Category: behavioral targeting watch

How Marketers Are Also Tracking Your Actions Online–when you hit “Play, pause, next…” [Annals of Web Analytics]

excerpt:  When it comes to analytics, few know the space like Avinash Kaushik, which is why we took your questions to him…

Ad Age: Are video-heavy, rich-media sites affecting the importance of certain metrics?

Mr. Kaushik: Absolutely. We used to live in the world of hits. Then we moved to page views. Now we are moving to “interactions.” … The actions of your website visitors are measured. Play, pause, next, send, forward, click, etc. — each is a “vote” by the customer to engaging in some kind of integration with your web experience.

Analytics.  Abbey Klaassen.  Ad Age.  March 30, 2009 [sub required]
 

Alain Heureux, IAB Europe, and the Battle Over Online Marketing and Privacy: Worried about Article 29 Working Party and Calls for Regulation

We recently met Mr. Heureux in Brussels at a EU conference on consumers in the digital age.  He is a most capable representative of the European online advertising industry.  But Alain’s job is also to help prevent the enactment of privacy safeguards that would protect European consumers and citizens when they use digital and interactive media.  Here are excerpts from a recent article on Mr. Heureux in New Media Age [26 March 2009]:

In the battle to protect online advertising from intervention by politicians, Alain Heureux is on the front line. The president and CEO of IAB Europe spends half his time on what he calls public affairs, concentrating on the regulatory agenda in Brussels.  “The three main concerns are privacy, targeting and social media, and all the links between…“We’re very worried,” he admits. “At the moment, the revenues from targeting and profiling are not so big, so if you damage them you might not damage the entire industry immediately. But marketers want to move away from traditional techniques to targeted, efficient forms of marketing, and that shift can only happen with the use of technology and data. So there is a risk of damaging the future of marketing and media.”

Heureux’s concerns include the Article 29 working party which, although it has no power to introduce legislation, carries considerable weight in Brussels. It’s currently working on a paper which would define a person’s IP address as personal data, making it subject to the same data protection regime as other personal information. He’s also worried about the upcoming EU elections, wondering if one of the current commissioners might campaign on a privacy and data protection platform.

“Someone could position themselves as the messiah of data protection,” he says. “You’d get a lot of sympathy from consumers’ associations and citizens who are a little bit scared about all this data stuff, so it would be easy to take that great role and use it politically. That’s why these elections are dangerous, the threat is very much present.”…

Heureux takes the view that the only way to stop regulators passing new laws is for the industry to regulate itself. And while he acknowledges that Brussels is open to the idea of self-regulation, he sees one of his biggest problems as managing its expectations.

“Regulatory affairs take time, but the regulator wants everything now, not in a year’s time.” …“We need to create room for self-regulation but I’m worried about who will take care of enforcement. It’s not clear that the SROs [self-regulator organizations] will do it, because they’re under-resourced and under-funded, so it won’t be easy to extend self-regulation to include new techniques and practices.”

Despite these concerns, Heureux acknowledges with a smile that the current economic situation is helping the cause of self-regulation. He sees companies becoming more pragmatic and open to compromise with their competitors, while regulators are more concerned about the effect of new legislation on jobs and business.

“behavioral targeting on steroids” is how one major interactive advertiser describes rush to create “goldmine of information” on consumers

Excerpt from a column written by Domenic Venuto of Razorfish.

“Data is now sexy. Very sexy. At the same time that publishers were looking to capture market share online they realized they sit on a gold mine of information that isn’t used anywhere near its potential… Suddenly publishers turned their attention to data. They became interested in building unified customer databases, repositories that captured a 360 degree view of the customer and consolidated behavior across brands and distribution channels. Whatever the phrase, it is behavioral targeting on steroids. All efforts focused on consolidating information about a user’s online activity with their offline behavior…Publishing aside, financial companies, CPG and retailers are also extremely focused on data. They collect data from every customer interaction—television ads, mailers, Web visits, call center calls, deposits, coupons—and connect the data dots between customer touch points to understand the effects of each interaction on the acquisition and retention lifecycle.”

Google Tells Advertisers it has the “Largest Global Network” for “Pinpoint targeting”

Google says that in the Ad Age Ad Networks and Exchanges Guide.  Here are some excerpts:

The Google Content Network can efficiently and effectively meet your advertising needs. Not only do we have the largest global network,1 but our product and engineering teams have developed a range of solutions—from contextual targeting to real-time reporting—that help you and your clients create, launch and optimize campaigns that deliver results.

