Tips and Ideas for Landing Pages and Sites

Behavioral Targeting - Who owns the Customer?

Simple question - is Behavioral Targeting an advertising technology or a site marketing approach? 

Ask Tacoda or Revenue Science and the answer is a way to buy highly targeted traffic based on the behavior of consumers across a broad range of sites.  As an online media buyer, I can target consumers who are presumed to be considering an automobile purchase.

Ask TouchClarity or ChoiceStream and the answer is that behavioral targeting is an approach to capitalize on past behavior of consumers to target offers or products to visitors with higher precision during that consumer's visit.

Ask Offermatica, and we would say it is both.

What is the difference? Who is right? Which should you consider?

One major consideration is who owns the profile.

All targeting services require some form of profile, which is a record of information about a given visitor. It usually identifies a browser and has other information to create a richer picture of that consumer.  This information can be compiled from anywhere, and can contain prior browsing behavior, recency or frequency calculations, or really any form of segmentation information that can be gathered.

In the case of a behavioral targeting ad network (which also includes BlueLithium and Ad.com), the vendor/network pays publishers to provide information to build a single profile per consumer.  They own that data, and you pay to access the aggregated view. 

With on-site behavioral targeting, the profile tends to be owned by the advertiser or marketer. The vendor is paid to collect this information based on behavior on the advertiser's site and make it available to optimize the experience for the specific visitor.

In the first case, he benefit is that the ad network profile would likely have a broader reach than any single site would have access to.  Understanding the activities of a visitor on a wide range of site may have the potential to provide interesting insights into stage of consideration or other intentions.  In the on-site BT case, you will have the ability to structure your own rules and segments as well as have control of what to store and not store in the profile.

Which is better?  We believe that many advertisers and site marketers can benefit from both. Test the behavioral ad networks and if they give you a reasonable return, go with it. 

We will continue to offer an advertiser-centric profile so that our customers can provide a better experience for their customers both with their display advertising and on the site with offers.

Leaning Back with LookBack from TimeWarner

The new Look Back offering from Time Warner (see: Look Back Service Forces Consumers to Watch Ads in the New York Times) is baffling.  My prediction: DOA.

And it didn't need to be that way. 

TiVo is a fabulous example of a lean-forward device that changes media consumption.  Instead of turning on the TV and disappearing into the Barcalounger, the TiVo consumer sits with remote in hand, engaged with the experience.  They are not a vessel, they are the captain. Time Warner failed to embrace this lean-forward consumer.

Reminds me of a CEO friend of mine, who regularly complains that business would be awesome if it weren't for all the pesky customers.

The new Look Back offering is a TiVo, only you can't fast-forward over commercials and you can't store shows for more than a day.  It takes a great concept, the DVR, and removes the very features that make it great. Here, kids, have a cheap ice cream cone! Oh, yeah, no cone, and no ice cream, but the napkin is in the shape of a cone!

But it is easy to take swipes at ideas like this.  Certainly we have to understand that Neilsen is changing the way they measure media, and an unwatched commercial is now a real loss to the media property.  We need to sympathize with their need to fund the content!

Yup, we do.

But pretending we can jam the customer back into the Barcalounger where they belong won't work.

Instead, why not embrace engagement?  Have them rate the commercials with thumbs up and down.  Let them mail the shows to each other with a pre-reel ad.  Even better, open up the cable delivery networks to real innovation and let the tens of thousands of tech and design engineers that fuel Web2.0 go crazy on the ad.

Odds are someone would devise an ad unit that worked.  Or come up with a way to introduce user-selectable commercial channels, or create something unimaginably unimaginable (think Twitter) that can change the way TV works.

Almost any industry on the planet would kill to have a customer lean forward and engage with their product.  The DVR has opened the door to this engagement.  Time Warner needs to embrace their consumer, not insult them.