Commentary

BT ReTargeter Enters Social Targeting

by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, October 5, 2011

Companies continue to dig deeper into social platforms, even those developing behavioral targeting platforms. The accuracy with which these tools now serve up ads continues to become a bit creepy. It reminds me of the last time I logged onto Google Street View to check out my house and saw neighbors outside in mid-step walking down the sidewalk and kids riding their tricycles across the driveway.

ReTargeter, with roots in core behavioral remarketing technology, launched a platform this week designed to help brands target online advocates across social media sites. The tool -- ReTargeter Social -- combines three social media retargeting products: RTInfluencer, RTDiscover, and RTInteractive

The platform retargets social influencers and their friends based on an algorithm. It replaces static ads with interactive, such as videos, polls, customer forms, and real-time feeds from a blog, Twitter, or Facebook account. Through RTInfluencer, ReTargeter CEO Arjun Dev Arora estimates a 50% increase in conversion rates, compared with general retargeting tools.

RTInfluencer identifies when social media users copy and paste content or share a link. Knowing and serving ads to the influencers sharing content leads to increase in conversion rate.

Behavioral targeting platforms will change, similar to the way demand-side platforms and search engine marketing platforms have transformed, integrating multiple functions and systems to make a complete platform. "Our core product, RTCore, is the traditional solution, but these new solutions take that model and modify it," Dev Arora said. "These new product let consumer engage more with the ad unit."

ReTargeter has access to serve up about a billion impressions daily across ad networks, exchanges and publishers, such as Google's DoubleClick, Yahoo's Right Media, Rubicon, Fox, and others. When display advertising and social media converge, ReTargeter found some advertisers manage to increase the value of their conversions by up more than 300%.

The ability to pull in a YouTube channel or a Twitter feed into an ad unit that targets consumers based on behavior will change future targeting techniques. The company has tested the platform with brands such as DKNY, according to Dev Arora.

behavioral targeting, facebook, social media, social networks, targeting, twitter

2 comments about "BT ReTargeter Enters Social Targeting".

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Bruce May from Bizperity, October 6, 2011 at 11:16 a.m.
I sure would like to better understand how this works. I assume that the add for OpenX that I am looking at now may have been re-targeted to me through your blog. That means that Re-Targeter (or some similar service) would be tracking you individually, serving ads to you individually, and using your connections to deliver more impressions back to the advertiser. What do you get out of that? Nothing except a database that tracks you personally, not to serve you ads (which has a potential benefit to you) and then using you to increase their own revenues. Aside from the lopsided economics of that, I would agree that it is creepy to think that you are being tracked just so your social media connections can be mined. So these databases are building giant, detailed profiles of our social graphs. So much for privacy. Of course no one sees this except for the machine that is crunching the data. Does that make you feel any better?
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Chris Zaharias from Campanja, October 6, 2011 at 12:19 p.m.

The second to last paragraph set off my B.S. radar. I've worked in the retargeting space enough to know that a) I've only once or twice out of several hundred discussions with advertisers heard Retargeter.com's name mentioned; and b) there's no way they're serving ~1B ads/day, which is what they strongly imply in that paragraph.

For reference, Criteo (by far the largest firm in the space) was serving ~100M/day in 2010. Criteo and 4-5 other retargeting firms which are all larger than Retargeter are not even doing 1B impressions/day, yet Retargeter.com is claiming that.

I call B.S. in the loudest possible way, and rather suspect Dev Arora will have to clarify what they really *meant* to say.