VIA Interaction

Monday, September 25, 2006

OMMA East: Search and Behavioral Targeting

Omar Tawakol, SVP of Marketing, Revenue Science; Matt Spiegel, Managing Director, Resolution Media; John Mracek, VP product marketing, Yahoo; Anna Papadopoulus, Interactive Media Director, Euro RSCG; Fran Maier, Executive Director, TRUSTe.

Mracek said that Yahoo uses the information it collects about people's activites on its site to create categories - some 400 in all - to segment the audience. That can require very different creative for the same campaign.

How will advertisers know if this is the right tool? Papadopoulus said she looks at the vendor's ability; the creative team's ability to target; the client has to be willing to track its site and give that information to the agency and the vendor. Spiegel: What action are we really trying to push? Sales? Leads? Then what information do we really want to track.

What standardization should we have in behavioral categories? Transparency and granularity are key. Standardization is hard for these companies to agree to, transparency can solve it.

Is the data truly anonymous, and is it truly privacy safe? The advertising industry needs to come up with solutions for this. There could me a major controversy that would upset the entire effort to do this.

Mracek: Target at the right level and the right granularity in order to have a big enough audience to make it worthwhile. For example, a lot of people may be interested in California, but the number may drop when we ask for people who are interested in both California and a particular other state.

Are we at the point where we have enough data to make anything other than an educated guess? Mracek said they have an incredible wealth of data and a lot of research on modeling and categories. We can plug the data in and find a correlation between brhavior and interest in other categories. Scale is important. The technology back office that supports this kind of data mining is also in place. The last piece is the people who know how to handle this data and get what we need from it.

What's the difference between interest and intent? Tawakol said interest means reading an article or visiting a site. Same as engaged in Yahoo's terminology. The number of people with intent is obviously a lot smaller, but a lot more valuable.

What are clients doing? Agencies need to see how it's really working, Papadoplous said. Spiegel said 95 percent of his clients aren't doing it. They're still picking around the edges, but this is where they are going. If the conversion percentage is a lot bigger, it's an extremely valuable audience. This is starting to get to the top of the advertisers' radar. It needs to be made easier - agencies can't dissect which of twenty different offerings makes sense.

You say it works well for auto and financial, but what about retail? Mracek said it does work for some retailers, like a $3,000 HDTV. A pair of jeans? The jury's still out. Spiegel said they saw a 60 percent increase in high-end apparel retailer using behavioral targeting.

What behavioral targeting methodologies are out there? Spiegel said that they are all different and that it's less about the categories and more about the kind of filters you want to put on it and the target you want to reach. Tawokol said there are four methodologies: 1. They own the search (Yahoo). 2. Providers but it from third-tier searched. 3. Buying it from the advertiser. 4. The toolbar manufacturer, where you steal the data. Maier of TRUSTe said they are trying to certify spyware using criteria that protect the consumer.

To what degree is Yahoo's offering standardized? Mracek said it's fairly systematic in terms of how it's sold and how it's approached. You can buy a category in the same way you can buy the Finance Home Page. Eight of the top 10 pharmas, the top 5 banks, eight of the top 10 car rental companies buy it from us. It is becoming a standard practice in buying.

Mracek said Yahoo fills in the model based on behavior at Yahoo - not conversion info from the clicked-through site.

The future for Behavioral Targeting is the "integration of the funnel," Tawakol said, where marketers can achieve sequential messaging based on the behavioral model, and then move to cross selling and other fine-grained messaging based on behavior.

posted by Tim Beidel at 9/25/2006 12:23:00 PM

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