AudienceScience Blog

Announcing our Digital Marketing Technology platform for brands: putting transparency and marketer control first
November 29, 2012

	Mike Peralta, President Mike oversees our sales, marketing and business development teams with the primary focus on ensuring the successful adoption of the AudienceScience Gateway technology platform for our clients. Full Bio

AudienceScience has always been in the business of firsts: from being the first DMP for publishers to the first behaviorally-targeted ad network. We’ve seen tremendous growth in the digital advertising market and radical changes in how technology impacts buying and selling. Through it all, however, something hasn’t been quite right. For all their investment online, large global brands have lacked the tools and transparency needed to spend more than 5%-8% of their media budgets in digital. Intermediaries and arbitragers have prospered while brands (and consumers) have struggled to find value in digital advertising.

 In fact, we find that for every dollar an advertiser spends, 50%-80% gets whittled away through waste and intermediary fees, leaving brands stuck with little of what we call Productive Media Quotient – the percentage of a marketer’s media budget which directly reaches the intended person, at the right frequency, in the desired place.

For the past year, we’ve been working closely with some of the world’s largest brands to maximize Productive Media Quotient and to eliminate waste and excessive fees through total transparency and advertiser control. Today, we’re announcing that AudienceScience is solely focused on a new first and dedicating the entirety of its resources to its global SaaS-platform for marketers, the AudienceScience Gateway.

What does this mean for AudienceScience going forward? We’ll continue to support our strengths in these key areas:

• A technology built for the marketer. Agencies are critical partners for marketers, but ensuring full transparency and maximizing Productive Media Quotient across multiple brands or business units on a global scale means marketers need to take ownership of their enterprise digital marketing technology. We’ll continue to align our product and services to the needs of marketers, empowering them to make the most out of every dollar.
• A truly integrated platform for data and media. While it seems theoretically appealing to “separate church and state” and manage data and media separately, practically, technical disconnects between systems and subsequent data loss only result in more waste and operational inefficiencies. We operate a unique, integrated platform today and our first-hand experience tells us that this approach maximizes efficiency and effectiveness for marketers.
• A global solution. Major brands in North America, Europe, LATAM, and Asia are already executing through the platform and we’ll continue to invest in our best-in-class global technology infrastructure to support large global marketers.

This decision to focus on supporting marketers through technology also means we’ll be closing our ad network business as of January 1, 2013. Networks have had an important role in the industry, but ultimately networks and trading desks obscure marketer spending to the advantage of middlemen, not the marketer. Being able to support greater transparency for marketers makes this an exciting time for AudienceScience and our clients. We look forward to sharing more in the weeks ahead.

Mike Peralta, President

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It's Not Big Data, It's Customer Data
July 26, 2012

	Click here to see all of the AudienceScience segments. More about Jeremy Mason, Vice President, Strategic Relationships Jeremy leads our efforts to improve our solution selling capabilities while deepening our understandings of the needs of our strategic clients, in order to best serve them.

The amount of digital ink being spilled around the topic of “big data” is starting to become a big data set on its own. I’m not going to beat the big data drum here, but I do want to address something I’ve read and heard lately. In our industry, data, no matter what the size, is eventually all about customers. If you don’t attach a customer to data, all you have are cold numbers. Data, when properly used, adds depth and color to customers. It informs marketing decisions based on what their passions are, what they want to see, what will enhance their experiences, and how to best serve them.

Data drives business. It is the most valuable currency on the Internet. Let’s look at banner advertising. Data drives the success of banner ads because they have to be delivered to the right customer, at the right time, to be effective. To say that data doesn’t drive banner ads (which has been suggested recently by some in our industry) is wrong. Customer data dictates the banner ad site placement, creative execution, and timing of ads. And when data is paired with effective contextual placement, it’s even more powerful and beneficial to the consumer, and generally to advertiser goals.

