Retargeting Ads Follow Surfers to Other Sites

The shoes that Julie Matlin recently saw on Zappos.com were kind of cute, or so she thought. But Ms. Matlin wasn’t ready to buy and left the site.

Then the shoes started to follow her everywhere she went online. An ad for those very shoes showed up on the blog TechCrunch. It popped up again on several other blogs and on Twitpic. It was as if Zappos had unleashed a persistent salesman who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

“For days or weeks, every site I went to seemed to be showing me ads for those shoes,” said Ms. Matlin, a mother of two from Montreal. “It is a pretty clever marketing tool. But it’s a little creepy, especially if you don’t know what’s going on.”

People have grown accustomed to being tracked online and shown ads for categories of products they have shown interest in, be it tennis or bank loans.

Increasingly, however, the ads tailored to them are for specific products that they have perused online. While the technique, which the ad industry calls personalized retargeting or remarketing, is not new, it is becoming more pervasive as companies like Google and Microsoft have entered the field. And retargeting has reached a level of precision that is leaving consumers with the palpable feeling that they are being watched as they roam the virtual aisles of online stores.

Read More: NYTimes.com

Integrated DR Marketing for Multi-Channel Retailers

Since the launch of AdWords in 2000, Google has worked with advertisers and their agencies to increase brand and product awareness — and to drive sales — by helping advertisers reach the right person, in the right place, at the right time, through the effective use of search advertising. The success of this tactic has generally been measured by connecting search advertising campaigns to revenue within the e-commerce domain.

As consumers have become accustomed to a multi-channel world, however, it has become important to look outside the “e-commerce box” to measure search campaign success. The goal in doing so is to find the correlation between search advertising and overall company sales, both online and offline, as customers are present in both places.

In recent times, a growing number of our customers have asked us and their agencies how they should approach the concept of quantifying online’s impact on in-store sales. We recently thought through the concept with Razorfish and came up with a joint POV; you can find that on the Razorfish site, here.

Read More: GoogleRetail.Blogspot.com

AOL Or Microsoft Could Buy Ad Startup AppNexus, Say Gossipers

Microsoft and AOL are both rumored to be looking at AppNexus, a New York City real-time bid (RTB) advertising startup, for a possible acquisition.

RTB — in which advertisers pay for ad impressions to particular consumers based on tracking data at the moment a new web page is loaded — is growing incredibly quickly right now.

As RTB appears set to take over a large portion of the display market over the next few years, major advertising players are building, acquiring, or partnering their way into the market. Most recently, Google paid a reported $70 million for Invite Media, a demand-side platform that helps advertisers trade in the RTB market.

AppNexus is run by a couple guys who sold Right Media to Yahoo, Brian O’Kelley and Mike Nolet, as well as ex-Googler Michael Rubenstein. Souces from the company dimiss all this gossip as just that – “rumors.”

Read More: BusinessInsider

Is Ad Blocking the Right Approach?

A couple of months ago I read an article by Tom Hespos called “Is our ad delivery infrastructure overtaxed?“ Besides doing a good job highlighting the growing issue of complexity and latency issues in our ad delivery infrastructure, it reminded me of a debate that we’ve had here at Adometry: is ad blocking the right approach?

A number of companies have sprung up to block ads that would appear next to objectionable content. From a brand protection point of view, we understand the appeal of ad blockers. If you could ensure that you could stop your brand appearing next to inappropriate content 100% of the time, why wouldn’t you adopt one of these services? But when you look more deeply at the reality of what these services deliver and the potential unwanted side effects, the value proposition becomes less clear.

Additional Latency

Ad blockers work by inserting themselves in the ad delivery chain.  Ad blockers need to make a decision whether to allow or reject an ad on a particular page without delaying unduly the delivery of the page.  Most of the time, they do this by matching a URL in their cache. For a new URL, they schedule the page for examination in an “offline” queue.

How much extra latency is acceptable? While opinion varies, 100-150 milliseconds would be an upper limit, and most publishers would prefer to see something in the 40-50 milliseconds range or less.

How much latency do ad blocking vendors introduce into the ad delivery path using today’s technology? Our measurement of one of the leading ad blocking vendors indicates that they add an average of almost 500 milliseconds to the ad call.  Perhaps we measured them during a bad month; I’m not claiming we have enough data to be accurate about someone else’s technology. I am saying that if you’re thinking of adopting ad-blocking technology, you should measure for yourself the delay to the ad call.

Read More: iMediaConnection

ShareThis Puts Value on Shared Content

ShareThis plans to release two analytics tools that allow advertisers and marketers to determine the value of content being shared across Web sites. Through both, Social Reach and Audience Index, brands have an opportunity to understand the value of social traffic.

Social Reach measures the true value of shared media across the Web by looking at inbound social traffic and outbound sharing, valuing the responder of a share as much as the sharer. The analysis aims to provide more data than buttons on Facebook, Twitter and Tweetmeme buttons that measure outbound sharing.

Audience Index measures and segments a publisher’s audience by influence, so it identifies who has shared, responded and viewed content from their site. It indexes the information by category and matches it against other sites across the Web.

Some early data shows that social traffic engages consumers more than search traffic, according to ShareThis CEO Tim Schigel. “It measures the social reach and allows publishers to measure it by article,” he says. “They also can index their reach from the articles on their site against the rest of the network.”

