The Lack of Transparency in Behavioral Ad Targeting

Behavioral and contextual audience ad targeting is experiencing a healthy boom in the industry. Though while there is much growth, perceived and real success, the lack of transparency in behavioral ad targeting is a real risk to the validity of the methodology. Today many data companies are offering high value in-market segments at improved CPM rates; but do consumers of this data really know what they are getting? Do they really know the quality of the data they are purchasing?

The best way to illustrate this is to take an example. With behavioral targeting, site visitation is a primary proxy for an individuals interest. For example, the following online behaviors may classify someone as an in-market car buyer or car enthusiast.

• Visitation to a car review site
• Configured a car with an auto online configuration tool

While this may be very true and valid, let's look at the example a bit further. More specifically, let's consider these as:

• visitation to http://www.audi.com
• User configured an Audi R8 on the Audi site

If using the criteria further above, both of these scenarios classify a visitor as an in-market car buyer or car enthusiast. At first glance this may be a safe proxy for a high performance in-market car buyer. After all, configuring your car is a great indicator that you are ready to purchase an Audi R8. Wow, this is some valuable data. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. As it turns out, the Audi R8 is one of the most popular car configurators on the web. This leads me to wonder whether these are really in-market car buyers or actually in-mid-dream-car-dreamers. Let's face it, a car configurator, and in particular one for the Audi R8 is real car-enthusiast porn.

The point here is, if you are a data buyer for ad targeting purposes, demand your supplier to disclose on what criteria do they use for classifying their data, and further, at what incidence level should you expect these to occur with your life targeting. If you can't get a clear and quantifiable answer, I would suggest this raises some real question on what you are really buying.

Adding Social Targeting to Audience Targeting

As reposted from the company blog at http://blog.crowdscience.com/2011/11/adding-social-targeting-to-audience-targeting/

Emerging research is building a case for the integration of social media into ad targeting strategy. This evolving area of targeting is referred to in a few ways, namely social media targeting or just simply social targeting. Social targeting is involves targeting ads to users based on their social behavior, such as Facebook ‘likes’, posts and Twitter tweets. Social media data is an ever evolving array of fragmented data. I’ve commented earlier how social is a very noisy medium and everyone is struggling to decipher some signal out of the noise.

Long are the days of generic ad targeting, or even further generic audience targeting based on a few core demographic characteristics. But how can we integrate social targeting to the audience targeting world? One approach that we are taking here at Crowd Science is to use our research methodologies to build an online social persona. These personas may take many shapes, including categorizing groups of individuals as social influencers and social addicts. The premise here is to evolve these various personas while attempting to gain insights into their habits, behaviors, motivators and drivers. We can then utilize this data to turn these profiles into targetable audience segments.

We are driving this a step further by providing the ability to build very specific micro-segments such as ‘connected students’, ‘social influencer technophiles’, or ‘online social addicted grandparents’. Using this kind of hypersegmentation provides audience segments that have exponentially more value to advertisers than traditional methods.

Below is a sneak peek at what we’re going to be adding to our SEGMENT + TARGET components of our CITRUS platform in the next feature release. This new functionality allows online publishers to take any of their existing segments and socialize them using this model. It is a just sneak peek (we had to hold a little back to keep our marketers happy), so drop us a line or keep us in your twitter feed to get updates on the socialization of audience targeting.

Responsibilities of a Manager in a Startup

The people you work with is one of the main things that makes being involved in a startup so exciting. Everyone becomes like a family and deeply involved in a vision. With so many ups and downs, there are many battles won and much pain endured.

People lean on each other for support, encouragement and advice through each days battles. Anyone who has ever been involved in a startup environment can attest to this. Particularly for anyone who's had to manage a team of individuals in such an environment, there are a few key responsibilities that I firmly believe are specific to a manager.

Keep them out of their comfort zone
In this type of environment, everyone needs to continually push themselves and each other. There is little room for corporate structure or maybes. It's about action and execution. To be able to function like this it is necessary that people are continually pushed outside the edges of their comfort zone. The goal is not to push them too far but just enough that it becomes a growing experience personally and professionally.

I've been out of my comfort zone for many years. The last time I found it, I quit my job.

Let them make mistakes
If you want your team to be effective you need to trust them, you need to let them run, and that means not being afraid of them making mistakes. Mistakes will be made regardless of how you proceed so why not try and set a positive spin on them. When mistakes happen, support them and move forward. I can assure you that the best learning and growth comes from making mistakes when outside of your comfort zone.


Keep them fed
Yes, keep them fed. Whether it is food (cheese, corn nuts and chocolate covered pretzels are very popular in our office), nice chairs, big monitors, an afternoon on team segways, friday wine-o-clock, or silly pictures on the walls, having some balance keeps us all grounded.


It is quite incredible that when you have good people together that good things happen.

Was the Old Spice Campaign Nothing More Than a One Night Stand?

The Old Spice viral social media videos were a well executed social media campaign and touted as a prime example on how an old brand can leverage social media channels to build awareness of it’s brand. While the total numbers of views, tweets and mentions are impressive by any measure (including 55% increase in body wash sales), one could argue that they failed in a primary social objective of maintaining the relationship. As great as it was, it simply came to an end. Thomas Baekdel goes as far as calling it a one night stand:

“They essentially created a one-night-stand. Huge amount of affection, but the next morning there is a note saying: “It was fun, but that was all it was.”