I’ve also recently seen commentary that data management functionality should not be part of a solution that accesses inventory (like Demand Side Platforms–DSPs). In my view, a true enterprise-level digital advertising platform should be an aggregator of inventory from all available sources including RTB, direct relationships with publishers, and the facilitation of relationships between premium advertisers and publishers. It should offer the flexibility to manage all data assets AND acquisition of media across all inventory sources and work with any preferred outside sources such as DSPs. If it so happens that a platform has both data management AND inventory access capabilities, that is a true benefit for the advertisers. And let’s be clear: an advertising platform that combines data with fluid access to media through all channels does not have to be biased. Platforms can be agnostic to the source of media and can work with any preferred outside source, and there are big advantages to aggregating all of these sources through one system. Frequency can be managed across all placements and the buyer/advertiser can gain control over, and visibility into all of the media their campaign may be running across. This is the only way to minimize waste and maximize efficiency.

I’ll have more to say about this, and to discuss other recent points that some folks in the industry say about complexities around data. And if you ever have any questions about what data usage, or thoughts around it, it’s one of my favorite topics and I always love to discuss.

Jeremy Mason, Vice President, Strategic Relationships
Reposted from iMedia Connection

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AudienceScience to Speak at OMMA Global
Partner Now for Better Search and Marketing Results!

Jeremy Mason, VP Strategic Relationships here at AudienceScience, will be speaking at the OMMA Global conference in San Francisco this Tuesday, March 20th. Jeremy will be participating in the 11:30 a.m. panel discussing the topic: “Partner Now for Better Search and Marketing Results! Sharing Data will Help”.

Companies must get past a closed culture of no data sharing in order to make their search marketing more successful. This requires businesses to change their culture, but can yield significantly improved results. Learn the business practices that agencies, platform providers and brands must adopt to feel comfortable about sharing data with partners.

On Tuesday Jeremy will discuss how to determine search campaign performance across a variety of strategies -- which are working, which are not? What new tools should marketers use to drive brand awareness, sales and conversions?

Laurie Sullivan of MediaPost will moderate the panel. Additional key leaders in the online advertising world will join Jeremy on stage:

• Adam Epstein , President & Chief Operating Officer, adMarketplace
• Francesco Fagnini , Senior Director of Business Development, BankRate Insurance
• Dan Felter , Senior Vice President, Lifescript
• Lesley Ross , Managing Director, iProspect SF

If you would like to listen in on this hot topic, and hear Jeremy speak, register for OMMA Global https://www.mediapost.com/ommaglobal/register/

OMMA Global is a two-day conference put on by MediaPost which is focused on how to leverage digital's unique skill suite – analytics, targeting, accountability, depth, social, mobile, search, and video to play in the big marketing leagues. It is for those advertisers, agency executives, brand managers, marketing managers, media planners, buyers, creative directors, sellers and marketing services suppliers who aim to be leaders of the interactive marketing revolution.

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The Brand Revolution Will Not Be Televised

	Click here to see all of the AudienceScience segments. More about Greg Olson, Director of Product Marketing Greg is Director of Product Marketing at AudienceScience where his team ensures that the marketplace is consistently aware of the value of and needs addressed by AudienceScience solutions.

It happens at least once at every industry event. The question inevitably comes up: ‘Can digital work for brand advertisers?’ Snickers are returned from the audience in response to the obvious absurdity of the question. Do we as an industry still battle this kind of insecurity to think that we have so little to offer a brand marketer? No. And I am certain that I’m not in the minority in my belief that digital will be an increasingly important component of the marketing mix for brand advertisers.

The brand revolution is on. It’s on at many levels but it’s not on many channels. We are witnessing a revolution via innovative media buyers dabbling in techniques that transcend traditional metrics such as CTR and CPA. While the industry still searches for a golden metric to support brand marketers' ROI measurement and shifting the big budgets away from traditional media and into online, the migration is happening nonetheless. The measurement entities are producing new means every day as we’ve seen with comScore’s recent announcement around Validated GRP. Perhaps it won’t be a single golden ticket, but a combination of tools that ends up being the winning combination.

So let’s look at the weapons currently in our arsenal. Brand marketers should, in theory, be more interested in higher-funnel measures such as reaching a specified target audience, improving consumers’ perception of their brand in the marketplace, or longer term effects on offline purchase behavior. Today we are seeing more clients that seek metrics that help validate success in meeting these objectives.

