.pingology.com, is a new paradigm search engine. It allows Users
to find more relevant information in less search time. Webpage Owners are
offered a skill-based alternative to costly pay-per-click on a free or
fixed-price subscription basis.
Businesses are finding top placement of the best key words on pay-per-
click search engines very expensive. ROI can be variable to say the least.
A $1000 pay-per-click budget will often not purchase a week's worth of top
ranked placement. Key words can cost over $20 a click-through. No wonder
pay- per-click is a $10 billion a year industry.
On Pingology, skill and relevancy determine placement -- not how much
money you can spend!
Pingology offers a fixed-cost, skill-based alternative. Webpage Owners
"cloak" their pages by filling out a questionnaire designed to provide more
specific information to the User than is available from only key word text-
descriptors and simplistic bot IDs such as "image," "video" and "link."
Users fill out a corresponding questionnaire of what they seek. The
more closely those responses match cloaked responses by Webpage Owners, the
higher the webpage is ranked in the search results seen by the User.
Webpage Owners and Users effectively "ping" each other, engaging in an
anonymous, ongoing dialogue between needs of the User and content offerings
of the Webpage Owner. The more effectively Webpage Owners cloak their pages
in relationship to User wants, the higher will be their ranking. Users get
more relevant results and webpage owners get qualified click-throughs.
Users and Registered Webpage Owners will have access to short-form,
long- form and specialized questionnaires. A Reports area allows Webpage
Owners to monitor searches and realign webpage content to meet User needs.
Pingology User Rollout is set for October 16, 2007. Between July 6 and
September 16 during the Webpage Owner Rollout Pingology is offering webpage
owners free short-form cloaking of up to three unique URLs. Pre-rollout
discounts on long-form and specialty form questionnaires is also being
offered.
Advertising will be offered but will not affect rankings or placement
and space will be limited.
Pingology will be free to Users.

Contact:

Michael Archer
303-274-0515
marcher@pingology.com

Media Inquiries:
media@pingology.com

Investors:
investors@pingology.com
This release was issued through eReleases(TM). For more information,
visit http://www.ereleases.com.

Context And The Crowd Trump Behavior

by Steve Smith, Friday, June 1, 2007

MOST BEHAVIORAL TRACKING WORKS ON the simple assumption that past behavior is a solid predictor of future need. Not so in all applications, says Baynote CEO Jack Jia. The founding CTO of content management giant Interwoven took a crash course in social science, which he claims tells us that group behavior in a given context is a better indicator of any given user's future actions than piles of personal behavioral history. He tells us how the wisdom of the crowds in context informs Baynote's approach to content and product recommendations.

Behavioral Insider: You were at content management supplier at Interwoven for eight years. How did that experience evolve into Baynote?

Jia: The last years of my Interwoven experience really helped me start thinking about the bigger problems people were facing. Customers were saying, the more content I am publishing, the less valuable it becomes. People aren't finding it. I created all this stuff but they aren't really getting value. This became the genesis of this new company that helps people consume this content more effectively. It follows how information and knowledge is accumulated and how it is passed down generation to generation.

Behavioral Insider: Explain that connection to human behavior patterns.

Jia: I actually spent almost six months studying and working with some of the social scientists at Stanford, really thinking through to the right solution -- not from a tech or computer science perspective, but more from psychology, sociology and organizational behavior.

We produce content recommendations. Where other people find value with similar things on your site, we start to accumulate that knowledge by observing their behaviors. We can deduce what is useful and what is not. and feed that back to the users with similar needs. The bottom line is the conversion rate improvement for any business site. Our e-commerce customers have seen somewhere in the area of 20%-plus revenue lift. The support side is cost reduction. Fewer people call if they find the answers online. We just did Turbo Tax's support site and they saw a huge reduction of the support costs by having the community being the backbone of providing what answers to provide to which questions.

Behavioral Insider: Explain that connection between the social science you learned at Stanford and the company's behavioral model.

Jia: We found what we call the wisdom of the invisible crowd. This is a big insight that the psychologists and the social scientists have known for years. There is a controversy between behavioral targeting and contextual targeting. A lot of computer scientists believe you can predict people based on their past behaviors, that past needs can actually dictate what I want in the future. And that's really the basis of personalization and the more recent BT.

When we went to Stanford and really studied this, we found [past behavior] is a very poor predictor, because humans have way too many profiles. I am a father, a son, a brother, I like travel, I like a lot of things. You can track all my past behaviors all you want, but in any given moment when I go onto a site it is very hard for you to predict what I want. We believe that particular approach has a low accuracy in terms of predicting human behavior.

However, there is opposite research that is well known among scientists that asks whether people are unique. We are raised with the notion that I am unique and don't have needs quite like other people. But the scientists proved we are not unique at all. We are pack animals. Pretty much 95% of people will need the same thing. We only need to find out under what context what things are useful, and then present that product or content given the context. Then the prediction is very accurate.

