I ran across an article published last week describing how to hide from Google’s "ad snooping":
http://blogs.computerworld.com/how_to_protect_yourself_against_google_ad_snooping
Honestly, who would take the time and effort to even figure this out? Given that offline marketing techniques, telemarketing, trigger leads and database marketing is significantly more intrusive, why would anyone care?
A few weeks ago at OMMA Behavioral, TARGUSinfo launched the AdAdvisor solution, designed to help companies selling display advertising to optimize that inventory for their clients.
A lot of attention in the industry is focused on Behavioral Targeting – which I discussed in a previous post, but to deliver on the promise of predictive targeting — and overcome the shortcomings of older methodologies — TARGUSinfo launched AdAdvisor services. Since no click-stream data is used, the platform enables advertisers to deliver relevant display advertising from the moment they encounter a user by delivering an audience of anonymous, non-personally identifiable population segments based on verified offline consumer information.
Where other targeting methods track a limited set of fleeting “in-market” behaviors, AdAdvisor provides a holistic view of the consumer by using segment scores to track hundreds of predictive persistent behaviors and provide offline data to corroborate online behaviors.
Segment scores reveal a robust set of demographics, interests, lifestyles, browsing behaviors and purchase behaviors — enabling ad networks to resourcefully match their available inventory with their current set of advertisers. Segment scores even work in tandem with other targeting methods to deliver a significant lift to results.
AdAdvisor is unique in its ability to provide insight into the following:
I have been meaning to post this for a while – and though it isn’t news for many of you, I thought the message was timely, given the current economic climate.
May businesses and families are experiencing tough times – and it is good to see this message coming from our industry:
—–Original Message—–
From: Pace Lattin
Sent: Sunday, March 08, 2009 9:44 AM
Subject: A personal message, something to think about
I haven’t written anything in a long time to all the people in the industry – perhaps its because last time what I wrote was spread all over the net as a sign of doom and gloom. Bloggers claimed that the CEO of Vizi was saying the industry was at the end, and didn’t read past the first few paragraphs of what I wrote: which was that the industry stays strong through connections, through relationships. Through these connections we make at ADTECH and other conferences, we can build business relationships that benefit us all.
That being said, I decided to write about something else this time instead of the interactive industry. Not going to bore you all with preaching or my political viewpoints, but instead expound on something that a lot of us have been thinking about during this time of economic downturn. A few bloggers and commentators are going to claim that writing about these things mean that perhaps medication is needed, and others are going to wonder if I’ve joined some weird cult and going to look to the stars to join my brothers. But nay, I am ok – just introspective and wanted to share a little of this with the rest of the industry, with as many people who might care.
When things were wonderful, everyone seemed to be able to buy a car, money was flowing, quite a bit of people were happy. There were always sad events, tragedies and those things that took away from many of our general feeling of absolute bliss – but in general a lot of us were exuberant with the flowing Champaign during our parties. It was nice that CEOs, VPs… executives of all kinds were able to buy Ferraris, Maseratis and even an Audi here and there. Nothing could go wrong, and we started to focus on ourselves, what we wanted, what we needed …the more, the excess.
Suddenly things have changed. Money isn’t flowing as much, we can’t all afford to go out as much. I’m sure some of you are doing wonderful, and still can afford the three cars – but much of the industry has employees and employers who are finding it harder to pay their bills. Many people are really struggling to make ends meet.
I’ve found that during times of hardship people start to examine their lives. They start to look at what perhaps is important: family, friends, and community. Suddenly those who thought the most important thing in their life was the playboy playmate on their hand, or the house in the Hamptons have hardships that make them really take a close look at what is important… and it’s not the things that you have.
What we are finding, as I talk to more and more people, the most important things in the world are the connections that we make with others. Zen Buddhists believe that everyone is really connected, and that we in our mind only believe to be disconnected; that our meanness, our fears, our selfishness comes from that belief of disconnection. Perhaps during this time we should all focus on this, look at how we are all connected and work to be more a part of those connections.