The thing with one-night-stands is that it can be really exciting, or a terrible experience afterwards. It all depends on people’s expectations going into it. Old Spice forgot to meet people’s expectations, and let many people down.”

P&G built a base of over 600,000 fans and the question remains whether they are really fans of P&G, Old Spice or Isaiah Mustafa? I’d like to see that metric explored. Hate to think that there are 600,000 people out there waiting for a call the next day?

5 reasons why you should stop using comScore Media Metrix and Nielsen @Plan

I am often asked by publishers and media buyers about comScore Media Metrix and Nielsen @Plan audience data. These two have grown to become a semi-standard currency for audience measurement, though consistently I hear feedback from users why they are unhappy with the services. They are both great services and I am sure there are many very happy users out there but never less this provides an interesting view.

As a result, here are five reasons why you should stop using Media Metrix and @Plan as your basis for audience measurement reports.

1. Typical visitors are not where the real value is. Both these services provide a good overview of web audiences but the focus is around clicks, pageviews and the typical visitor. Typical visitors are BORING and are just that - typical and average. Want real differentiation and value? look deeper into the non-typical visitor and discover your niche. Understanding these takes a bit more effort but are of much higher value.
2. Forget about your competitors - focus where you have influence. Need reports to compare yourself to your competitors? Too often we get caught up on what the competition is doing though there is little you can do about it. Focus on where you have influence - on your own properties and building your niche and differentiation. Forget about the competition and focus on yourself, you'd be surprised what you can accomplish with the redirected energy.
3. You need more data. Web properties are dynamic and deep. The syndicated services have a real challenge representing new web subsites, smaller sites and overnight micro-sites. Though it is often these speciality subsets that have the most interesting visitors. General stats are good but if your unit of operation is smaller than the 'general' stat, they are useless.
4. Innovation. While these services have become a pseudo standard, they have lost their innovative edge. There is very little that is new or interesting and their time has come. People are asking for innovation and new approaches. 
5. Expensive. These services are expensive. There are many inexpensive (read mostly free) third party validated alternatives out there - these include Quantcast and of course Crowd Science.

By no means comprehensive but hope it stirs some discussion. 

What a poorly designed mobile survey looks like

The survey research world is still trying to get a handle on how to deal with surveys on mobile devices. Improvements are being made but time and time again I am seeing instances where the mobile experience is being ignored.

Case in point, I recently participated in a survey on my iPhone (displayed here). There are a number of concerns here.

While the slider looks decent on the device, as a survey response mechanism, it is unclear what the values are along the slider.


The number on the slider changes as you move, but what if I had five 6-12 year olds?

Things get worse when you actually try and use it. Smartphones are largely driven by the thumb and unfortunately it obscures much of the screen real estate. The second image depicts what the thumb area would hide. As a result the scale and slider is rendered useless.

Ultimately, if direct response surveys are to make the transition to the mobile world, survey designers need to take careful attention to the user experience.

3 Most important developments of 2010

2010 proved to have a number of interesting developments and surprises that have taken the tech, venture and social media society by storm. Here I am attempting to outline what I feel to be some of the more important developments over this past year.

First on my list is flipboard. Flipboard is a true departure from the Web as we know it. We've spend a dozen years being accustomed to the ever so familiar web page format driven by HTML standards and ever more boring designers. Flipboard in my opinion is the first to format the web as we more naturally consume content. Not as a boring and linear web page with flakey flash animations and graphics, but instead organized in a much more natural state.

The significance of this is that in order to get beyond the desktop computer screen and on to a new mobile device, the format has needed an update. I don't want a web page on my iPad or iPhone. I want content!

I do admit that it took me a bit to get used to reading Facebook or Twitter in a new format but it quickly became awkward to revert to the old format.

Second on my list is Apple's Airplay. I really didn't think much about Airplay when it first came out, that was until I purchased the latest Apple TV. It never occurred to me how many people that visit my home have some Apple device such as an iPhone, iPod touch, iPad etc. and at some point want to show me something on their device. One of the great things about these devices is that they naturally encourage us to share our content with one another.

The significance of Airplay is that we can now share our content outside of our home beyond the little screens that come with the device. In most homes you are never more than a few steps from a television and when someone pulls out their device to show everyone the pictures from their latest vacation, instead of huddling around a small screen, we now simply AirPlay them to the big screen.

This is how people want to view and share content. We've been saying it for years and there have been many unfulfilled promises. AirPlay isn't perfect but I see it as a significant change in how we move from the computer monitor, to the mobile device, and into the living room.

Third on my list is Quora. To be honest, I'm yet to find anyone who really likes it; though I believe this is because most haven't really understood what impact it may have.

I've been involved in online survey based market research for a number of years now. It seems not long ago that we were trying to convince people that the internet is a suitable medium for conducting survey research. Today online surveys have overtaken phone based surveys and we are now trying to figure out social media and it's impact on research.

The reality is that social media, and in particular attempts to harness it for structured research have been limited in true success and in general produces a very very noisy signal. As a result there is a tendency for many to adopt a listening approach to research which is transitional at best.

Research is so difficult because there is a delicate balance between art and science. A balance between something being structured and it be natural (both tend to conflict).

My opinion is that Quora is the first social media service where people are willing to respond and engage in a semi structured question and answer format. There are hints to this in LinkedIn and other discussion based environments. Quora is definitely interesting to watch.

This list could easily be 10 or 20 items long but I've chosen to limit it to a few that have had a direct impact on my day to day, and I believe are helping pave the direction that we are moving in.