Short-form surveys from the likes of KN Dimestore and Vizu have gained traction as a way of taking the pulse of a campaign in terms of brand lift, attitudes, favorability, purchase intent, and more recently audience composition. Constructive debate has taken place around the methodology and credibility of these surveys. Big CPG brands have lent them weight as a positive indicator on campaigns. At the same time, it’s difficult to dismiss the value of real-time feedback and the ability to learn about characteristics of respondents in real-time in order to course correct a campaign while it’s in flight. Savvy marketers are using these data points to optimize their campaigns and many are seeing positive results. As seen in the recently launched AudienceScience Brand Lifter solution, sellers and technology providers are working closely with the survey vendors to provide integrated optimization solutions.

The more they spend, the more marketers pay attention to available data sources and proof of their validity. Third party tools are being used to measure composition of campaign audiences reached and data providers are being held to higher standards. No longer will an advertiser simply take a seller’s word around the quality of an audience being pitched. In order to be successful on these campaigns, sellers and technology providers will need to perform due diligence, up-front validation, and cleansing of data using whatever means they have at their disposal. The ability to merge on and offline data is a welcome addition that helps make this type of measurement possible. We at AudienceScience audit our data with both proprietary technologies and tight integration with trusted third-party tools such as segment profiling from comScore to help ensure we are reaching who we say we are.

Brands continue to be concerned about where their ads run. Verification on campaigns has become a standard, but we’ve seen buyers drill deeper around their monitoring of ad placement using metrics such as percentage of impressions above-the-fold or viewable impressions as key components of their overall scoring model on campaigns. When looking to strengthen their brand, advertisers are also seeking out a richer advertising experience through nascent channels such as video and social, and are taking advantage of more advanced creative solutions in display such as page skins, road blocks, and synched ads.

In summary, we are seeing real cases where big brands are leveraging new models for measurement, optimization, and presentation of brand awareness campaigns. The more sophisticated buyers are building models that combine many or all of the factors mentioned above. Positive results are happening. Brand buyers are finally, expressing a willingness to ditch traditional practices in favor of new models. Those who have taken the plunge are experiencing a new level of awareness. Welcome to the revolution.

Greg Olson, Director of Product Marketing

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On Target: Making The Pieces Fit
January 23, 2012

	Click here to see all of the AudienceScience segments. More about Jeremy Mason, Vice President, Strategic Relationships Jeremy leads our efforts to improve our solution selling capabilities while deepening our understandings of the needs of our strategic clients, in order to best serve them.

It’s January, and back to work and ready for a year of complexity and opportunity. It struck me toward the end of the year that this complexity that we all deal with in the audience targeting business can be a good thing, rather than a limiting factor. The more solid, easily interlocking audience and data elements you have, the more solid and durable your entire digital marketing effort can be. If you have kids, and I just spent Christmas with my two amazing ones, you already know a great example of this: Lego.

Lego is actually my favorite activity with the kids. Sometimes we just build one of the elaborate Star Wars or Harry Potter sets, but more often than not, we create structures that come purely out of their imaginations. We always find that the success of these creations can be traced to two key elements. One: Assemble a vibrant collection of different and unique Lego parts. Two: Organize them so key elements are easy to find and use. When you have those two states, you can build creations that are unexpected, delightful, and completely different than you had originally planned.

This is such an apt analogy to the state of online targeting right now. There are currently no lack of platforms and providers of data and technology in the space. And many of them are focused on helping advertisers or publishers to collect, aggregate and use standardized sets of data. From this comes the ability to create broad and (hopefully) differentiated audience segments for online targeting. But this is like playing with an incomplete set of Lego blocks. Or if you have kids, one of those sets where a large percentage of those blocks have found their way under beds, into vacuum cleaners and other black holes of toys you can’t find. What happens when you need that special online behavior, or that special action which indicates high levels of interest? What about when basic site behaviors or conversion pages don’t tell the whole story about the shopping cycle or lifestage of a consumer?