Behavioral Insider: Describe how that insight translates into a recommendation method.

Jia: For example, although we know each individual and track them, we don't really care what they did yesterday. We can build profiles, but generally we don't use that primary guidance. Instead, say at our customer Cisco's site, someone goes to the router portion of the site -- then you will more than likely behave like other people who have interest in routers. There is a router peer group vs. the switches Cisco also sells, or the investor visitors vs. the job seeker. They can be the same people with different profiles, but once you enter that router world you behave much like the other people in routers.

We don't really care about your behaviors. And given our attention is so short, we can only recommend to you three or four documents before you get impatient. And then which ones you choose is very important. In aggregate, you are watching everyone's behavior. But it's not necessary to track behaviors day after day.

Behavioral Insider: But what data points are you collecting to understand what people will do in a given context?

Jia: That's one of the unique things. Almost all of the vendors out there except Amazon is collecting clicks. Through our studies at Stanford we found the click doesn't tell you anything. The click is the function of the area of the site you are on. If you put a link on the front page, you will get more clicks. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you link less-used content on the front page more people will click on it, and then people back out of it.

So click doesn't tell whether a piece of content is useful or not. It is the other things we are tracking, about 20 behavioral characteristic that in aggregate can tell us, for instance, how much time you spent on a piece of content relative to the size of the content. It really depends on what other like-minded peers also spent time with. Whether you come back to the same content. A repeat visit to the three or four products you like, we call virtual bookmarking. So, basically how you navigate now is telling.

Behavioral Insider: What kind of sample base is needed to make predictions?

Jia: One person can be noisy. Two people still noisy. Three to 10 with similar needs, like-minded peers, will start to cancel the noise out. By observing a set of heuristics, that forms a unique fingerprint of someone who likes or dislikes the content. Then we compare that fingerprint with like-minded peers, 10 or 100 other people. The noise will cancel each other out in 100, and what remains is a consistent pure signal. That is where we know that this content is truly important to that group of people.

Time To Go Quigo For Contextual

by Gavin O'Malley, Tuesday, Jun 26, 2007 6:00 AM ET
MARKING ITS BIGGEST ONE-TIME DEAL to date, contextual ad service Quigo Technologies has secured an exclusive, multi-year partnership with Time Inc.
Quigo gains access to more than 19 million unique visitors who flock each month to Time.com, CNNMoney.com, People.com, and SI.com, among other sites.
For the first time, Time Inc. will be able to directly offer its advertisers text-based pay-for-performance ad serving across its entire network, site by site, and page by page.
With Quigo's AdSonar-powered ad platform, Time Inc. advertisers can buy space on, say, the home page of People.com, sections like "Time.com-Health and Science," along with hundreds of topics or keywords, including "Mutual Funds" or "Chicago Cubs."
"We chose Quigo because of the flexibility they offer and the fact that many of our advertisers are very response-driven," said Vivek Shah, president of digital publishing, Time Inc. Business and Finance Network. Until now, Time had divided its contextual ad duties between Google and Yahoo.
The companies estimate that ad revenues will top $100 million over the first three years of the partnership, according to Henry Vogel, chief revenue officer at Quigo.
In the competition for contextual-text-ad-serving, Quigo has been nipping at the giant knees of Google and Yahoo. Over the last two years, the New York-based company has won over a number of top-tier media sites, including ESPN.com, FoxNews.com, Forbes.com, as well as Cox Newspapers' 17 sites.
Apart from its David-and-Goliath charm, publishers have been attracted to Quigo's transparent ad placement operations, which have stood in contrast to Google's and Yahoo's more veiled approach. (Quigo gives advertisers a list of specific sites where their ads have appeared, as well as the chance to buy space on specific sites and pages.)
Quigo's strategy is proving so effective that Google earlier this month followed suit by offering placement performance reports for AdWords--allowing advertisers to see where their ads appear, as well as site-by-site performance metrics.
But Quigo's success does not rest on its transparency alone, assured Vogel.
"Our strength comes from our highly customizable and customer-centric focus," said Vogel. "This is about publishers who want control over the ad-serving process, rather than outsourcing it to a blind network."
Quigo had 13 billion impressions in May, said Vogel, who predicted the number would rise to 20 billion monthly by the end of the year.
And Quigo's business is not limited to text ads. According to Vogel, the company is busy integrating its performance-based technology into other ad formats, including display and even video ads.
"We are at a tipping point with performance-based marketing," Vogel said. "The door is now open to explore other ad formats."
According to Shaw, Time Inc.'s main interest with Quigo is text-based ads, but the company would be open to exploring other ad formats with Quigo in the future.
Contextual ads generated about $2 billion in revenue last year--or 13% of online ad spending, according to eMarketer. Google took in about 60% of that revenue, while Quigo was left with less than 10% of the pot.
Other sites in Time Inc.'s network include EW.com, InStyle.com, Golf.com, FanNation.com, SouthernLiving.com, SouthernAccents.com, Sunset.com, CottageLiving.com, CoastalLiving.com, CookingLight.com, and MyRecipes.com.

