• by Skip Brand , April 1, 2013

If you’re planning to launch a premium display marketplace, audience targeting and insights are going to be a critical element. Insights are always important, of course, but when you’re investing in oversized rich-media advertising units and targeting particular audience segments among affluent consumers, you’ll want to be confident that the ads are reaching the right folks. Ads like the IAB portrait are already expensive to create, and they cost more to place. Data that helps advertisers hit their mark and prove success will also fuel their desire to continue to invest in online display at scale.

nPario provides data-driven services to help advertisers gain audience insights so they can create targeted, relevant advertising. When I recently spoke with Bassel Ojjeh, president and CEO of nPario, he was enthusiastic about adding data science to real-time branding. “A rich media ad marketplace that is driven by the very best data, segmentation and data science insights is a step in the right direction if we want to attract global brand budgets online,” he said.

“The value of data has already been proven in media buys,” said Ojjeh. “When it comes to high value, rich-media units, the value of the data becomes magnified for two reasons: One, the advertisers will look to maximize the return on advertising spend, and data provides a very strong signal in that aspect.” Advertisers will learn not only how much the return was, but how valuable each interaction was with quantifiable audience data. “Two,” he continued, “the publishers have the ability to collect even more user data (behavior, interaction, response, etc.) from these rich-media units, which can then be used to optimize media campaigns. This ‘consumer intelligence’ is the key when it comes to enabling data-driven advertising.”

The benefits nPario brings to an exchange like this one are really threefold. The first is that it enables advertisers to gain a real, data-driven understanding of who their audience is. This understanding is critical not just in terms of targeting for acquisition purposes, but for really getting to know who their audience is in terms of commercial intent: demographics, technographics, hobbies, online habits and beyond. These data points can not only inform ad placement, but also ad creative and messaging.

The second benefit is that, with deeper understanding of their audience, advertisers can effectively create their own ideal segments. They can build very granular descriptions of consumer segments to target with their marketing efforts, and understand what the size of that universe actually is within and beyond a specific network or marketplace.

The third benefit is optimization. Advertisers can, at any point, review their campaign to discover how a particular segment responded to their creative versus how another segment may have responded. By incorporating data from rich interactive media units like the Rising Stars, additional behavioral data can be used to optimize campaigns.

“By understanding your audience, you can engage them based on commercial intent,” offered Ojjeh. “By leveraging consumer intelligence and applying some data science, you can increase the relevance of your creative and the placement of your ads. By pulling in data from rich advertising units, you can further optimize how well your ads will resonate with your target audience. The combination of a premium marketplace with rich advertising units and consumer intelligence gives you unprecedented control in acquiring customers – and the more you use it, the better information you will have to optimize your ads.