| ||||||||||||
PRINT
COMMENT
SUBSCRIBE
RSSThat disparity between the Tour ads and the Tour audience is representative of the issues with contextual targeting -- and it explains why the next frontier in personalization lies in behavioral. Contextual targeting puts things together that go well together. Behavioral targeting aims to put things together with the people who are likely to want them.
And, yes, this is Search Insider, and, yes, behavioral targeting has a reach that goes beyond search, but here is what I want you to keep in the backs of your minds: the search industry rests on delivering relevant results and relevant ads. That's where semantic search is going. That's where personalized search is going. That's why behavioral is important in this context.
And that's why the big news at OMMA Behavioral last week was ValueClick Media's launch of Precision Profile, which, according to the company, "uses a proprietary predictive algorithm to identify a marketer's best prospects in hundreds of consumer interest segments." Following their keynote, I had a chat with Matthew Boyd, ValueClick Media's senior vice president, and Joshua Koran, ValueClick's vice president of targeting and optimization. Koran contrasted his company's new product with the "traditional" behavioral targeting approaches of clusters and business rules.
For the record, clusters group people together based on existing data ("I've seen you looking at auto ads, so you're an auto guy"), and business rules rely on if-then relationships ("If you've done three auto page views within five days, you're an auto guy").
Clusters and business rules rely on a certain amount of behavior in a segment before they become useful -- e.g., they don't recognize your interest in cars until you've already been shopping for a few days. That lag also prohibits those technologies from recognizing when a segment no longer applies, such as after you've bought your car. And, as Koran points out, coming up with business rules is difficult. You have to know the right frequency and the right recency, and the answer changes for each client: what's right for BMW isn't necessarily right for Jaguar.
ValueClick Media's new system, on the other hand, uses a predictive algorithm to detach past behavior from future likelihood to click or convert. This forward-looking approach is self-learning and adapts on the fly to data from more than 13,000 publishers and thousands of advertisers.
(For full disclosure, our company, VortexDNA, takes a conceptually similar -- but technically different -- approach, so obviously I'm inclined to support it!)
BT faces some significant challenges, and privacy sits at the top of the list. ValueClick's platform doesn't contain any personally identifying information at all, which sounds great. Unfortunately, as the recent Senate hearings demonstrate, there has yet to be any consensus amongst citizens, politicians, or businesses about what is and isn't acceptable from a privacy perspective.
The other big BT challenge -- and one that's potentially more significant from a commercialization perspective -- is avoiding the creepy factor. Everybody wants relevance, but nobody wants to feel like they're being spied on. ValueClick Media, like every other behavioral targeting company, will have to find the optimal balance between "personal enough to be useful" and "so personal it freaks me out." These concerns aside, the beta period for Precision Profiles generated promising results. Although Boyd declined to speculate on what kind of increase clients could expect, the press release contains some impressive anecdotes: "One online games client achieved a 298 percent lift in conversion rates over an optimized control group... [and] conversions for one mobile campaign outperformed other behavioral targeting vendors 11 to one."
With numbers like that, it seems predicting the future is the future of behavioral targeting.
RSS FEEDS
Tim, excellent points. The fact that a computer can't distinguish between you and your daughter is one of the major shortcomings of BT -- and a barrier that is highly interconnected with the 'creepy factor'. We all want relevant content (and I include ads in that category), but none of us (including me) wants to be spied on. Finding out how to reconcile those two propositions is the Holy Grail of BT.
P.W., believe it or not, I AM in the target market! In our family, the bikes tend to be worth more than the cars :-) And I don't think it's a bad thing for high-end brands to advertise at the Tour -- as Paula points out, bike-related companies do well to associate themselves with that brand. My point was more that contextual advertising doesn't distinguish -- and doesn't try to distinguish -- between the people in the audience who are potential customers and those who are observers.
Thanks again for the feedback!
BT, creepy factors, spying goes further than contextual.
Though I agree with the basic premise that contextual advertising is a marketer's goal and knowing the individual's behavior and predisposition can make your messages more relevant, I am not sure if it is any different than something advertisers have been doing for a long time - trying to target their ad and the message to the right audience, which is what P.W. says. In using mass media, you know you will reach a wider audience than what you want. This is what you pay for, in the hope of also reaching the narrower target.
The idea that somehow you can only target those people who have already displayed an interest in your value proposition and products and service by following their Internet behavior sounds somewhat Utopian. Sure you can gain valuable insights into a person's interest in certain things by knowing their online click behavior. It makes sense but sounds a lot like spying. On the aggregate level, it works but on the individual level it is an invasion of privacy. Why should I accept someone out there observing my Internet behavior and sending me stuff I MIGHT be interested in buying if I haven't given them permission to do so? And who in their right mind would give permission for that, except if they thought they were giving their permission for something else?
The fact that you were not part of their target means that until cable systems can offer the ability to micro-target we will all be stuck seeing something we don't want or are not the best prospect for. Again, this is independent of the targeting technology.
If the bicycle manufacturer is able to get 100 people out of all of those who watched the tour, to buy a bike they've more than paid for their ad spend. Appreciate your points on the benefits of behavioral targeting but there's a right way and a wrong way to use any of these methods. In the future you may want to get a better overview on how ad buys are done before claiming that they're contextual when they're not ;)
What it gets down to is whether the BT improves performance, not the fallacy of some proprietary technology that claims to be Nostradamus' long lost son.. Positive influence will be the result of the richness of the data and the quality of the network of site where the ad is serving. You can have all the data in the world, but if they are serving Rogaine ads on Neopets.com, you are going to get a conversion. This is where most company, including Value Click miss the point.
One riddle these BT efforts have figured out is whether it is me on my computer or my six year old daughter. Just because the computer is on doesn't mean that it is me using it. They use my data to target ads for me on sites that my six year old visits. BT will never reach the pinnacle until the networks doing it improve their targeting and clear out website not suitable for ad distribution.