Connect with your audience, large or small
  • Consumer behavior is shifting toward niche sites.3 With sites spanning broad and premium niche, the Content Network gives you access to hundreds of thousands of sites and millions of consumers.
  • Select your audience based on their interests—whether they’re sports enthusiasts or social activists—and our targeting technology will find them across the Content Network.
  • We give users the ability to edit the interests we think they have, providing a new level of transparency for users and better targeting for you…Broad reach. Pinpoint targeting. Efficient prices. Better ROI. The Google Content Network…

    Network Reach

    As the largest ad network in the world, and fourth largest in the U.S., the Google Content Network reaches 75 percent of international Internet users and 76 percent of the U.S. online audience.*
    *Source: comScore, February 2009

“Microtargeting at scale”–a look at one Behavioral Targeting Online Ad Network

We urge everyone, including the FTC and Congress, to review Ad Age’s “Ad Network & Exchange” guide published on April 20, 2009.  Much of it is online.  Here’s an except from Tribal Fusion:

“We offer:

  • Vertical expertise
  • Deep customer insights
  • Comprehensive targeting tools…Tribal Fusion works with a broad array of data sources to provide a true 360º consumer view. We aggregate data to pinpoint interests, past actions and likely future behaviors. This enables each campaign to get smarter over time, informing clients about which data points are making consumers convert.
    Microtargeting at scale

    Tribal Fusion can deliver personalized messaging to multiple niche audiences on an exceptional scale, combining consumer understanding with comprehensive targeting technologies and dynamic creative. The content of a single ad unit can be tailored by the geography, demographics and lifestyle of individual viewers, producing thousands of personalized ads in real time. Ad units with dynamic copy can perform six to seven times better than static ads.“

Cable TV’s Targeted & Interactive Ads: Benefiting from a “enormous fire-hose of data”

excerpt from Advanced Advertising.  Linda Hardesty.  Cablefax.  April 1, 2009:  “There’s a lot of technology in place for data collection,” said Ross [Doug Ross, Cisco’s VP of business development in the service provider video technology group]. “We can collect almost an unimaginable amount of data at a granular level. The industry grapples with what’s the right architecture that would make this enormous fire-hose of data more useful.”

“The challenge is the enormity of that whole set of data,” agreed Woidke [Paul Woidke, SVP and general manager of advanced advertising at Open TV – and chair of SCTE Digital Video Subcommittee (DVS) Working Group 5]. “Eighty-five percent of homes in the U.S. have some kind of satellite or wired connection with a potential return path.”

Instead of just getting Nielson data for a selected sample of homes, a cable operator could gather data from all its subs and know what people watched, when they watched it, and how they behaved in terms of pausing, rewinding and fast- forwarding.

Cable’s Big Six Canoe Ventures & Privacy: “We can certainly compete with a cookie”

That quote is attributed to David Verklin, CEO of Canoe Ventures, when he spoke at a recent industry marketing event.  As noted by Inside the Marketers Studio, Mr. Verklin said that:

I think the TV can do a pretty good job at targeting. “We can certainly compete with a cookie.” Can tie it back to set top boxes, loyalty cards. 90% of grocery shopping happens with loyalty cards.

Cable Giants Canoe Ventures and Your Set-top Box Data [Annals of Telling Congress One Thing, But Insiders Another]

From a November 2008 report on Canoe CEO David Verklin’s speech at the “NewTeeVee Live” conference.  Excerpts:  Canoe Ventures outlined its strategy today at the NewTeeVee Live conference in San Francisco, where David Verklin, the CEO, outlined the cable industry’s answer to the competition from online video…“Data is the new creative,” Verklin said. He said Canoe thinks the key to that data is the set-top box that’s already hooked up to the televison. That box can tell advertisers exactly how many people are watching an ad.

And this excerpt on Comcast’s data mining warehouse from a January 2009 report in Multichannel News.  Excerpt:  Comcast has sketched out plans for a gigantic database called “TV Warehouse,” able to store a full year of statistics gathered from digital set-tops in more than 16 million households nationwide, according to an industry executive familiar with the project.  TV Warehouse, envisioned as having a massive 500 Terabytes of storage, would then feed up to a database even broader in scope operated by Canoe Ventures, the advanced-advertising venture formed by Comcast and five other large MSOs.  The idea: to give advertisers an enormous set of actual viewing metrics — showing exactly what millions of cable customers watched and when — as opposed to representative samples.