Google thinks "flickr censorship = Hitler ringtones"... the social context is missing

from CenterNetworks - by Allen Stern

Earlier today, I posted an article from Franz Patzig about flickr and the censorship from their German customers. Someone then submitted it to Digg. About thirty minutes ago I received an email noting that on Digg, the Google ads somehow matched the story about flickr censorship to ads for Hitler's ringtones.

See the image below. What's interesting to me about this is two things: the content matching might be close to correct I guess if you assume that "germany + censorship" might equal "hitler" but ringtones? Clicking the link gives me one of those crappy monthly ringtone services but no mention of Hitler.

The "social context" is what's missing in these ads. "Hitler Ringtones" which has nothing to do with Hitler looks like SEO desperation on the advertiser's part...Google (and the others) also has a real weakness with the social context of terms. Someone I was chatting with this afternoon mentioned that phrase to me with regards to ads, and you have to wonder as more of us create content online, whether ad companies will start to use this as a part of their matching systems. The algorithms don't understand social context or meaning.

Do you have good examples of very poor ad matching? Leave them in the comments.

read more

Context And The Crowd Trump Behavior

by Steve Smith, Friday, June 1, 2007
MOST BEHAVIORAL TRACKING WORKS ON the simple assumption that past behavior is a solid predictor of future need. Not so in all applications, says Baynote CEO Jack Jia. The founding CTO of content management giant Interwoven took a crash course in social science, which he claims tells us that group behavior in a given context is a better indicator of any given user's future actions than piles of personal behavioral history. He tells us how the wisdom of the crowds in context informs Baynote's approach to content and product recommendations.

Behavioral Insider: You were at content management supplier at Interwoven for eight years. How did that experience evolve into Baynote?

Jia: The last years of my Interwoven experience really helped me start thinking about the bigger problems people were facing. Customers were saying, the more content I am publishing, the less valuable it becomes. People aren't finding it. I created all this stuff but they aren't really getting value. This became the genesis of this new company that helps people consume this content more effectively. It follows how information and knowledge is accumulated and how it is passed down generation to generation.

Behavioral Insider: Explain that connection to human behavior patterns.

Jia: I actually spent almost six months studying and working with some of the social scientists at Stanford, really thinking through to the right solution -- not from a tech or computer science perspective, but more from psychology, sociology and organizational behavior.

We produce content recommendations. Where other people find value with similar things on your site, we start to accumulate that knowledge by observing their behaviors. We can deduce what is useful and what is not. and feed that back to the users with similar needs. The bottom line is the conversion rate improvement for any business site. Our e-commerce customers have seen somewhere in the area of 20%-plus revenue lift. The support side is cost reduction. Fewer people call if they find the answers online. We just did Turbo Tax's support site and they saw a huge reduction of the support costs by having the community being the backbone of providing what answers to provide to which questions.

Behavioral Insider: Explain that connection between the social science you learned at Stanford and the company's behavioral model.

Jia: We found what we call the wisdom of the invisible crowd. This is a big insight that the psychologists and the social scientists have known for years. There is a controversy between behavioral targeting and contextual targeting. A lot of computer scientists believe you can predict people based on their past behaviors, that past needs can actually dictate what I want in the future. And that's really the basis of personalization and the more recent BT.

When we went to Stanford and really studied this, we found [past behavior] is a very poor predictor, because humans have way too many profiles. I am a father, a son, a brother, I like travel, I like a lot of things. You can track all my past behaviors all you want, but in any given moment when I go onto a site it is very hard for you to predict what I want. We believe that particular approach has a low accuracy in terms of predicting human behavior.

However, there is opposite research that is well known among scientists that asks whether people are unique. We are raised with the notion that I am unique and don't have needs quite like other people. But the scientists proved we are not unique at all. We are pack animals. Pretty much 95% of people will need the same thing. We only need to find out under what context what things are useful, and then present that product or content given the context. Then the prediction is very accurate.

Behavioral Insider: Describe how that insight translates into a recommendation method.

Jia: For example, although we know each individual and track them, we don't really care what they did yesterday. We can build profiles, but generally we don't use that primary guidance. Instead, say at our customer Cisco's site, someone goes to the router portion of the site -- then you will more than likely behave like other people who have interest in routers. There is a router peer group vs. the switches Cisco also sells, or the investor visitors vs. the job seeker. They can be the same people with different profiles, but once you enter that router world you behave much like the other people in routers.

