Targeting Gets Social

Data is at the heart of any successful marketing strategy. Decades of research have produced scores of theories and best practices on how advertisers can best reach their target audiences. Marketers have seen an array of targeting techniques, most focused on context, demographics and psychographics. With the explosion of the social Web, a whole new approach to building brand audiences that is based on the connections among people and between people and brands has been discovered. This new approach is called social targeting.  Social targeting is taking the old model of audience targeting and turning it on its head. The old model associated a brand with personal attributes — age, gender, income level, various cultural attitudes — and then targeted media that best matched those attributes. The new model, enabled by both social media and audience bidding technologies (ad exchanges and real-time bidding), uses social graph data to assemble custom audiences and reach them where they are most receptive to a marketer’s message.  Theories about targeting based on connections among consumers have been around for several years. In research published in 2006, AT&T Research and New York University’s Stern School of Business showed that the best way to find new customers for a given telecommunications service was through connections between prospects and existing customers. Evaluating a wealth of data to define cohorts based on personal profile and purchasing patterns, the research team found the best way to identify future customers was to target the people who called existing customers and were called by them most recently and frequently.

Read More: MediaPost

NYC Officials on Charm Offensive to Woo Emerging Media Firms to City

New York City government went on a charm offensive today at two tech industry events in the hopes of attracting new media and tech business to the Big Apple. Mayor Mike Bloomberg was an unexpected speaker at today’s TechCrunch Disrupt event in New York, while his deputy mayor for economic development spoke at a Google event touting the company’s economic impact.  As the city recovers from the financial industry meltdown and its negative effect on its tax base, it aims to establish itself as a rival to Silicon Valley and a place for small and large tech and new media firms to set up shop.  “We would welcome [Google] as you think about moving your headquarters here to New York City,” quipped Robert Lieber, New York City’s deputy mayor for economic development, while speaking at an event held by Google today. While the event, held at home goods retailer Gracious Home, was intended to promote Google and its contributions to New York’s economy, Lieber took advantage of his attendance by suggesting that the city aims to “create the kind of environment that supports” innovative companies like Google.

Read More: ClickZ

Audience Reselling: Data Aggregators

In the upcoming posts, I’ll look into the impact data aggregators (pure-play and ad networks) have on publishers.  Do data aggregators provide bi-directional transparency?  What are the implication of transparency?  What are the issues associated with attribution of data sources?  What realistic contribution margin can selling data have to the bottom line of a publisher?  Data aggregators have been a big force behind the movement to audience buying.  For the most part, they are the ones doing the audience selling, or reselling as it were.  Essentially, they aggregate audience members from publishers and then repackage and resell them.  Their goal is to build a big enough audience (i.e., pool of cookies annotated with rich information) for sale to advertisers and agencies for targeting.  Creating differentiated cookies and understanding their traffic patterns, is the secret to building margins in their business models. 

Read More: Blog.ScoutAnalytics.com