So, what does this mean in business right now, and perhaps always? Here are a few thoughts, on perhaps how you can help others.
- Help companies that owe you money work out a payment plan. Many of them are struggling but with your assistance can get back on their feet. They have employees who have families, who have children who need the income maybe more than you
- Don’t take that raise unless you need it, especially if means someone else is going to lose their job. A raise is great, but do you really need that new car while someone can’t afford to send their kids to school?
- Ask those in your company what they need to help make their life easier – carpooling, helping with the children, working harder with them afterwork to accomplish their tasks. Taking a load off someone else might allow them to pick up their kids earlier so they don’t have to pay daycare.
- Think about others even in your time of need. For many of us, our pain and situations seem like the worse – but there are still those who can’t even afford a can of soup. I read that charities are suffering and the poorest of the poor are suffering because less and less is being given.
Please, feel free to reach out to me at pace@lxb1.com (easiest way right now) and send me a message about your life. I’d obviously love to do business with more people, but more than that, I’d love to know what is going on with other people. Let’s reach out, find connections and see each other as more than we did before.
Best,
Pace
Google’s controversial behavioral advertising has spurred the US legislators into action. In order to protect people’s privacy rights, the congressmen have already started to draft a bill to make the companies like Google to warn its users beforehand of its behavioral based ad-tracking activity.
The representatives who are scripting the bill that highlights the need to revive requirements of the defeated Consumer Privacy Protection Act (CPPA), first proposed in 2002, include Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.), Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) and Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas).
"I think if we empower (Internet) users in this way. It would lead to greater consumer confidence, leading to more electronic commerce," Boucher has said.
The CPPA provided that "upon the first instance of collection from the consumer of personally identifiable information, that may be used for a purpose unrelated to the transaction, by a data-collection organization, the organization shall provide the notice at the time personally identifiable information is collected."
According to the representatives, the bill will also call for data-collection agencies to offer consumers the choice to opt out of the sale or revealing of personal information. It will require call for the drafting and effectuation of an "information security Relevant Products/Services policy" to protect confidential information.
Full store here.
Congrats to Amar and Rajeev at Pubmatic – rumor has it that they raised $7M in their Series B, although the actual number was undisclosed.
In addition, they annouced Pubmatic Premier, designed for global media publishers doing greater than $5 million in annual online revenue – more details below:
http://pubmatic.com/news/pubmatic_premier_launch.html
Congrats guys.
Behavioral Targeting – the myth that online behavior is predictive of future interest
A core preoccupation of online targeting has been to locate the most likely prospects to pursue among the millions of active Web searchers, shoppers and browsers. In this pursuit, marketers have increasingly moved from a focus on the Web page to the person, and ultimately tracking their behavior online.
In theory, online behavioral targeting (BT) opens up a far larger universe of potential inventory than contextual or demographic targeting. Once a consumer is identified as “in market” by their actual online activities, they can be reached anytime, anywhere online.
Studies have documented the superiority of BT in some key performance metrics. A recent study, conducted by JupiterResearch for Revenue Science Inc, (now Audience Science), found that online consumers are consistently more receptive to behaviorally targeted ads than to contextual ads, with behavioral ads outperforming by as much as 22%.
The study also found that consumers who responded most often to behaviorally targeted ads skewed to higher income brackets, spent more money online and shopped online more frequently than those favoring contextual ads.
The “Hidden Weakness” of Behavioral Targeting
For all its strengths, BT remains beset by limitations — some technological and others more intrinsic to its marketing model. One nagging difficulty… BT is notoriously difficult to scale. Large networks have hundreds or thousands of sites that they’re trying to monetize and they really have no idea who their visitors are. The extensive variety of BT methods makes it difficult to buy a standard set of behaviors across multiple networks and third-party solutions.
