• by Tyler Loechner  @mp_tyler, April 29, 2013

eWayDirect polled nearly 350 Business to Consumer marketers, two-third of which said that they use "real-time targeting to add new customers and fuel revenue growth." The term "real-time targeting" could have had a different definition for each of those 350 B2C marketers, though. RTM Daily spoke with Chris Dailey, SVP of sales and account management* at eWayDirect, to figure out what what the respondents were thinking as well as what "real-time targeting" could mean.

Dailey admitted, "[the results] caught me a little bit by surprise." eWayDirect describes themselves as a "Now Data" company. Dailey defined "Now Data" as any data a company uses to engage a consumer in dialogue in the moment - specifically using something just learned about them. "Serving up another ad based on what they look at is still a weaker form of using real-time data than engaging them in a dialogue off of that data," he said.

eWayDirect opens up the dialogue using email from users that have signed up to receive email from certain brands. Dailey argued that companies shouldn't spend so much money mining data. "When you have someone on your website right now looking at dresses, why worry about all of the money to mine all of that data? She's in your store [right now], looking at a dress. Talk to her about a dress!" He claimed that the "click-through rates and conversation rates" are "off the charts" when using real-time data to engage a consumer in dialogue within 20 minutes of collecting data about them.

Of course, the problem with that example is getting consumers to sign up for email in the first place. And, if they have signed up for email with a specific brand, odds are they feel comfortable with that brand and are more likely to buy from them anyway. Regardless, the example brings out the fact that there are numerous definitions for "real-time targeting." For Dailey and eWayDirect, it means using data to speak with consumers at the moment the consumer shows interest in a specific product. For others, it means data mining and then targeting consumers on real-tme exchanges based on their findings.

"[The poll respondents] probably interpreted real-time targeting as RTB," said Dailey. There's nothing wrong with RTB, but Dailey thinks that data collected in real-time can be used in a much more meaningful way. "I would love to know what the respondents were thinking the question meant," he said, which suggests that the industry needs a stronger, more universal definiton of "real-time targeting."

*Editor's Note: Dailey has recently been promoted to COO. The company will officially announce the promotion later this week.