Canoe CEO David Verklin has said the venture expects in the near future to provide viewing metrics for 32 million U.S. cable households, representing about 57 million set-tops.  “One of the first things we must do is bring set-top data into the marketplace and make that the currency,” Verklin said, speaking last November on a panel at the CTAM Summit.  Detailed audience measurement metrics, in Verklin’s view, are crucial to Canoe’s aims to sell interactive-TV services and deliver ads that are “addressable” to individual set-tops.

and an excerpt from an interview with Canoe’s chief technological exec Arthur Orduna.  Worth thinking about the implications:
And when a viewer does respond, or requests information, what happens?

[Orduna]:  There the local system comes into play, and so does Canoe, actually. Because whatever I click will be collected into a separate aggregation server by the MSO or the system. That information would then be sent to a centralized Canoe aggregation server, because we’d be managing all the information for that particular campaign. And then whatever would need to be done with that data, whether it would need to be presented back to the subscriber, or whether it would be compiled for fulfillment or reporting, that would be Canoe’s responsibility.

An Example of Why Online Marketing Requires Public Scrutiny: An Ad Network that will “find the individuals that matter”

The vast system of online marketing has implications for how we define ourselves and are viewed by others.  It’s simplistic to say that online marketing is really only about sending the “right” ad to the right person  at the right time.  The tremendous amount of data and consumer tracking raises fundamental questions about the kind of society we are creating.  Here’s how a relatively new ad network–Rocket Fuel--describes what they do.  It’s an excerpt and not meant to single them out for criticism.  But it’s emblematic of a philosophy that must be vetted for its direction and implications:  “Our technology focuses on finding desirable audience characteristics rather than mere impressions. Through rapid automated testing and user-level targeting we find the individuals that matter…An ad server makes billions of decisions per day, tens of thousands of decisions per second, about which ad to serve for a given online impression…”


A Mobile Marketer explains how they build a profile, including operator, geographic, demographic, search query data [Annals of Mobile Marketing]

Here’s an excerpt from an video interview we transcribed with Paran Johar, CMO of Jumptap (a mobile marketing company).  The interview was done at the Mobile World Congress, Barcelona 16-19 February, 2009:

“Journalist: You have a lot of intelligence built in to your engines in the back. How is that working together? How far down can you deep-dive in the targeting? How granular can you get?
PJ: Number one; Targeting is only important as long as you have scale and reach. So we need to kind of frame that out. Number two; we take inputs from various sources. So, we take operator data, whatever they want to pass to us, they can pass us. Certainly with AT&T we get geographic data from them, in some cases we get demographic data, we get search word query data, whether we are the search engine or if it is Google, Yahoo or Microsoft, that can get passed to us, contextual data and behavioral data. We take all that together and we score it, build a taxonomy to build a profile that will serve a relevant ad. We believe mobile phone is the most personal devices…
Journalist: … How much of an issue is the analytics now and are you positive and upbeat now that you feel that maybe mobile operators are getting their head around this to deliver it?
PJ: That’s a great point. A couple of things with the GSMA-Comscore UK trials. Number one, was absolutely wonderful that it fostered collaboration among operators for various audience segments. Number two, it was wonderful that they looked beyond just geographic, demographic, but they also include behavioral profiles in terms of their audience assessment. I also think it is very interesting that they are moving forward without actually being able to monetize this and building a platform so advertisers can participate in this. I think from a metric standpoint, the next thing that we are gonna look for is really standardization of post clip metrics and how to integrate that into
advertising campaigns.
Journalist: That’s an interesting idea. How do you envision that? How should it be?
PJ: It gets a little complicated but it shouldn’t be. In it’s simplest form you just have post-click, like a click to action. You click on the ad unit, you perform some action and it calls a pixel and you register that. But with mobile you obviously have different actions that can occur. It could be click to a map, it could be click to call, click to SMS. How do you track those actions? How do you then integrate them into a reporting structure, which is key. And we are building the tools to make it easy for media planners, agencies and clients to actually track all their actions holistically and then optimize their campaigns so that they are reaching their maximum ROI.”