This is where the value of large data volumes comes into play, and where a structured, organized process for collecting and using granular data is a huge asset and advantage as part of a targeting strategy. Notice that I used the word “asset.” Data should always be an opportunity for online marketers, not an obstacle. Just as the goal of my kids and me is to build out a durable, creative Lego asset collection, it should be the goal of any online marketer to follow industry best practices to build their valuable data asset with every relevant and actionable audience attribute possible. To this end, I see three critical changes that need to happen for online marketers:

1. Move beyond basic building blocks. The real fun with Lego comes when you get past the standard pieces that make up the majority of a structure and move into the trim, corner pieces and even decorative blocks – the details that really make it exceptional.Once you decide you want to move beyond basic data building blocks, and basic audience definitions, it’s important to consider what other data elements are valuable in online targeting. The truth is, there’s no lack of actionable online data.
2. Try new things. Often when building a Lego set, there are pieces which don’t seem to fit, or designs that don’t make sense until the final structure is in place. It’s the same with audience targeting – as marketers build their audiences, it’s not always the most straight-forward set of rules that make the most sense. Removing pre-conceived notions, testing and continually reiterating the audiences is the way to ensure you’re always moving forward.
3. Play nicely with everyone. There are no ethics or rules with Lego. At least not written ones. But there are the unspoken principles of sharing and cooperation. In the audience targeting business, rules are a bit more strict and sensitive, as well they should be. Using targeting technology to benefit and delight consumers is key. Cooperating and engaging with groups like the IAB and NAI will help communicate the positive elements of using audience targeting technology. Integrating with worthy technology partners is also key to creating the most successful structure for clients.

Embrace the excitement and opportunity of building your own data asset structure. And be sure to use every piece available, and your company will be on target for 2012.

Jeremy Mason, Vice President, Strategic Relationships
Reposted from iMedia Connection

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Efficacy of Data Partnerships

There is no denying that we are in the midst of a data revolution in the online advertising industry. This brings into sharper focus the fact that the value of data partnerships is critical to any Audience Platform. The ability for data partnerships to directly affect results within a targeted campaign takes strategic planning and analytical knowhow in the usage of the data by the distribution mechanism and data management platform. It's easy (and common) to partner with a standard run of the mill data supplier, pull in some data, choose a category the data fits within and then flight a campaign against it. But does this really help produce the client's desired results? Highly unlikely.

At AudienceScience, the data strategy with our partners is to strengthen the assets that will ultimately benefit our clients by associating with the most premium and strategic data sources, then allowing our experts to optimize these data assets toward the client's goals. While many platforms are in the business of protecting their own internal financial interests as a first priority, pushing the data sources that pose the most benefit to themselves, at AudienceScience, we feel it's more effective and strategic to leverage the data assets that perform best for the client's desired goals and putting their optimum results first. It's a pretty basic business concept, really―when the client succeeds, we succeed.

Regular review of data strategy, partnerships, and performance is key in finding the right data sources and long term partners in order to achieve the critical goal of reaching the client's desired results. We believe this at our core and adhere to these fundamental practices daily.

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We the People of this Mortal Coil

	Click here to see all of the AudienceScience segments. More about Johnny Hirsch, Brand Marketing Manager As the Brand Marketing Manager for AudienceScience, Johnny plays an integral part for the overall marketing and branding strategy, positioning, identity, and messaging for the company. He is responsible for public relations and social media and oversees brand perception measurements and criteria, communicating marketing objectives across the organization and implementing the initiatives to achieve strategic goals.

I like people, always have and presumably always will. I am especially enamored with the people here at AudienceScience. I write proudly about them now to highlight a recent humanitarian effort by our company in response to the catastrophic events that occurred earlier this year in Japan.

The earthquake. The tsunami. The threat of nuclear disaster. The news came at us unrelentingly, and as an organization with office locations around the world, including Japan, AudienceScience felt deeply compelled and ready to help. Members of every department wasted no time offering suggestions as well as their service and time.

I was honored to help manage what was to become known as our Japan Relief Effort. After meeting with a representative core from across our global organization, the initiative took shape quickly and effectively. Our approach was multi-faceted: ask of ourselves, ask of others, and leverage the technology at our disposal to do so. A plan quickly took shape:

Objective
As a company, culture, and individuals—determine how we can best offer immediate relief efforts to this urgent crisis, as well as establish an effective response platform for future people in need.

The facts of the Matter:

• Beneficiary: After a rigorous vetting process, we selected ShelterBox. They do extraordinary work around the world and offer immediacy in their responses.

• Monetary:
• Secure matching donations. AudienceScience offered to match our employees’ individual donations, dollar for dollar.
• Provide the necessary resource allocation (i.e. people) for research, creative development, technological implementation, as well as management in all of these areas.
• Employ the full strength of our industry-leading technology with our proprietary audience delivery solutions in order to maximize this campaign’s efficiencies and execute a successful relief effort.