Read More: MediaPost

Specific Media Sued Over Flash Cookie Use

Online ad network Specific Media has been hit with a lawsuit for allegedly violating Web users’ privacy by using Flash cookies for tracking purposes.

In a complaint filed in U.S. District Court in the Central District of California, six Web users allege that Specific Media failed to provide adequate notice about its online data collection techniques, including Flash cookies. The lawsuit also alleges that Specific Media used Flash cookies — which are stored in a separate location from HTML cookies — to recreate HTML cookies that users had deleted so it could “obtain personal identifying information, monitor users, and to sell users’ data.”

The company’s “privacy documents require college-level reading skills for comprehension and include substantial legalese, ambiguous and obfuscated language designed to confuse, disenfranchise, and mislead the users,” the lawsuit asserts.

In addition, the use of Flash cookies to recreate deleted HTML cookies “unfairly wrests control from users,” the lawsuit alleges.

Read More: MediaPost

Adap.tv Launches Brand Impact Offering for its Online Video Advertising Marketplace

Adap.tv, creators of the industry’s first online video advertising marketplace (atm) and the onesource video ad management (ato) platform, today announced Brand Impact, a powerful suite of tools that makes it easy for brands to increase the effectiveness of their online video advertising in the marketplace.

“Our customers are telling us they want brand safety, advanced targeting, increased measurability and verification for their online video ad campaigns. Only adap.tv’s Brand Impact incorporates all of their needs into a single offering, so they can have confidence in their video ad spend,” said Toby Gabriner, President of adap.tv. “Through partnerships with industry leaders such as Affine Systems and Vizu, as well as built-in tools, we provide brands with the necessary technologies to make online video advertising easy, targeted and impactful.”

Adap.tv’s Brand Impact provides five key benefits for brands that want to create powerful online video advertising programs:

Prevention – Through a partnership with Affine Systems, Brand Impact offers access to innovative new video targeting technology. Affine’s first-of-its-kind computer vision engine fully analyzes in-stream video content frame-by-frame, and provides ratings based on obscenity, production quality and violence. As brands expect more transparency and protection for their online video advertising, Affine’s data provides them with the protection they need to prevent their campaigns from running alongside harmful content and ensure their brand is safe.

Performance – Brand Impact will leverage Vizu’s Ad Catalyst solution to enable real-time measurement and optimization of brand advertising campaigns. With Ad Catalyst, advertisers using the adap.tv marketplace can move beyond basic clickthrough rates and apply a more relevant metric, Brand Lift, to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns. Advertisers can also use real-time data on the performance of creative, targeting, and frequency to optimize in-campaign, for maximum Brand Lift and ROI for their online video advertising.

Precision – The adap.tv marketplace includes the industry’s most advanced data targeting and audience verification tools as part of its Brand Impact offering. Brands can leverage multiple targeting providers including eXelate, Lotame and TARGUSinfo across campaigns to reach specific audiences.

Proof – The adap.tv marketplace has a built-in URL verification system that automatically confirms a campaign only runs on the sites that have been selected. Brands have full visibility into the video inventory their ads are running against and the audience they are reaching.

Premium Inventory – With a roster of more than 1,400 of comScore’s top properties, adap.tv ensures access to premium quality inventory, giving brands a powerful environment to showcase their ads.

Read More: PRNewswire

The Rise of the Demand-Side Platform

During the past few months, this column has briefly explored the history of digital ad serving. This month, we’ll continue that journey as we look at recent ad serving developments that are creating significant changes throughout the industry.

Digital advertising, unlike more traditional mass media marketing, doesn’t rely on group exposure models for its success. In reality, online advertising is less about reaching the greatest number of eyeballs and more about reaching the right eyeballs. This means that standard “blind” ad serving models (where ads are being served to any open ad slots on any available pages within the ad network) are being replaced by “smart” ad networks that look for the best recipients for an ad’s message, regardless of where in the network they visit.

Not only does this approach mean that consumers receive more relevant ads, but it also means that advertisers get better results and higher conversion rates for their campaign because they’re reaching a higher percentage of consumers who may take future action in line with the advertiser’s needs.

But there’s also a third winner in this scenario in the form of publishers who are able to better monetize the impressions they serve on behalf of the advertisers. Historically, most websites needed to divide their available inventory into a tiered value model to identify which pages were most popular (attracted the greatest number of eyeballs) and which were less popular. As a result, ads that appeared on the popular pages of a site cost more per impression than those on the less popular pages.

Because advertisers are able to rely on more behaviorally-driven ad models today, which page an ad appears on is becoming less and less significant. Instead, second or third tier online inventory can now be sold at a premium price, not because of where or when the ad runs, but because of who is seeing it when it does. This allows publishers to increase the value of all of their site impressions without having to weigh in on a page popularity contest first.

Most ad networks today utilize some level of audience targeting which allows publishers to better identify site visitor characteristics and behaviors that can be used to help define possible future interests and actions. Through the use of cookies, each user’s browser is tagged and when that consumer revisits a site or ad network, that history is used to direct ads that are more in line with the personal needs and interests of the consumer.

Read More: ClickZ