Behavioral Targeting explained – how Advertisers use Internet Cookies to track you

Courtesy of Wall Street Journal Online, published July 2010:

glenn

Digital Ad Buying and Selling – a brief history

A very nice series of articles on ClickZ on the history of buying and selling digital ads, and the advent and evolution of ad exchanges. Links to the 3-part series are provided below:

• A Brief History of Digital Ad Buying and Selling – Rob Graham, June 30 2010
• The New Challenges of Digital Ad Buying and Selling – Rob Graham, July 28 2010
• The Rise of the Demand Side Platform – Rob Graham, August 26 2010

A few other articles on ad platforms – both demand-side and sell-side:

• Real-Time Bidding: The Ad Exchange Leaps – AdExchanger.com, May 2009
• A quick guide to demand-side platforms – Josh Dreller, May 2010
• The Rise Of Real-Time Bidding Is The Biggest Online Advertising Story Of 2010 – Nick Saint, August 2010
• Glam Buys AdPortal; Piecing Together The Publisher Platform – AdExchanger.com, July 2010
• Glam Tries To Automate Premium Online Ad Packaging And Battle Infinite Inventory – TechCrunch, November 2010

glenn

Delivering Audiences to Advertisers – TechCrunch Disrupt 2010 panel

Another interesting panel from TechCrunch Disrupt 2010 – this one titled How will AdTech deliver the audience? The video is provided below:

TechCrunch CEO Heather Harde hosts the panel. The participants are:

• Samir Arora – CEO and founder Glam Media
• Chethan Ramachandran – CEO Turiya Media
• Zaw Thet – CEO 4Info
• Eric Wheeler – CEO 33Across

I particularly enjoyed Samir Arora’s insights into audience aggregation at Glam.

glenn

Imagini’s VisualDNA and Audience-based Selling

A couple weeks back, I watched the entire collection of videos from the Newspaper Consortium conference hosted at Yahoo!’s offices in November 2010. There were several themes that emerged repeatedly during the sessions, but a key theme was traditional newspaper sales organizations moving away from product-based selling to audience-based selling.

Shortly after, I stumbed upon an article describing the Trinity Mirror Group‘s adoption of Imagini’s VisualDNA technology. From the article:

Trinity Mirror is moving from simply selling impressions to what it claims is a far more sophisticated system which will effectively allow them to ‘sell audiences’, using the online profiling specialists patented VisualDNA technology.

Imagini’s VisualDNA works by inviting internet users on a site to take part in a free online personality test via text links and display ads.

The results are used to create highly detailed profiles with around 100 tags for each user based on their responses to questions revealing core demographic, location, lifestyle, attitudinal and motivational personality traits and specific brand preference data.

VisualDNA then collates profiles into specific Audience Lists that can be automatically integrated into DoubleClick’s DFP and DFA products, enabling the Mirror’s sales teams to sell targeted audiences according to a particular advertiser’s needs.

The following video provides a brief overview of how VisualDNA’s segments audiences:

And here’s a link to Trinity’s Audience Targeting page.

Interesting technology for more personalized, relevant ad targeting.

glenn