We don't really care about your behaviors. And given our attention is so short, we can only recommend to you three or four documents before you get impatient. And then which ones you choose is very important. In aggregate, you are watching everyone's behavior. But it's not necessary to track behaviors day after day.

Behavioral Insider: But what data points are you collecting to understand what people will do in a given context?

Jia: That's one of the unique things. Almost all of the vendors out there except Amazon is collecting clicks. Through our studies at Stanford we found the click doesn't tell you anything. The click is the function of the area of the site you are on. If you put a link on the front page, you will get more clicks. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you link less-used content on the front page more people will click on it, and then people back out of it.

So click doesn't tell whether a piece of content is useful or not. It is the other things we are tracking, about 20 behavioral characteristic that in aggregate can tell us, for instance, how much time you spent on a piece of content relative to the size of the content. It really depends on what other like-minded peers also spent time with. Whether you come back to the same content. A repeat visit to the three or four products you like, we call virtual bookmarking. So, basically how you navigate now is telling.

Behavioral Insider: What kind of sample base is needed to make predictions?

Jia: One person can be noisy. Two people still noisy. Three to 10 with similar needs, like-minded peers, will start to cancel the noise out. By observing a set of heuristics, that forms a unique fingerprint of someone who likes or dislikes the content. Then we compare that fingerprint with like-minded peers, 10 or 100 other people. The noise will cancel each other out in 100, and what remains is a consistent pure signal. That is where we know that this content is truly important to that group of people.

A Picture of AdTopics

This is an image and post i found that describes how the Advario contextual targeting engine reads the density of the page and then targets the red areas for the most relevance.

Anjo Anjewierden posts the image to the left which described the topics found in his blog. The topics are mined automatically and the image essentially represents a graph of the topics where proximity describes relatedness between topics. The colours indicate how strongly related neighbouring terms. Thus, one could interpret this map as a presentation of the topical coherence in the blog. As red indicates strong relatedness, the fewer and larger the red areas are, the more focused the content of the blog.
To really understand the potential value of this type of visualization, it would be great to see a grid of, say, 100 blogs so that one could see if there were any clear patterns. One might see, for example, highly focused blogs as a single, large red blob with a fringe of green. Other blogs which are less topically focused might look like the example above.
Digg this • Add to del.icio.us • Email this
September 16, 2006 in blogosphere, text mining Permalink Comments (0) TrackBack (0)

New book on Behavioral Targeting

New book on Behavioral Targeting

Rob Graham’s new book on Behavioral Targeting and online advertising has been distributed to OMMA, iMediaSummit and AdTech audiences as part of its introduction, and now you can own a copy as well..

Fishing From A Barrel takes an energetic and foundational look at how behavioral targeting is changing the face of advertising as we know it and introduces readers to the fundamentals of behavioral targeting technologies and how advertisers and publishers can use BT to achieve greater campaign and ROI results for their online advertising.

While still in its infancy, Behavioral Targeting is filling in many of the holes that have been part of the direct marketing landscape for over 100 years. Fishing From A Barrel brings readers on a journey that introduces them to concepts such as:

• The future promise of Behavioral Targeting
• Why Mass Marketing isn’t the best way to reach an audience
• How to target and market to ‘individuals’
• How to plan for and create highly targeting ad campaigns
• How publishers are using BT to turn a huge profit
• What you need to know about ‘Customerization’
• How new targeting data goes well beyond demography
• Why contextual targeting often falls short
• Understanding and using ad networks
• Using BT with traditional media channels
• How to collect and use relevant web analytics
• Understanding new definitions of Reach, Acquisition and Conversion
• How to create targeted audience segments
• The importance of privacy to consumers
• What makes consumers consume?
• Meeting consumer needs and expectations with every campaign
• The Foundational Communications Model
• Communicating Interactively
• Who’s who in Behavioral Targeting
• BUY THE BOOK HERE
  

Getting Ads to the Right Eyeballs (Page 4 of 4)

BEHAVIORAL MARKETING

Published: April 20, 2007

Getting Ads to the Right Eyeballs (Page 4 of 4)

By Michael Estrin

More by this Author
Contact Author

The challenges facing BT

Return to Page 3

To paraphrase Graham, there is an elephant in the room when it comes to BT, namely a lack of standardization across solutions. According to Graham, this is no small obstacle, as he writes, "It could prevent BT from gaining the foothold it really needs to complete its paradigm shift."

As Graham sees it, the landscape of BT solutions is a mixed bag of practices because providers employ different approaches to reach consumers. While Graham concedes that the spirit of experimentation in that area will likely pay dividends in terms of innovation, it is something of a drawback for advertisers because running a campaign with a single vendor won't put the message in front of all potential buyers.

