by Jeff Hirsch, President & CEO, Audience Science-
The promise of BT, as the targeting technique was named over five years ago, was to reach the right person with the right message at the right time. The idea was a hit – the problem was that there was no scale. When was the last time you heard about scale problems with BT? The landscape has absolutely changed and thankfully, scale is no longer a major concern. What has driven this change? The new data economy.
Behavioral targeting companies, publishers, and some ad networks provide advanced targeting services that can help advertisers reach out to audiences that are most likely to be interested in their product and to eventually make a purchase. Data is what makes this possible. Data is constantly gathered regarding user behaviors, browsing and purchasing patterns, interactions with social media and more.
Through advanced technology and science these mass amounts of data are processed into powerful audience segments that can then be utilized by advertisers as anonymous targets for their campaigns. The sheer amount of data gathered on a daily basis can be staggering, and its sources are just as plentiful. As such, deciding who owns data, and who is therefore compensated for its use in marketing, is a major industry pain point, and it only worsens as online usage grows and evolves.
Behavioral data can be owned by advertisers, networks, agencies and publishers, and can be gathered in a variety of ways. The challenge is that there is often a great deal of overlap between these various groups, and there is usually dispute about who owns what. The situation gets even stickier between competitive advertisers, as brands might find that their data is being accessed by their competitors.
The deal is the same between publishers and networks. As a best practice, publishers should own the behavioral data from all targeting campaigns that they run on their site, and should be compensated for data gathered from their sites for targeted campaigns. A publisher who creates content creates two assets that can be monetized via advertising – inventory space and their audience. They need to be paid for both. Just as they will have a comprehensive sales plan around their inventory, they must do the same around their data.
We need to listen to the lessons learned from inventory. How inventory is bought and sold has created many problems over time—brokering created a morass of problems around where ads are running. We must be careful of this with data as well.
Agreements between the various players regarding licensing, payment and data use should be put in place before a campaign begins. This can help cut down on confusion, but a larger set of standards should be guiding business practices. As part of its many missions, the Behavioral Targeting Standards Consortium aims to clarify ambiguity associated with behavioral targeting and determine acceptable behavioral data usage and ownership. Gathering voices from all aspects of the industry is essential to agree upon standards. If you’d like to be involved in that conversation, please visit www.btstandards.org to inquire about membership.
In this new data economy data ownership is very much a chicken-and-egg situation. After all, data actually originates with the consumer, but it is worth nothing until someone harnesses and analyzes it to create actionable insight. Does the BT firm own it at that point, or does the publisher whose site was pixeled or cookied?
It’s a difficult situation when so many players are involved, each playing a crucial role in the process of targeting a campaign. All players must come to an agreement that is fair to each, and an impartial yet authoritative third party organization such as the BTSC, must facilitate the process for it to come to any resolution to ensure that everyone prospers fairly in this new environment.
An online media pioneer, Jeff Hirsch has spent the last 12 years building successful media companies and growing his knowledge and reputation as an Internet guru. As president and CEO of AudienceScience, Hirsch is responsible for building the company's world-class behavioral targeting marketplace by leveraging AudienceScience's superior technology to deliver audiences for digital advertisers and real value for online publishers globally.
Hirsch has held executive leadership positions at leading media, advertising and promotions companies. In 1988, he founded Xymox Systems, Inc. (now Xytech Systems), which he ultimately sold in 1995 after steering the company to a position on the 1994 Inc. 500 list of the fastest-growing private companies. In addition to his expertise in incubating companies for strategic growth, Hirsch has held sales and marketing management positions in various start-up and later-stage technology and media companies.
Prior to joining AudienceScience, Hirsch was SVP of Business Development for ValueClick, Inc. where he orchestrated building and strengthening the company's cross-divisional publisher relationships. Hirsch joined ValueClick from Fastclick, where he served as Chief Revenue Officer for over four years. While at Fastclick, Hirsch was instrumental in building and establishing the company as a premiere Internet advertising network business that was purchased by ValueClick in 2005 for over $210M.
