• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, September 14, 2007

"If anyone should be bored with the ad network business, it should be me," confesses Joe Apprendi, CEO of Collective Media, which reaches 99 million unique users monthly across high-profile inventory like USA Today and TVGuide. Joe has run sales operations for Click Now, 24/7 and Falk in a career about as long as the Web itself. "But I have never been more excited by this business," he tell us. After attending the MediaPost Behavioral Marketing Forum in July and hearing JupiterResearch's Emily Riley explore the distinctions between different kinds of online behaviors, Joe was eager to extend the discussion. As networks aggregate greater reach and consolidate to achieve scale, he argues that they will need to differentiate themselves in the market. Media buyers need to ask deeper questions about how behaviors are being gathered and where the ads are showing up.

Behavioral Insider: You think media buyers need to demand more transparency and inventory quality from BT networks. How so?
 
Joe Apprendi: A lot of my perspective comes from my background. First, I started in the ad network business close to 12 years ago. Whether you were a direct marketer or a brand advertiser with a Fortune 1000 company, you cared where [your ad] ran because you were burned in the past. And the burning in the past for advertisers was where you may have run where you didn't think you could possibly run with the network.

I think today that still exists, and I think networks like ours and others are trying to address the quality of the inventory. Because BT is so new, there could be opportunity for abuses if agencies and advertisers don't get more educated faster about how behaviors are collected. What behaviors are you actually buying? Whether it is BT, context targeting or channel targeting, how you source that data and ultimately make it available to agencies and advertisers is what we're really focused on.

Behavioral Insider: Explain the transparency you have in mind.

Apprendi: I do believe all behaviors are not alike. One of the most important things about BT is this question of how you sourced it. There's a lot of different avenues for acquiring BT data. BT is only as good as your context targeting. BT is context over time. You are reaching them out of context, but it is still the basis of context. You can collect it yourself, through your own ability to determine the context in which a particular user is on a page.

And how that technology works is a huge criteria. A lot of context-sensing capabilities and hence BT capabilities that ad networks and publishers employ are all keyword-based. Hilton Hotels vs. Paris Hilton. There is a high probability Hilton Hotels is about travel while Paris Hilton can be about innumerable things, and 99% of context-sensing engines will assume it is travel.

[The Entrieva engine we use] doesn't only look at keywords, but phrases and concepts, and also the frequency of those concepts. Based on that, are you just using the highest ranking category? Pages can be about multiple things. Will you only make the determination based on the highest ranking one? When we determine a behavior it is at minimum one time within the last 30 days. That is our standard. A lot of times it can be one time in the last 90 or 60 days. You don't know. So you would probably assume a user visiting a particular type of content three times in the last seven days is a higher quality prospect than one who visited once in 90. I don t think those questions necessarily are addressed. Most people don't ask the question, and I think they should.

Behavioral Insider: But that raises a questions for agencies who are themselves just getting up to speed on BT. How much are they willing to pop the hood and see these details?

Apprendi: We are very early. First and foremost, online media planning and buying is a time-consuming process and probably there are nine other topics or issues they need to address in advance of this one. In general they are happy to hear about it because it is news to them. Honestly, it is just getting them more educated on what does run of network mean or channel mean or us vs. another network. A lot of that is news to the agencies. It is good for them to understand certain behaviors are different from others. One travel profile may not be the same as another. And it is incredibly empowering so they can talk intelligently to their client. They can make it more a part of their RFPs: quickly let me know your methodologies and how you source your behavior. Just add it to the regular RFP process.

Behavioral Insider: How will consolidations like Yahoo buying Blue Lithum and AOL snapping up Tacoda affect how BT is evaluated and sold?

Apprendi: We are all trying to increase our profile. I think the Tacoda play was strictly about reach, without question. AOL had inventory; Tacoda had behaviors and they tried to reach more of these users and increase the size of the buy. However, it is no different from the overall ad network business.

Again, for brand advertisers, which I believe will fuel BT,  quality is a far higher priority than they it was against direct response. So as a result I think for BT networks in general the [quality] standard is going to be much more interesting and [emerge] faster than it did for direct marketers buying ad networks in the past. It isn't a technical discussion necessarily. Is it a brand I trust that sources the behavior or not, and then how did you collect it? I don't think it is that complicated to cover those two points. I do think you will start seeing more branded behaviors.

If I sell you the Collective Media business executive behavior as a source, I communicate who is in the network, what providers I source from and methodology. If it was the Wall Street Journal business executive behavior, that immediately adds credibility and immediate trust. What is going to be interesting is that these leading brands in their verticals will start seeing a way to complement what they have done with their brand and seeing how behavior can play a role in their overall strategy. You will start seeing more marriages like Hachette and Jumpstart because it just makes sense. But it doesn't just have to be within a specific vertical. It can be with any trusted media brand. I think you will start seeing some of the leading vertical media brands start thinking about their own branded audience.

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