For Graham, there is no easy fix for the standardization problem. Although he points out that media exchange solutions and the establishment of standards by a governing body such as the IAB should go a long way toward allowing BT to reach its full potential.

A primer on privacy
At some point in a conversation about BT, someone will likely use the S-word, according to Graham: spying. "There's no way to sugar coat this," Graham writes. "In order to learn more about individual consumers, marketers have to resort to 'spying.'"

While Graham details the some of the legal and business concerns those employing BT should have when it comes to issues of privacy, he makes the point that advertisers and publishers who use BT need to demonstrate to consumers that the practice benefits all parties involved.

"Benefit is the key word here," Graham writes. "As consumers, we demand to know 'what's in it for me' before taking any action. Relevancy is king. If I'm going to give you something, I expect to get something in return."

Beyond BT, the human element
While BT may look like a numbers-heavy discipline, the truth of the matter is that it's really more of a human art. After all, as Graham explains, "it's difficult to understand the parameters of BT without first understanding the realm of human behavior." For that reason alone, Graham delivers some basics on studies in human behavior as they relate to ad campaigns.

According to Graham, the relevance of an ad, whether it's served up via BT or otherwise, comes down to how the ad plays to our core emotions. Whether the ad meshes with our self-described identity, or whether it conflicts with how we see ourselves, will also determine whether a given message can break through the noise of everyday life.

Resources
While "Fishing From a Barrel" is meant to serve as a roadmap for a BT campaign, as well as a strong argument for BT in general, Graham rightly assumes that his readers may not be quite as far along in adopting BT as he would hope. For that reason, Graham concludes his book with a useful "Resource Pack," which contains contact information for various firms offering BT solutions, and better still for the novice reader, brief, easily digested descriptions of what those companies do.

"Fishing From a Barrel" is available from LearningCraft.

Michael Estrin is the associate editor at iMedia Connection. Read full bio.

Getting Ads to the Right Eyeballs (Page 3 of 4)

BEHAVIORAL MARKETING

Published: April 20, 2007

Getting Ads to the Right Eyeballs (Page 3 of 4)

By Michael Estrin

More by this Author
Contact Author

PRINT EMAIL DEL.ICIO.US DIGG IT

Five ways to use BT

Return to Page 2

As Graham is quick to observe, BT isn't a what, but a how. In "Fishing From a Barrel," he isolates five ways of approaching BT, making clear that a specific marketing goal needs to be set so that the marketer can gauge the campaign's effectiveness.

"By first identifying the specific actions consumers need to take, marketers can create ways to capture and measure data to determine if those goals are being met," Graham writes.

1) Publisher solutions
According to Graham, more than 90 percent of advertisers using BT use some type of publisher-based BT solution. Publisher solutions use identifying characteristics of site visitors, applying those understandings to current visitors in order to serve them relevant ads.

"The main advantage for sites that use behavioral tracking capabilities is that it allows them to be defined within ad networks as a specific audience destination," Graham writes.

2) Ad Network Solutions
Ad networks are a collection of sites representing an expanded range of places where advertisers can run ads. But unlike a single publisher, ad networks offer an added wrinkle to BT, according to Graham.

"Unlike a single site, ad networks can collect consumer data on hundreds of sites and, in some cases, track individual consumers as they travel between sites on the same network," Graham writes.

3) Adware Solutions
Adware solutions are an opt-in way for advertisers to reach consumers directly, usually by giving the consumer some free software or online tools in exchange for their participation. But as Graham points out, advertisers using adware solutions have felt the heat recently from lawsuits seeking to conflate adware with spyware. While a good tool, Graham says he believes only time will tell if it is to be a viable option for BT.

4) Ad Optimization
Ad optimization is considered an offshoot of ad serving. Ad optimization companies typically use intelligent ad serving technologies to interface with a publisher and an ad serving engine.

"The greatest advantage of this process is that targeted consumers can be reached with tier one targeted ads, while visiting pages normally cater to second and third tier inventory," Graham writes.

5) Rich Media Advertising Solutions
To be fair, Graham says he is a "huge fan of rich media solutions," having designed more than 500 rich media ad units in his career.

"To me, the greatest benefit that rich media ads offer advertisers is the ability to help drive the consumer's behavior toward a specific marketing goal," Graham writes.

Campaigns typically involve gathering information such as product preferences, email addresses or ZIP codes. The data is then collected within the ad unit and fed into a back-end database.

The difficulty, according to Graham, is synchronizing the data gathered from an interactive ad with the appropriate web analytics data.

"By tying all the collected campaign data together, it is my expectation that rich media and behavioral targeting will become a juggernaut in the land of online advertising," Graham writes.

