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RSSConsumer intent is extremely difficult to prove, even with the correct data to analyze it. Last week I wrote about BT companies merging in-store cash register data with online cookie data to better understand consumer buying trends. Let's take the concept one step further and add data that suggests consumer intent. The reality is closer than you might think.
OpenAmplify Tuesday released the tool, TopicIntentions, that aims to help advertisers and ad networks identify consumer intent through its computational linguistics engine, OpenAmplify v 1.1.
While BT platforms focus on where users go across the Web, OpenAmplify identifies what people read, positive and negative meaning of the content, and how the person reading the content reacts. It's done by monitoring blog posts across social networks and deconstructing the sentences that people write.
Think about Jacques Derrida's theory of deconstruction, which identified the ability to find the meaning of words by breaking them down to their core. Identifying consumer intent requires deconstructing the sentences by identifying subject, verb and object. Most platforms rely on general statistical techniques, such as how many times the word appears in the article or post, or what words appear closest to the subject of the content.
Understanding the relationships between words in a sentence allows the BT platform to target consumer intent. OpenAmplify CEO Mark Redgrave says the company is working with ad network Lotame to not only track people across the Web to monitor the sites they visit, but identify blog posts and the meaning behind them. The technology can monitor posts as people write them, which assists BT platforms to determine ads that might serve up alongside the written content.
Redgrave says Lotame is integrating OpenAmplify's technology. The two companies are evaluating the areas to tackle first.
OpenAmplify also has an online developer community where someone created a plug-in to the Drupal content management system, allowing people to amplify the content on their Web site. It lets them tag the content with semantic metadata.
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I tend to align with Jon Stamell on this. Parsing commercially-useful intent out of people's (substantially presumed) history of interactions with deep-in-the-weeds internet content is not likely to move the dial in any substantial way, except in speeding the day when Firefox introduces session cloaking as a default.
Asking people what they want makes much more sense. Even better, give people an absolutely-flat, uninflectioned, un-gameable tool (not site, not experience, not brand envelope) for finding and buying stuff online.
In the end there's still some serious wetware needed to bring it all together and synthesize it for 'consumable' artifacts (extracting the relevant 'story' and telling it). All part of the larger collection of Design Research to bring together the "context of 'intent'" http://www.fastforwardblog.com/2009/07/31/the-context-of-intent/