• by Phil Leggiere , July 11, 2007

"Matching the right offer to the right prospect at the right time" has become the mantra of this generation of marketers. So far, however, the lion's share of intellectual focus has been reserved for addressing the second part of this formula. In the discussion below, Pradeep Javangula, CTO of Tumri, discusses how advertisers can begin to creatively address the first part -- the ad offer itself.

Behavioral Insider: Previously in Behavioral Insider we've discussed your efforts to develop new automated personalization technologies for publishers. How does your new work on an ad targeting platform relate to that?

Pradeep Javangula: The conundrum we've set out to address in developing an advertiser-based solution to personalization is that text ads provide a clear value from a response perspective but no brand awareness. Banners, on the other hand, can create brand awareness -- but they're notoriously hard to monetize. So our mission in developing an ad targeting platform is to integrate branding and performance in a way that hasn't been done before. We're committed to breaking down the silo between advertising as a brand expression and advertising as direct response.

BI: How does it work?

Javangula: What we're introducing for advertisers is a tool that provides the same kind of flexibly customized delivery of ad units that we give to publishers. What we do for publishers is associate demographic and psychographic characteristics for every item in their product catalog. Once that's done, publishers can deliver the most relevant information in their catalog to each incoming visitor based on information culled from their site visiting, browsing, keyword usage and other behavioral profile data. With the AdPods we come at similar matching processes from the other side, that is, starting with the advertisers. We enable them to think of what specific kinds of messaging or content they want to target to specific users.

BI: Which reverses the way the behavioral targeting process is conventionally conceived.

Javangula: Right. Usually it's been the other way around. Advertisers have already had their ad creatives ready and the challenge was 'let's go out and find the kinds of customers whose profile fits our bill.' Now the targeting equation can be more 'when user X comes to site Y, what kind of content do we want to serve them.'

BI: How are product promotions and branding integrated in these ad units?

Javangula: The ad units can be geared to either a particular product message, a call to action or a branding message. Or they can combine a brand banner as part of a product ad all based on who's going to be seeing them.

Advertisers have been stuck heretofore with a fixed either-or straitjacket in their targeting tactics -- either focus on product information and direct sales or on the brand. Once those targeting parameters are set, the delivery of the message is out of the advertiser's control. In fact, however, the opportunities of targeting are dynamically changing all the time, but the mechanisms of ad serving are still incredibly rigid. An example of how this will work in practice is, imagine Sony now being able to show a promotion for its new LCD TV at price point X as part of its brand banner for one customer on a given site -- and then switch that, say, to a promotion for its newest home theater system for the next visitor on the site, based on the differing behavioral profiles of each.

BI: You've talked about integrating the creative process with targeting execution more seamlessly. How does that work?

Javangula: The other silo we're looking to break down is between ad creatives and targeting execution. In the past advertisers created their banners and waited till they became too stale to run anymore. The purpose of the AdPod is to enable them to continuously change and customize their message on both the direct response and branding side.

Adapting the semantic matching engine applications we've used for publishers, we can now tell advertisers, 'If you know what kinds of target customers you're looking for you just need to instruct our matching engine about which offer or offers you want to match up with which target customers, and you can do that for each specific message, offer and product you have.' The matching engine then does the work of locating the sites and consumers visiting sites for whom your messages are intended and delivers them according to those specifications.

The notion is that advertisers build a customized template. Within the AdPod advertisers can combine banner creatives for their brand along with instructions to trigger delivery of particular product messages to particular target behaviors. They can also constantly update their ad units with new creatives and product promotions, and display them instantaneously across any ad network they work with.