• Banner Campaign: 
• Create online “ads” for soliciting external donations.
• Our creative consultancy, Thomas Creative of Seattle, donated their excellent skills with remarkable speed to produce the ads. 
• Our superior Media Development department reached out to many of our premium publisher partners who then moved quickly to donate impressions across their Web sites.

• Internal and External Outreach: 
• Leverage social media postings on Facebook, Twitter, and Blog postings.
• Highlight the donation opportunity on our Web site homepage.

My contact at Shelterbox, Tiffany Stephenson was most amenable and excited about our efforts. Our employees stepped up with personal contributions and the company matched them dollar for dollar. (Thanks again, my friends).

The ad campaign was created and managed in-house. With the outstanding help of our Media Development team, we were able to secure ad space from some of our best publishers, contribute space across our AudienceScience Network, both of which helped deliver a successful campaign.

I am pleased to report that our efforts helped. ShelterBox noted that from 4/18/11 to 6/28/11, AudienceScience remained in the top 10 of referring sites, garnering both a spike in monetary donations as well as greater recognition to this worthy organization‒ direct response and brand lift. ShelterBox had this to say in their press release: “In the weeks following the launch of the campaign, AudienceScience referred hundreds of visitors to our website,” said Tiffany Stephenson, ShelterBox USA’s communications and events manager. “More than 95 percent of them were new visitors, exposing ShelterBox to a new online audience."

Rewarding? Sure. Done? Not by a longshot. We continue our work in establishing an ongoing program that will help people in times of distress... in order to form a more perfect world, before shuffling off.

Johnny Hirsch, Brand Marketing Manager

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Practical tips for breaking down data silos
November 9, 2011

	Click here to see all of the AudienceScience segments. More about Jeremy Mason, Vice President, Strategic Relationships Jeremy leads our efforts to improve our solution selling capabilities while deepening our understandings of the needs of our strategic clients, in order to best serve them.

I love silos. They look iconic against the rural horizon and do a great job of completely separating disparate materials so that there is just no risk that they will get intermingled, keeping our foodstuff and arsenal safe and pure.

Not so great for data
But what works so well for rockets and agriculture is just not right for data, which is critical for audience analytics and targeting. Advertisers, agencies, and publishers have been generating data for a long time -- much longer than online advertising has been even a consideration. This historical data is for the most part stored in disparate internal systems. Whether considering email systems, demographic databases, commerce platforms, or offline registration files, these systems rarely speak to each other. This is a lost opportunity, on a massive scale, to define an audience in a significant way.

Is it really a big issue?
As marketers strive to understand their consumers better and to present the appropriate messages to them, it becomes more important than ever to break down the silos in a structured way. The goal is to create an audience strategy that takes into account all key relevant attributes, all with the goal of ensuring that each message to your customers or prospects is relevant, timely, and full of value.

This shift away from single-dimension targeting (whether behavioral targeting, IP targeting, geo-targeting, or registration targeting) to a multi-dimensional audience targeting mindset has been underway for the last few years. Breaking down data silos is a critical component in completing this view of how to message to an audience.

In a basic example, an e-commerce retailer targets a display campaign to users who viewed emails from the retailer, but haven't visited its site recently. This is only possible if the email interactions are successfully integrated with the website activity, so the retailer can create a segment of users who view emails but don't visit the website. This same example can be applied to offline purchases, respondents to sweepstakes, and many other non-website visit-related activity.

I've had long discussions with Josh Dreller, VP of media technology and analytics at Fuor Digital (a data and platform expert), about this topic, and here is how he aptly explains it: "One of the things I've noticed is that when data is in disparate systems, analysts just don't look at it as often. What you lose is those little brilliant hunches... the insights that bubble up from the subconscious. Chances are a busy analyst won't necessarily follow up on these hunches every time if it means that they have to pull reports from multiple systems and then have to aggregate, scrub, and pivot the data just to see if there's any validity to the hypothesis. The more integrated data you have in a single system, the more chance someone from your team might serendipitously stumble over something absolutely wonderful that they might not have uncovered if it took them 30 minutes of data aggregation to find. In terms of data targeting, the same applies. Disconnected data is simply inefficient and will cut back on your team's ability to load up hunches on the fly. If you want to truly tap into all of the targeting opportunities to which your data could be applied, it's important that you de-silo and bring all of your various sources together in one platform."

