Keep In Mind!: Drake Morton

BT And Consumers: Transparency Crucial

To Gaining Trust 

by Phil Leggiere , Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Publishers and advertisers by now have internally devoted enormous investments in money, time and intellectual capital to behavioral targeting platforms. Yet when it comes to consumers themselves, most brands still like to pretend that behavioral targeting doesn’t exist, treating it like a secret vice to be locked away, hidden from the public that simply “can’t handle the truth.”

A study issued last week by Trust(e), an independent nonprofit online privacy advocacy organization, documents why that is precisely the wrong message for brands to be communicating. (more…)

Need to Understand: Drake Morton

Targeting For Value

by Phil Leggiere

ONE CLEAR SHIFT IN THE zeitgeist driven by economic strain and uncertainty is currently being referred to as “the flight to quality.”

As investors are forced to shift from trading to value investing in their stocks, so advertisers must seek ways of shifting from quantity to quality. This shift can manifest itself in numerous ways, including the eschewing of “me-too” ad networks with minimal or deficient targeting capabilities. It can, and increasingly will need to, include more intensely scrutinizing the blind spots in current display spending strategy and tactics, especially areas where behaviorally based targeting has been under-utilized, or entirely ignored up till now.

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Excellent Read: Drake Morton

Aspirational Behavior

by Phil Leggiere , Wednesday, December 31, 2008

WATCHING A BRAND STRUGGLE TO impose its “relevance” on a community of social media users is often akin to listening to a comic trying to explain his or her joke to an audience that doesn’t (or doesn’t want) to get it. Instead of organic connection and rapport, there’s only a strange disconnect. Truly leveraging the social and communicational power of social media, Jordan English Gross, COO of Saber Seven and co-founder of Dorthy.com, explains below, is less about brands targeting social communities to talk about themselves, and more about learning how consumers pursue their own dreams and aspirations online, and what role brands can play in helping them achieve them. (more…)

Basic Understanding of Your Market: You Need to Know: Drake Morton

From Static To Dynamic Behavioral

by Phil Leggiere , Wednesday, December 24, 2008

THOUGH WE’RE OFTEN CREATURES OF habit, we know human behavior is about a lot more than habit. In its essence, it’s about change and finding new ways of expressing needs and intentions. It should follow then that “targeting ” behavior should be creative and responsive to change as well. Ironically, however, behavioral targeting has been surprisingly slow to move from a static to more dynamic model, as Rodney Webster, senior product manager of Mediaplex, the technology division of ValueClick, explains. (more…)

Very Good Read: Drake Morton

Are You Maximizing Your Use Of Targeting?

by David L. Smith , Tuesday, December 2, 2008

MANY WEB BUYS ARE BOUGHT on an impression basis. The majority of those are CPM buys. For those of you brought up in the TV economy, this is akin to making all buys on a household basis, which is what was done way back in the ’60s.

Today, many sellers have packages where they talk about targeting, including behavioral and contextual. Below I will try to summarize the various types of targeting that are available now and will be available in the near future. The concept here is that the Web needs to be bought like other media — not just on a CPM impressions basis, but on a CPM targeted impressions basis. What method of targeting you use should be resolved at the media objective stage.

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B to B / You Need to Get This: Drake Morton

Targeting B-to-B Behavior

by Phil Leggiere , Wednesday, November 26, 2008

FOR CONSUMER-DIRECTED MARKETERS, THE CHALLENGE of leveraging behavioral data is to discern, amidst the myriad of data “touch points,” the relevant signals from irrelevant noise. For B-to-B marketers, with far fewer touch points to work with, the core challenge, is how to learn to better aggregate and model truly leverageable behaviors — as Craig Stouffer, manager of email marketing at Pinpointe, explains below.
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Understanding the Target: Drake Morton

Behavioral Targeting In Context

by Phil Leggiere , Wednesday, November 19, 2008

ONE OF THE MAJOR ACHIEVEMENTS of behavioral marketing has been to allow advertisers to expand from an excessively singular focus on WHERE ads run to an emphasis on the more important question of HOW to get the right message to the right people, regardless of where they are online. Just because behavioral marketers can reach a prospect literally anywhere, David Cooperstein, of Burst Media explains below, doesn’t mean that choice of context for placement has become unimportant or irrelevant.

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Good Read: Drake Morton

Pumping Up Email IQ With Catalog RFM

by Steve Smith , Friday, October 17, 2008

IN MANY WAYS, ONLINE BEHAVIORAL targeting merely formalizes techniques that direct marketers have used for ages. Motivated by the high costs of mailings, catalogers learned long ago how to track customer ordering habits and adjust their mailings accordingly. While email marketers enjoy low distribution costs, a poor understanding of customer interactions can lead to costly opt-outs and missed sales opportunities says Steve Webster, CEO of email services provider iPost. He tells us today how tried and true catalog marketing principles are applied to email in the company’s new AutoTarget 2.0 release. (more…)

Need to Know: Drake Morton

A Question Of Influence: BT And Accountability

by Phil Leggiere , Wednesday, September 24, 2008

AS BEHAVIORAL TARGETING HAS MOVED in the past few years from novelty toward necessity, many marketers have come to realize that behavioral technologies, like consumers, are unique, and that one size does not fit all. As Web developers, optimizers and advertisers attempt to apply an ever wider array of behavioral approaches, Elizabeth Apelles, CEO of Greater Than One, an ad agency widely deploying behavioral solutions, explains below, the task of understanding the multi-dimensional impacts  of behaviors on results, becomes more and more central. (more…)

Very Good Read: Drake Morton – Drake Morton and Associates, Inc.

Insert-Personality-Here.com:

The Pros and Cons of Demographic Search Engines  

By Janel Landis , Friday, August 22, 2008

THERE HAS BEEN MUCH HYPE over the last few years about vertical search engines and how they will change search marketing; however, in addition to the fact that most have failed to attract sizeable user bases, most vertical search engines do not have paid inventory available or are filling the space with Google or Yahoo ads. In light of this, there is an intriguing new trend emerging in niche search engines. A few months ago, Ask.com announced it was focusing on the female searcher, attempting to position itself as a demographic search engine. After all, as search marketers, we love to leverage every level of granularity we can get our hands on, right? (more…)