Another weakness in the current practice of BT is its audience-narrowing nature. Though most BT platforms are sold as “self-learning,” evolving systems, most can only take into account the fact that site visitors are “in market” for a single product or product type.
Pros:
• Indentify “In-Market” Status
• Focus on the Individual User
• Tracks Only One Product
• Stale Data; No Feedback Loop
• Blind to Ability to Buy
Cons:
• Not Scalable
• Reflects Online Behaviors Only
Ouch.
Christine A. Varney, nominated by Obama to be the U.S.’s next antitrust chief, h.s described Google Inc. as a monopolist that will dominate online computing services the way Microsoft Corp. ruled software, reports Bloomberg:
Christine Varney is currently a partner at Hogan & Hartson
Great post by Paul Graham from Y Combinator
1. Pick good cofounders.
Cofounders are for a startup what location is for real estate. You can change anything about a house except where it is. In a startup you can change your idea easily, but changing your cofounders is hard. [1 ] And the success of a startup is almost always a function of its founders.
2. Launch fast.
The reason to launch fast is not so much that it’s critical to get your product to market early, but that you haven’t really started working on it till you’ve launched. Launching teaches you what you should have been building. Till you know that you’re wasting your time. So the main value of whatever you launch with is as a pretext for engaging users.
3. Let your idea evolve.
This is the second half of launching fast. Launch fast and iterate. It’s a big mistake to treat a startup as if it were merely a matter of implementing some brilliant initial idea. As in an essay, most of the ideas appear in the implementing.
4. Understand your users.
You can envision the wealth created by a startup as a rectangle, where one side is the number of users and the other is how much you improve their lives. [2 ] The second dimension is the one you have most control over. And indeed, the growth in the first will be driven by how well you do in the second. As in science, the hard part is not answering questions but asking them: the hard part is seeing something new that users lack. The better you understand them the better the odds of doing that. That’s why so many successful startups make something the founders needed.
5. Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent.
Ideally you want to make large numbers of users love you, but you can’t expect to hit that right away. Initially you have to choose between satisfying all the needs of a subset of potential users, or satisfying a subset of the needs of all potential users. Take the first. It’s easier to expand userwise than satisfactionwise. And perhaps more importantly, it’s harder to lie to yourself. If you think you’re 85% of the way to a great product, how do you know it’s not 70%? Or 10%? Whereas it’s easy to know how many users you have.
6. Offer surprisingly good customer service.
Customers are used to being maltreated. Most of the companies they deal with are quasi-monopolies that get away with atrocious customer service. Your own ideas about what’s possible have been unconsciously lowered by such experiences. Try making your customer service not merely good, but surprisingly good . Go out of your way to make people happy. They’ll be overwhelmed; you’ll see. In the earliest stages of a startup, it pays to offer customer service on a level that wouldn’t scale, because it’s a way of learning about your users.
7. You make what you measure.
I learned this one from Joe Kraus. [3 ] Merely measuring something has an uncanny tendency to improve it. If you want to make your user numbers go up, put a big piece of paper on your wall and every day plot the number of users. You’ll be delighted when it goes up and disappointed when it goes down. Pretty soon you’ll start noticing what makes the number go up, and you’ll start to do more of that. Corollary: be careful what you measure.
8. Spend little.
I can’t emphasize how important it is for a startup to be cheap. Most startups fail before they make something people want, and the most common form of failure is running out of money. So being cheap is (almost) interchangeable with iterating rapidly. [4 ] But it’s more than that. A culture of cheapness keeps companies young in something like the way exercise keeps people young.
9. Get ramen profitable.
"Ramen profitable" means a startup makes just enough to pay the founders’ living expenses. It’s not rapid prototyping for business models (though it can be), but more a way of hacking the investment process. Once you cross over into ramen profitable, it completely changes your relationship with investors. It’s also great for morale.
