• Last Indie Standing? Revenue Science on Tacoda + AOL
    Revenue Science and Tacoda have been spirited rivals since the early days of behavioral targeting, an industry the two companies helped invent and proselytize over the last five or six years. With AOL's announcement that it will acquire Tacoda, however, and the recent flurry of acquisitions, Revenue Science is left as the largest and one of the last BT companies independent of a major media company or portal. We asked CEO Bill Gossman to weigh in on what the Tacoda/AOL deal means for his company and the industry.
  • Targeting Relationships
    For years, behavioral marketers have been engaged in relentless, often obsessive pursuit of data about individuals -- where they've been, and what they've done online. They want to reach that mythic goal of "one-to-one" targeting. All that data, however, argues Mike Svatek, marketing director and product manager of Baynote, may be blinding marketers to a more fundamental fact: It is not behavior in isolation, but rather the charting of similarities and affinities of intent and interest, that ultimately matters.
  • When Fewer Clicks Are A Good Thing
    There may be times when a declining click-through rate on a behaviorally targeted campaign is a good sign. When Advertising.com ran a comparative test of three campaigns that used both run-of-network and BT techniques, Brent Halliburton, director of network strategy, was surprised at the results. The targeted ads demonstrated lower CTRs than untargeted ads, and yet at the same time they showed much better results on the back end. This week, Halliburton walks us through that research and explains what it means to media planners.
  • Widgets And BT: Charting Changes In Online Behavior
    The simplest, most fundamental rule of advertising has always been to follow consumers where they are. However simple in theory, this rule is becoming ever more complex in online practice, as content usage patterns and preferences increasingly move beyond the conventional metrics and measures of publishers and advertisers alike, as Quantcast CEO Konrad Feldman explains.
  • Privacy, Portability, And Mobility: The Consultant Weighs In
    Anyone who has been in the digital media business for the past decade will recognize Alan Chapell. For nearly five years he ran the privacy program at Jupiter Research and then helped DoubleClick develop its research and ad effectiveness products. Before starting his own consultancy, Chapell & Associates, in 2003, he also worked with Yesmail and Cheetahmail. Chapell & Associates provides business and legal advice to interactive marketers, brands, BT firms and media companies. We asked him about the growing importance of user data to the business models of the publishers he consults.
  • Mix and Match: Integrating The Creative In Targeting
    "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. Pradeep Javangula, CTO of Tumri, discusses how advertisers can begin to creatively address the first part -- the ad offer itself.
  • Yahoo SmartAds Grab Transformer Vibe
    Sports cars and SUVs in Michael Bay's "Transformers" aren't the only things reassembling themselves on the fly this summer. Last week, Yahoo launched a SmartAds product that automatically morphs ad creative according to a targeted user's individual profile. The Yahoo behavioral engine is but one targeting lever a SmartAd can pulls to determine which combination of creative elements to serve a user. It is this layering of multiple target criteria that can double and triple the effectiveness of display ads, says Senior Vice President of Display Marketplaces Todd Teresi. SmartAds launched last week in the travel segment, but expect to …
  • Unlocking Mobile BT
    Given the uniquely personal nature of consumers' relationships with their mobile devices, mobile advertising in theory would seem to be the ideal medium for uniquely personal targeting. In practice however, mobile advertising, as Bob Walczak, CEO of mobile ad network MoPhap, explains below, has lacked one fundamental catalyst compared to its online counterpart: the ability to collect and aggregate relevant anonymous behavioral data in a scalable way.
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