Smart stewardship
Of course, as is the case with everything around audience targeting and data, it's critical that breaking down the data silos is done with the utmost focus on user privacy and respect. This means a few very key things: following all current best practices about giving notice to and obtaining consent from consumers about their information, using a reputable company to do data integration and on-ramping, and avoiding the utilization of any types of personally identifiable data, among other practices.

Chris Scoggins is SVP and GM for the DLX Platform at Datalogix, one of the leading companies in the online data integration field. As an astute contributor to our discussion of silos, Scoggins says, "Over the last two years, we have worked with over 75 companies (many from the Fortune 500) to transform various aspects of their offline CRM files into addressable online audiences, which are used for media targeting and insights. Our focus as a company is to break down the walls between the offline and online marketing silos that exist within large enterprises and their agencies. But none of this would be possible if not for the privacy and security controls baked into our technology and processes. Stripping out personally identifiable data, working with validated data providers, and offering users an opt-out mechanism are just a few of the controls that make this possible."

What can be done?
The first step is to take an account of all data assets you have and how they can be accessed. This might involve talking to internal groups that are rarely or never involved in advertising or marketing. (It might take some work to track down these parties.) Then a structured integration plan should be developed. Work with your targeting platform partner to see what strategies are in place to integrate data assets, and which best practices are recommended. Then finally, use these new data elements to build smart audiences and test, test, review outcomes, and test again. The output is well worth it. It will further enhance your marketing strategy and get you a step closer to the reality of delivering the right ad to the right user at the right time.

Jeremy Mason, Vice President, Strategic Relationships
Reposted from iMedia Connection

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Insights from the Seattle Interactive Conference

AudienceScience kicked off this November with stellar visibility as a premiere sponsor of The Seattle Interactive Conference. This was the first annual event celebrating the coming together of online technology, creativity and emerging trends. The theme for this year's event was Transformations: Interactive technology has already transformed how we experience our everyday lives, both at work and play, yet there are profound new levels of transformation upon us -- some good, some bad, and some yet to be determined. Speakers at this conference included thought leaders from Facebook, Bing, Amazon, Wunderman and more.

AudienceScience had a successful presence at the conference on multiple levels including a thought-provoking standing room only panel on the complexity of the ever evolving interactive advertising world moderated by our VP of Marketing, Marla Schimke.

To elaborate on the success of the session let’s just say the doorman was necessary. He actually had to close the doors and physically stop attendees from overflowing into the panel room in order to adhere to fire codes. Once the doors closed Marla stepped on stage with fellow online advertising experts from AdReady, advertising.com, AT&T and Bluekai to lead the group in a discussion around the online advertising ecosystem and the language used to describe the technologies and measurement/cost methods which have created a chaotic and confusing “Acronym Soup”.

The tone was set with a short, engaging video: 2020 - what does the future hold for digital marketing? then the panel focused on simplifying the abundance of industry acronyms. DMPs, ATPs, MTPs, DSPs, SSPs, RTBs, ad networks, exchanges, agency trading desks, yield optimizers…what's the flavor of the week, what does it mean and where does it fit in? Next they dug into best practices around operating within the convoluted technology landscape, and finally the transformation of digital audience based advertising moving forward. The amount of knowledge, experience and expertise on stage was impressive! The perfect online advertising strategy/recipe is yet to be concocted, but the panel shared some very valuable insights, tips and key ingredients:

• We live in a dynamic and complex industry so take the time to educate yourself regularly. Knowledge is power, and the more you know about the industry, the functionality of service providers and your ad campaigns, the better decisions you can make.
• To stay competitive as an advertiser you must tailor your marketing strategy to YOUR audience. Working backwards, starting with your audience is the most efficient way to make sure the content is relevant and increase ROI.
• Online advertising will become increasingly dependent on data management and data transparency. This coincides with the recently debated slogan “Data is the new black” prepare accordingly.
• Advertisers no longer have to choose between quality and quantity they want both.
• It is critical that companies adhere to privacy standards and commit to self-regulate!! As leaders in the online advertising space it’s imperative to secure consumer trust and acceptance.
• Speaking of trust, trusting your partners is imperative. Don’t settle - instead seek out partners who you do trust - within the convoluted digital technology landscape you have a lot of great options!