Getting Ads to the Right Eyeballs (Page 2 of 4)

BEHAVIORAL MARKETING

Published: April 20, 2007

Getting Ads to the Right Eyeballs (Page 2 of 4)

By Michael Estrin

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Data matters, a lot

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As Graham says, "It all starts with data." Publishers can collect two kinds of data to learn more about their customers. Declared data represents information consumers willingly disclose about themselves, while observed data is information compiled and collected based on how consumers use websites. Once the data is gathered, the challenge, according to Graham, is to make sense of it.

For Graham, the twin-tools of cookies and analytics solutions capable of observing time spent online, and repeat visits and which pages generate the most traffic, are more than just ways to track consumers. As Graham sees it, the online ad experience is a dialogue between consumer and publisher, wherein the publisher (if he is listening) can adjust his business on the fly to meet the needs of a savvy user.

Though Graham points out the use of several BT models, the basic process is quite simple. Publishers create page tags for targeted webpages that are triggered upon a visitor's arrival. The data is then collected and analyzed. Visitors are next grouped according to similar patterns observed while on the site or within the ad network. The groups are then refined into groups of clearly defined audiences. Publishers can then sell advertisers access to highly-targeted audience groups.

While the process may sound basic, for Graham it is revolutionary.

"For the first time in the history of marketing, the ability to reach individuals based on their needs, interests, desires and sudden urges is within reach of advertisers," he writes.

Next: Five ways to use BT

Getting Ads to the Right Eyeballs

Getting Ads to the Right Eyeballs

By Michael Estrin

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"Fishing From a Barrel" author Rob Graham explains how to put the right ads in front of the right people.

In "Fishing From a Barrel" author and professor Rob Graham has one message for his readers: Know your customers.

The book, then, to paraphrase Graham, is an attempt to draw a roadmap that aids online advertisers and publishers in understanding the process of planning behaviorally targeted (BT) ad initiatives.

The target
"To be effective in the new world, advertisers have to stop targeting 'us' and start targeting 'me,'" Graham writes. The beauty of BT, Graham argues, is that it allows publishers and advertisers to learn more about their customers not as group, but as individuals.

Rather, than sifting through mountains of data meant to encapsulate the buying patterns of groups of people, Graham sees BT as a way to look into the minds of a single, potential customer.

"By recognizing and tracking the surfing behaviors of individual site visitors, publishers are able to plot patterns of behavior that identify specific areas of interest, current needs and buying intention," Graham writes.

While it is the publishers who must set up their websites to gather information, much the same way a retail store would instruct a clerk to observe a customer's in-store behavior, it is both advertisers and publishers who gain from BT, according to Graham.

In a hypothetical example featuring "Jerry," a busy consumer in the market for mountain biking vacations, Graham explains how tracking each visit made by the consumer to a relevant website, and subsequently serving ads targeted to where Jerry is in the buying cycle, yields positive results for publishers, advertisers and consumers.

By knowing precisely where Jerry was in the buying cycle, the publisher can sell ads at a premium because they cater to the right buyer. And by putting ads in front of a likely buyer, the advertiser wins because relevant ads are better able to convert. As an added benefit, Graham points out that Jerry will benefit because relevant ads help him save time finding what he wants, thus building a stronger relationship between advertiser and consumer.

Next: Data matters, a lot

Ex Did-It Chief Bill Wise Lands At Remix Media Ad Network

by Shankar Gupta, Monday, Mar 12, 2007 6:00 AM ET
FORMER DID-IT CEO BILL WISE, who left the search engine marketing firm last month citing a disagreement about the direction of the company, starts today as president of Remix Media, a division of auction-based ad network Right Media, OnlineMediaDaily has learned.
Right Media made headlines in October when Yahoo bought a 20% stake in the firm for $45 million. In December, the company created the new brand Remix Media for its ad network, which allows advertisers to bid on display ad impressions from specific sites.
Wise will oversee the growth of Remix, having experience with both auction-based media from his role at Did-It, as well as ad network management from his experience as general manager of DoubleClick Media.
"It's really kind of bridging the ad network business and the concept of an exchange with search marketing and everything else," he said.
Currently, Remix represents mostly lower-cost inventory, but part of Wise's job will entail attracting both big-spending advertisers and more premium inventory, he said.
"They're now serving two billion impressions a day. They've gotten large very quickly. Right now, they're representing a lot of remnant space," he said. "But clearly, the strategy is how to go upstream, and that's going to be a large part of my role."
Wise said the company aims to help marketers manage entire campaigns on an auction-based level.
"More and more marketers and agencies need to embrace the concept of auction-based media, and Right Media has the online advertising piece figured out," he said. "Remix Media, and we're really establishing that as another brand, can really help marketers manage their inventory holistically."

