• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, March 9, 2007

While most behavioral targeting networks are trying to expand their scale, Active Athlete is also about deepening the passions. Founded by Tacoda veteran Robert Tas, Active Athlete Media, Inc. represents exclusively over 75 properties for athletes that are comprised of 80% user-generated content. Tas not only tags their passions but their passionate discussions about their passions. But how does a verticalized BT network of 7 million users handle issues of scale that plague networks with 20 times the audience? Tas, the company’s president and CEO, explains below.

Behavioral Insider:  In addition to focusing on the active lifestyle vertical, what is unique about the content you network into?

Robert Tas:  It’s all about the athletes talking to each other about gear and events and training and getting better at their sport. It is great clean content. We have really good data about the users and what they are doing and how much they interact with the sport. .

BI:  What sort of data points can you get, and how do you extract them from these conversations?

Tas:  Our partners have varying degrees of registration data. We have done a reasonable job of tagging certain areas and content areas. Message boards are very well categorized, and we've been able to tag those areas and monetize things like the nutrition category. We see a lot of crossovers from the little sites because the communities are all so small that users go to a number of different sites to see what communities are saying.

BI:  Give an example of BT campaigns in this vertical.

Tas:  We worked with a hydration product to target endurance athletes who were looking at nutrition. We tried to target it to high-level, serious endurance athletes, first, and then people who had some interest in looking at nutrition and hydration articles across our endurance channel. It was pretty successful and got good click-through and above average return on that campaign.

BI:  Much larger BT networks have to deal with issues of scale when they are dealing with 120 million uniques. How do you manage it with 7 million?

Tas:  I think our domain expertise in the category helps. We spend the time and the granular targeting of identifying content so that the user population is big enough. We work with partners to identify profiles of people that are relevant to them. I think it’s important that we share data., What we’ve done is figured out how to help advertisers on a very definite budget achieve success. Seven million uniques is good, but it’s not Tacoda. But its seven million really qualified athletes that we have pretty good data on. We know how often they visit. How passionate they are about a sport. We believe we offer more value in terms of just general psychographic targeting.

BI: Are you bringing something different to BT as well?

Tas: As we evolve, we have different visions of BT than some of the others. The one difference is that we’re not looking to target somebody on an impulse buy: if I type in ‘bike,’ I get a bike ad. We can build a profile about somebody over a longer period of time. We’re talking to people like Nike about advertising running shoes in December and January, not in June. People are already racing in June and have picked their events. But they start the training and go back to the gym and plan their season earlier in the year. We want to be able to market and monetize an athlete over a longer time frame. We believe that BT will provide a better element to do that. We see a lot of crossover of our athletes. Runners are skiers and snowboarders, so being able to target that shoe on a snowboard site still makes a lot of sense. We think the better value to the advertiser and the user is to make something more relevant to the lifestyle on a longer term basis.

BI:  So you are taking the aggregated behavioral data to inform overall planning?

Tas:  We go in to a client and say, here’s the profile of lacrosse players. It is only March 2, but we’ve been watching traffic over the past two months go sky-high. I certainly wouldn’t know much about lacrosse, but we see a lot of people start their research for which event they will go to. [A relevant segment] is travel. If I know that someone is going to Atlanta for lacrosse we can monetize that athlete better and provide relevance to them because they are making those plans today. Most BT wouldn’t put the two together. We have a unique opportunity based on the profile of that athlete to provide better relevance.

BI:  What is the role of having discrete creative in a BT campaign that reflects different contexts and users? Does it improve performance?

Tas: Absolutely, as we become bigger and have more weight to convince advertisers to do custom creative. That nutrition drink campaign is a great example. We had them create cycling, triathlon and running creative, and you could see a measurable difference in how the messaging performed better, because the athlete could relate to it. If any advertiser can relate to that and tie their passion to it, all the better.

BI:  How do you convince the big non-endemic brands to buy into your 7 million, when there are much larger networks out there?

Tas: One, we have the exclusive relationships with all our publishers. More importantly, they can’t get to these people while they are engaging with their passions. When you and I surf the Internet, we do it for our jobs and research. But when we surf for our passions it is different, and having a brand connect with that we think it is a unique value proposition. There was research recently that showed vertical sites saw better branding lift than the bigger sites because the audiences were more focused and more connected. When you talk about social engagement and the conversation we are all trying to have with these consumers, we believe we provide a very compelling environment. [These consumers] are so engaged.