The popularity of the panel titled “Alleviating the Confusion - The Acrimony Around Acronyms” reinforced the thesis that is an issue of interest. Overall the panel brought forth good news for AudienceScience… many of the key takeaways from the session addressed issues we can or are already working towards solving. I look forward to the transformations that will emerge between now and the next Seattle Interactive Conference as we work to stay on the forefront of digital technology.

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People Do Actually Buy Products
November 3, 2011

	Click here to see all of the AudienceScience segments. More about Stuart Colman, Vice President, International and Managing Director, Europe Stuart oversees the account management, business development and agency outreach, and is responsible for development and adoption of audience targeting technology amongst publishers, agencies and advertisers across Europe. Stuart is chairman of the IAB UK's Behavioural Targeting Council. Full Bio

Reading the news around Yahoo! purchasing Interclick is simply another example of the dynamically changing online advertising technology marketplace. Not a day seems to go by without some sort of announcement, many of them around new technology solutions to help drive relevance, effectiveness, targeting, insight or all of the above.

As a result, the whole world of targeting has become ever more complex. Whether it’s audience-based or behavioural, geographical, contextual, demographic, lifestyle, remarketing, what seems often lost is the fundamental fact: targeting is about reaching people. At the end of the day, it’s people who actually spend money and buy things – not locations, characteristics, cookies, sites, sections or technologies.

One thing I’ve noticed is that targeting seems increasingly driven by ‘audience profiles’ like ‘image conscious’, ‘risk taker’ or ‘adventure seekers’ which help paint a mental picture but are impossible to transfer into actionable targeting.

In a similar manner, criteria that may at first appear relevant (e.g. product X appeals to males 45-60) actually can limit potential. If a female in the 25-35 age bracket is interested in the same product, she’ll never be reached with the advertising as she does not fit the criteria.

By starting with ‘people’ – that is, those who are potentially interested in buying your product – you then can look for the right audience, irrespective of if they are male, female, young, old, cautious or risk takers. If you can find those whose online activities suggest a real interest in finding out more about a particular product, or even if they are in the buying window for it, then surely these are the people you want to reach. It’s fundamental but something that seems to be all too often forgotten.

Stuart Colman, Vice President, International and Managing Director, Europe
Reposted from M&M Networking Global Marketers

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AudienceTargeting: The What, Whys and Where of Audience-Based Marketing

Behavioral Targeting, Audience Targeting, Demographic Targeting, Social Targeting, Psychographic Targeting. There is so much buzz milling around the market about the different types of online targeting one can engage in, it's enough to make a marketer throw their hands up in exasperation. What does it all mean? And once we think we've figured it out, what actually comprises it? Where does the data come from?

Audience Targeting is really the most encompassing term to use for identifying relevant and specific audiences for digital display advertising. 'Why', you may ask? Audience Targeting is the comprehensive mix of behavioral, demographic, social, and psychographic targeting.

So, what makes up these data assets that collectively lead to Audience Targeting? From the AudienceScience perspective, Audience Targeting is made capable by the concept of audience segment creation. Segments are created by the use of rules derived by Boolean Logic to create groupings. These rules act to compile data by pulling various attributes from numerous data partners, including but not limited to online behavior, demographic, purchase propensity, online actions, etc. The data utilized to create the targetable segments, or audiences, may also be derived from offline data (how to get offline data online? That's another topic!).

The where of the data origination stream used to pull these unique attributes into targetable audience segments are derived from various sources and types of partnerships. AudienceScience partners with many exclusive and premium data sources, niche content sites, 3rd party data, data aggregators, search data, offline data, and much more. When compiling various types of data, the quality, privacy compliance, and thorough vetting of these data sources are equally as important as the data attributes themselves.

To bring it all together – targeted audiences are derived from various qualified data sources, which contribute to unique rules and segment creation capabilities leading to a richer targeting experience. The next time you look to engage in Audience Targeting, be sure to ask your partners how they actually view Audience Targeting and what their methodology actually consists of for the audience creation.

As for the 'why', well, successful online marketing, of course.

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