10. Avoid distractions.
Nothing kills startups like distractions. The worst type are those that pay money: day jobs, consulting, profitable side-projects. The startup may have more long-term potential, but you’ll always interrupt working on it to answer calls from people paying you now. Paradoxically, fundraising is this type of distraction, so try to minimize that too.
11. Don’t get demoralized.
Though the immediate cause of death in a startup tends to be running out of money, the underlying cause is usually lack of focus. Either the company is run by stupid people (which can’t be fixed with advice) or the people are smart but got demoralized. Starting a startup is a huge moral weight. Understand this and make a conscious effort not to be ground down by it, just as you’d be careful to bend at the knees when picking up a heavy box.
12. Don’t give up.
Even if you get demoralized, don’t give up . You can get surprisingly far by just not giving up. This isn’t true in all fields. There are a lot of people who couldn’t become good mathematicians no matter how long they persisted. But startups aren’t like that. Sheer effort is usually enough, so long as you keep morphing your idea.
13. Deals fall through.
One of the most useful skills we learned from Viaweb was not getting our hopes up. We probably had 20 deals of various types fall through. After the first 10 or so we learned to treat deals as background processes that we should ignore till they terminated. It’s very dangerous to morale to start to depend on deals closing, not just because they so often don’t, but because it makes them less likely to.
Having gotten it down to 13 sentences, I asked myself which I’d choose if I could only keep one.
Understand your users. That’s the key. The essential task in a startup is to create wealth; the dimension of wealth you have most control over is how much you improve users’ lives; and the hardest part of that is knowing what to make for them. Once you know what to make, it’s mere effort to make it, and most decent hackers are capable of that.
Understanding your users is part of half the principles in this list. That’s the reason to launch early, to understand your users. Evolving your idea is the embodiment of understanding your users. Understanding your users well will tend to push you toward making something that makes a few people deeply happy. The most important reason for having surprisingly good customer service is that it helps you understand your users. And understanding your users will even ensure your morale, because when everything else is collapsing around you, having just ten users who love you will keep you going.
Fred and Brian –
All good points, and I think many of the individuals on here would be ecstatic (and simultaneously mortified) if display can ultimately outperform search. It would dramatically change the lead generation industry and finally threaten the large search giants.
My experience with the networks is similar to Brian’s in that they are technology companies first, second, third, fourth, and maybe marketers and media optimizers somewhere much further down the the list. This has created a unique opportunity for companies like MediaMath, Invite Media, mediageeks, and others, than are fighting to show the value of publisher’s audiences, and make it easy to agencies and networks to find individuals across mutliple sites, rather than buying on a mediakit basis.
Today, it still seems as though the art and audience segmentation is largely done offline by the agencies and advertisers, and then the target audience is sought through a mangled insertion order and translation process that essentially flattens the ideal lift curve down to a straight line. There isn’t an easy way for an agency or advertiser to easily find their target audience online, period. By pushing this square peg through a round hole, the networks are forced to “interpret” the desires of the agency, and in more cases than not, just do what they want, and report something after the 30M impressions are fulfilled.
Behavioral targeting, although it may employ the greatest technology and clickstream translation layer, resulting in some behavioral segment, isn’t understood by media buyers. We sit on the sidelines and remark how neat it is, but the sales teams and advertisers can’t find a relevant audience that way.
Depressed CPM’s is only excaberate the problem as more media will be purchased and more RON impressions will be used to backfill large orders.
In full disclosure, I have been working for over a year to combat this problem and provide a solution to power ad networks to drive informed ad serving and reach the true audience requested, but time and time again, networks want to tout their own capabilities and fall back on science and optimization, which in many cases, in neither science, nor optimization.
“The Ad Server just figures it all out in real-time” won’t work in 2009 and 2010.
-Dave
Originally posted as a comment by davidhelmreich on A VC using Disqus.
Hey Web 2.0 startups without a business model – are you listening?
New Realities:
