Behavioral Targeting Firm Revenue Science Teams With Nielsen
- by Ross Fadner , October 13, 2004
The new service will cross-reference information gleaned from Nielsen//NetRatings' MegaPanel, which measures the online usage of 750,000 individuals, with audience behavior information gathered by behavioral targeting firms for publishers.
The partnership isn't meant to create audience segments, or to influence how segments get created, but is intended as a tool to validate the quality of segments, said Omar Tawakol, Revenue Science's senior vice president, product management.
The company says the new program will allow advertisers to compare similar audience segments from different sites and determine which segment is of a higher composition quality.
Revenue Science's business, behavioral targeting, is premised on the belief that not all Web surfers are equally likely to buy certain products. The company tries to separate out the likely purchasers--those marketers most want to reach, even if only with a branding campaign--from the unlikely ones.
But until now, the segments the company defines have been limited by behaviors contained within a publisher's site. In other words, Revenue Science can see what a user does within WSJ.com, one of its clients, but doesn't see which sites that user visits elsewhere on the Internet.
Revenue Science still can't track publishers' Web users throughout the Internet, but is hoping to draw conclusions about those users' overall Web behavior by teaming with Nielsen//NetRatings. In that way, Revenue Science would use Nielsen's Web ratings for forecasting purposes, similar to the television industry.
Each month, Revenue Science will collect the composition metrics from Nielsen//NetRatings for its publishers' audience segments.
GartnerG2 analyst Denise Garcia said the new joint initiative takes much-needed aim at "establishing a benchmark," or "facilitating a dialogue" between advertisers and publishers. Garcia noted the importance of using a well-established, neutral entity like Nielsen to set standards, adding that advertisers "know and understand" Nielsen data, although it's "not the most perfect system." Garcia said that publishers will most likely be "absolutely thrilled" with the Nielsen/Revenue Science initiative because many agencies have been using Nielsen's panel data to compare publisher audience compositions anyway.
Tacoda Systems, a rival behavioral targeting firm to Revenue Science, disagreed that publishers will embrace the concept. "When you start quantifying quality, you start taking control away from publishers and start commoditizing their data," said company CEO Dave Morgan. He called the new service a "media planning tool" that "reduces the unique aspects of a publisher's brand to a quality score."
Roy Shkedi, CEO of Almondnet, another behavioral targeting firm, called Revenue Science's plan a "good idea," but noted that advertisers will most likely go directly to publishers to see how they define their segments rather than relying on sample data to make their media buys. He said, "the strong sites will benefit and the weak sites will suffer."
Randy Kilgore, vice president of sales for WSJ.com, agreed that publishers with poor audience compositions might feel that this tool hurts them. On the other hand, he said, it highlights other publishers' strengths.
Revenue Science's Tawakol said the company's plan, called "Audience Quality Certification," enables publishers to confirm their strengths through the Nielsen data. He acknowledged that some sites might not feel well-represented by the Nielsen standards; he said that publishers are not forced into submitting their data to Nielsen for quality comparison.
Tawakol noted that audience quality is still owned by the publishers only now that there is a quality measurement to measure it against. He said, "to my knowledge," all of Revenue Science's publishers are planning on making their data available for the Nielsen standards.
