• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, July 6, 2011

It will take about a month for the Travel Ad Network to get up and running on AudienceScience's Gateway data management platform, enabling targeting campaigns worldwide. The company plans to announce the agreement Wednesday.

Updating marketing materials and sales processes are underway. The next step becomes integrating Travel Ad Network's data collection and ad serving platforms into the AudienceScience Gateway DMP, which will deliver campaigns to a variety of custom audience segments.

Getting "out from under the travel mindset" has become one of the goals, according to Jeremy Mason, vice president and general manager, AudienceScience Gateway. "They know affluent consumers visit their sites, so targeting a campaign toward these consumers based on family needs such as clothing and cars might become a consideration," he said. "It's really about understanding the behavior and building the appropriate segments."

It might be a narrow audience to target affluent cruise-goers in the South Pacific, but Travel Ad Network will have an option to use the segments to get the perfect message to resonate with the perfect audience.

About 125 clients, a mixture of publishers, advertisers and agencies, use Gateway, AudienceScience's data management platform. Advertisers and publishers deploy the data-collection code. The data flows into a data warehouse built by AudienceScience, where syndicated segments get integrated. Clients have the ability to build their own audience segments using proprietary and/or AudienceScience data to target site visitors across ad networks and exchanges.

Across the AudienceScience network, more than 100 publishers use the tech company as their targeting platform, about 60 in the United States. The company offers about 300 standard, demographic and Hispanic audience segments. Clients also can combine segments or find specific behaviors to customize targeting.

Providing the Travel Ad Network access to more than 300 billion events taking place online on any given day equips them with insight into their 35 million worldwide site visitors across Rand McNally, Let's Go, Not For Tourists, Vayama, Viator, HomeAway UK and nearly 300 other travel sites.

Aside from AudienceScience's ad network, other companies have experienced success. Take Skechers, for example. The sneaker manufacture wanted to target customers who visited skechers.com and searched its shoe selection, but did not make a purchase. To make a long story short, the company's return on investment came in at 827% during the life of the campaign.

It doesn't always go smoothly, Mason admits. When publishers do ad serving and prioritization manually, it could slow the process. Clients wanting to bring in unstructured unidentifiable registration data into their platform might need some "pre-processing" advice before allowing the data to flow into the DMP. It might require a little reconfiguring, but there's never been a case where a company had to re-architecture their infrastructure.