Google Ads To Appear On Social Networking Profiles

http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.san&s=56452&Nid=27921&p=406600

by Tobi Elkin, Friday, Mar 2, 2007 6:00 AM ET
FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS? NO, NOT those kinds of benefits ... cash benefits.

Dada.net, an Italian-based provider of social networking and mobile community services, has partnered with Google's AdSense to launch the "friend$" program that offers bloggers and social networkers a way to earn some cash from their content.

Dada says friend$ attempts to leverage the viral nature of social networks and user-generated content by enabling ads, via Google's AdSense, to appear not only on blogs but around the profiles of consumers' social networking pages. Consumers are invited to opt-in to the program to enable placement of text and display ads on their blogs, profiles, and next to photos and videos.

"The really new thing is the viral aspect," said Max Pellegrini, Dada USA's CEO. "If you invite your friends to participate in this program, you can make money on the clicks and on the pages of your friends. You're incentivized to invite your friends." It's a kind of social networking loyalty program.

So if you're a music blogger and receive an invitation from someone in the friend$ program, you follow the link, opt-in, and wait for approval from Google. The program is not only for use with blogs, Pellegrini stressed, but on the profile pages of Dada.net. Users can rack up their own clicks plus clicks from friends' pages. So people can earn cash not only from Google ads that appear on their own pages, but also from messages that appear on the pages of friends they've invited.

Dada claims that the friend$ program is the first to enable the matching of the AdSense code of social network users which may already exist or can be created from scratch, with the registered Dada.net profiles via a relatively easy method using a single platform.

Google is supplying the ads and managing the inventory, while Dada will manage the real estate on which the Google ads appear and the relationship between "member friend$" on the Dada.net platform.

"Historically, AdSense has been something that publishers use, so this is a little bit unique in that individual people can place the ads on their own pages," said Debra Aho Williamson, senior analyst at eMarketer. "But what that says is the beauty of AdSense is the more traffic you get, the more likely someone will click on the ad and you'll get paid."

But will the clicks add up to something meaningful? "You've got to be pretty popular and have a whole lot of friends to make any significant money from this," Williamson said. "It sounds to me like a really interesting idea, but I wonder how big the revenue potential is both for the individual and Dada."

Social networks are struggling to monetize millions of pages of user-generated content.

"Everybody's trying to figure out what the best way is to generate revenue from social networking. It does make some sense that the individual profiles will start to become a place that social networks will want to tap into revenue possibilities, but I still think in this particular instance, the revenue potential has got to be pretty minimal," Williamson added.

News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media last month announced that it bought Strategic Data Corp., an ad technology firm, to help it enhance the value of its ad real estate on MySpace, IGN, AskMen.com, and others among its properties. The company's technology is said to use yield optimization to help publishers squeeze more from each ad served.

Dada, which launched the program in Italy before extending it to the U.S., considers itself an online social networking platform for blogging, dating, mobile communication, and entertainment. The international Dada.net program counts more than 7 million users. Plans include launching the friend$ program in Spain, Portugal, and Brazil in the near-term.

Tobi Elkin is Editor-at-Large, MediaPost. Email her at telkin@mediapost.com

Contextual Advertising - The New Web Market

I love where online marketing is going. That’s the best way I can say it. With each passing day, more and more advertisers are realizing old markets are old markets. Contextual advertising is the future of marketing…………period. A targeted campaign focuses advertisements based on the content being shown.
Not everyone who watches the Super Bowl wants to buy beer or eat chips, but odds are somone who visits a BMW enthusiasts site would want to buy BMW parts or see a new BMW or Mercedes ad, right? Or someone who visits a cooking site would want to see ads about pots and pans or cookware. Of course!
Marketing companies are starting to see the light and develop products that target ads based on the content of the site delivering the ad. One such company is Media Trust. Media Trust’s new product Advario allows publishers to specifically target campaigns based on content of a publisher’s site rather than a geographic or network blanket. The ads are specifically target by content therefore saving wasted advertiser’s money and saving the site user the hassle of instrusive pointless ads.

http://www.kensoftinc.com/blog/

You’re now free to use other contextual advertisements along with AdSense

A recent revision of Google’s AdSense Program Policies now enables you to place contextual advertisements from non-Google services along with AdSense ads on the same page. Till now you weren’t allowed to display ads from third-party services like Chitika eMiniMalls, IntelliTXT, Kontera etc. on the same page as AdSense ads.

However, restrictions still apply regarding the nature of ads shown. You can use any of the other services in conjunction with AdSense, as long as their ads don’t mimic the AdSense ads i.e. the visitors shouldn’t confuse them with AdSense ads.

In other words, services which by default, show ads in the same format as AdSense ads won’t be permitted. If on the other hand, your ad service provides you ad customisation tools with which you can alter the format of the ads (e.g. add a border, alter the colour palette) you are free to place their ads parallel to AdSense.

