Unique retargeting across major networks - ‘New(?)’ Tech Posted on September 7th
Just thought I’d bring your attention to what looks like a great new system for retargeting ads across different networks.
HOWEVER - I just want to take you back a few years to 2003/2004
Back then, I was lucky enough to work with some great people on an award winning campaign for the launch of Playstation’s network gaming in Australia.
The task was to a)Find people who had a PS2, b)See if they had broadband c) Let them KNOW (ie - in a big way) that they can now play eachother over the internet.
Small budget - but we had to make it look big (ie - look, the ads are everywhere - this must be massive, I need to get onboard)
Short version - without getting into a case-study:
Preperation:
In the leadup to the campaign, we profiled people in Australia who owned a PS2 and cookied them. This was done through PS2 sections on numerous gaming sites, questionaires, emails databases etc. We stored all of this data ready for the launch campaign.
Launch:
We negotiated with the major publishers and gaming sites in Australia (who would let us do this) to detect several things when a user came to their homepage or chosen section:
a)Do these people have our cross-network cookie that says ‘I have a PS2′
b)Do they have broadband (This done through IP targeting)
If the answer was yes to both points - we ran a high saturation of adverts to these people for a period of 2 weeks across all placements. Effectively following them around the internet and showing them the different aspects of network gaming with your PS2.
(Credit due - Damien Healy (now Operations Director for Atlas UK ) was the technical guru that made this possible)
Later, I was lucky enough to attend the 2004 Microsoft SAS conference, where peers meet in Redmond for a conference about online advertising.
One of the segments of the conference was a ‘panel’ chaired by Michael Kinsley from Slate which featured Yusuf Medhi (MSN) Terry Semel (Yahoo) and Greg Stuart (IAB). The aim was to discuss ‘how can everyone work better together’.
I put forward the question to Terry of what would the chances be of working together to unify ad-serving systems and tracking. IE - If I show my target audience a roadblock advert on MSN and he appears on Yahoo, how do I match the two ads up to work well together, avoid piss-off factor and generaly get better results for the client.
What got me - reading the story today about FetchBack (who are basicaly now doing exactly what we want) - is that Michael said to me back then (i guess, based on my english accent) “I dont know about where you are from - but we have something here called the Justice Department”
So - is this now fixed? Is there no longer a Justice Department in the USA - or was the idea back then just too far ‘fetched’? Looks like we wern’t the only people playing with this back then.
Go read more about Fetchback and see what you think. Any reason why Google shouldnt do something like this now they own Doubleclick - who’s technology we used to do this all that time ago? Would be nice to tie it in with AdWords.
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Fetchback looks interesting … however the scope of their service is really not clear on their site. Re-targeting is certainly powerful as we proved all those years ago. Generally it’s done within a single network however, as per Atlas’ ‘Selector’ product and a number of other network technologies. In the US there is no restriction around re-targeting people anonymously i.e. targeting on their behaviour rather than any personally-identifiable information. In any case, the re-targeting server needs access to change ad decisions across very large reach.
I believe that the best approach for this type of technology is from the 3rd Party Ad Serving side, which touches a mass of inventory across most sites and holds information around behaviour on advertisers’ sites. I suggest that advertisers should be willing to trade their own ads to users about whom they have no information (i.e. ads that are more relevant to other advertisers), and use those credits to buy back inventory from other advertisers that matches their own ‘high value’ profiles. The only remaining problem is whether publishers will accept the range of ads on their site - although this is already commonly done when selling distressed inventory to blind networks.
Commented Damien Healy on September 10th, 2007.