• by Jonathan Mendez , Op-Ed Contributor, March 25, 2016

The bedrock media principle I know for sure: The Web is the only user-controlled medium. The more a publisher allows for visitor events to define run time or dynamic rules, the better the ability to deliver relevance to brands and consumers. Put another way, there is no better segmentation than self-segmentation.

In marketing terms, this means pull instead of push. The best representative example of this is, of course, search. A visitor action provides an input (query), and everything else proceeds from that query. Relevance is delivered by machine-learning algorithms, and the most successful technology of all time is born by pulling content to data input rules.  

So why does this matter to publishers whose business is one of “pushing” content?  It matters because of one incredible fact about search that still seems lost on publishers:  Neither the intent that precipitates a consumer’s query, or the content used to deliver relevance to her, belongs to search. It belongs to content.

Eighty percent of people bring their intent sparked by some form of media to search—and roughly 80% of the time, search sends that intent back to organic links.  The best content is what fills up the search index. The intent around it is what is so valuable to marketers.

Marketers are starting to get this and figure it out. Search may be the meat in the intent sandwich, but you can’t have a sandwich without bread. Bread is the media generating intent and receiving intent.  

Publishers need to take advantage of intent.  While many are using this type of data to optimize their content experience for visitors, they are nowhere near fully optimizing the ad experience. Instead they have outsourced this all too many times to other businesses that are destroying the user experience of their content by not being relevant.  Why would publishers treat their ad relevance any different than their content?  In fact, it’s that relationship that is vital to user experience.

As publishers begin to better grasp this information opportunity, it’s clear that intent matched with timing and context can improve visit monetization by an order of magnitude. And why shouldn’t it?  This scenario happens millions of times a day on large sites, and these click-streams of data provide rich real-time intent data that sharpen intent classifications and matching rules.

With advances in data technology, publishers are now poised to truly harvest consumer intent in a meaningful manner.  This trend has been fueled in no small way by the emergence of first-party data collation and application by brands.   The revenue opportunity is huge. Publisher display inventory and site content for real-time intent dwarfs the amount of intent impressions in search.

Best of all for brand performance, the amount of inventory using first-party (better) data is increasingly making third-party data a more marginal source in data-driven marketing.  First-party data is coming from both advertisers and publishers.

What’s even better for brands is that the intent from publishers is across the entire non-linear consumer journey; has greater context; is less competitive; and has the influential power of being in a trusted domain and can leverage creative in ways search cannot. Publisher-generated intent should be more valuable to advertisers than search, with its SERP (Search Engine Results Page) landscape of crowded text link ads and arcane rules.

The bottom line is, publishers are in the unique position to both classify the intent on their sites and use pull rules, once that intent is recognized to deliver the highest levels of relevance in real time, just like search. Even better, they never lose ownership of their data and can monetize it directly with advertisers--even using their own ad server through header bidding.  

Now that’s a tasty sandwich we can all sink our teeth into.