According to the Jensense Blog…

I have had a few questions regarding whether using the same ad unit sizes would constitute having the “same look and feel”, and some others are reporting that using anything in an ad unit in the same style as Google’s (such as using something that looks like YPN) would violate this policy. Fortunately for publishers, the answer is no, just the fact the ad units share the same styling (as nearly all contextual ad networks do) will not break the policy as long as you take care to change the color schemes used by each.

Bottom line, this means you can use the same ad unit sizes from two different programs, as long as there are clear differences in the color scheme (and things such as borders or backgrounds) used by your Google ads. It is also worth noting that proximity of the competitive ad units to each other also comes into factor when making changes to your site by adding competitive ads. I asked Brian Axe from AdSense to clear up just how different the ad units need to be so publishers do not inadvertently violate the policy.

Services like Chitika & Amazon serve ads in a different format by default - so you can go ahead and implement them directly without any alteration as such. You might require a bit of tweaking in case of IntelliTXT & Kontera.

As for YPN ads, be careful - it’s against Yahoo’s program policies to place contextual ads from multiple sources on the same page. But one might expect Yahoo to follow suit after Google’s policy revision.

All in all, the change is actually for the better as it’ll allow placement of ads of competitive products on the same page - and not just from a single source. All you need to ensure is that any other ads you use (whether contextually targeted or not) do not resemble the AdSense ads run anywhere on the same site.

That Slope Is Just Getting Slipperier

George Simpson

As if air pollution, astronomical real estate prices and the possibility of running into The Donald weren't reason enough to sprint to suburbia, here comes this news item from a New York Times story: "Yankelovich, a market research firm, estimates that a person living in a city 30 years ago saw up to 2,000 ad messages a day, compared with up to 5,000 today."

Since the story was about place-based ads, one assumes the 5,000 messages don't include those we encounter in media--which, you will recall from earlier Over The Line dispatches, is where we bury our noses for about three hours a day. A single network prime-time TV show now has 634 ads per hour (956 if you count the promos they scroll under or paste over the content itself). The only good news is that ads are continuing to disappear from your newspapers and magazines. The bad news is that when they lose those cool auto ads, magazines replace them with cheapo, classified-looking ads from the retail equivalent of penis and breast enhancement creams, crapping up their layouts and just adding to the clutter.

But the bottom line is that overloading consumers with ads to the point that they can't sit quietly in a toilet stall without having to see commercial messages just puts them further over the edge, so they just hate the ad industry more than ever and forget how useful (and occasionally entertaining) ads can be to their lives.

Like everyone else, I have online ad blockers and I fast-forward through TV shows I have recorded. I either change channels during live TV commercials--or hit the mute and read a magazine for the duration of the break. (Given the length of most newsmagazine stories now, I can nearly complete an entire issue in two pods). I never listen to commercial radio anymore, since their ads are THE MOST obnoxious of all media. I am happy to pay for XM, which I listen to in the car and almost all day online. I only look at newspaper ads that have SALE in big letters plastered across them. ANYTHING related to advertising that comes in the mail (no matter how cleverly or deceptively designed to get me to open it) is dumped unread into the trash. In other words, I am a pretty typical consumer.

But at least I acknowledge that I love ads that are relevant to what I am in the market for on any given day. I don't really care which medium delivers them to me, either (except that online has spoiled me with instant gratification, so if a print or TV ad asks me to dial a number or go to a store, our love affair pretty much ends right then and there.)

I grew up on the premise that advertising was a form of information, and therefore useful for the consumer. But as ad exposure has climbed beyond the 5,000 units a day, the contest to gain my attention has resulted in the pollution of most urban landscapes, TV screens, print layouts and my computer screen. There was a story yesterday about a woman who produces some of the Internet's most annoying ads, which use constant motion to get your attention. While some might see her as a kind of ad industry folk-hero for producing ads that seem to work for her client, I suspect most consumers would rather she be drawn and quartered in Iraqi justice system-time.

I appreciate that one man's "best ad of the year" is the next man's "if-I-see-that-goddamned-spot-one-more-time-I-will-pitch-the-plasma-out-the-door," and that at the end of the day, it all comes down to what moves product out the door, but I would not underestimate consumer backlash to too-many-ads-trying-too-hard-to-get-my-attention. I know people who won't buy from companies just because they got a telemarketing call from them, or hate seeing the same ads run during every college bowl and pro playoff game. OK, it's me. But I am not alone (I don't think).

Too many in the ad industry chuckle when people in focus groups say they hate ads--but then go out and buy the product anyway. But all we've done is foster a resentment that will be reflected in enhanced electronic measures to avoid ads at all. Including the ones that we might have really wanted to see.