This year´s Interact took place in Berlin and a case study from Ekstra Bladet was presented there, showing the effectiveness of nugg.ad´s predictive behavioral targeting. Please find the presentation in the following.
nugg.ad is one of this year’s Red Herring 100 Europe companies.
Malta, April 15, 2008 – Red Herring today announced that nugg.ad is a recipient of the Red Herring 100 Europe, an award given to the top 100 private technology companies based in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region each year.
We’d like to use this opportunity to thank everyone in the company, our customers, family and friends.
Well, to be honest with you, the iMedia Agency Summit did not really take place in Central London but rather St. Albans, pretty much on the outskirts of London in a very nice and very British countryside (with a golf course in the neighbourhood). Frank, Jesh and myself had a lovely stroll (in the mud;-) enjoying the fresh air (of sheep and liquid manure;-).
We are really exited about the results for our campaign on imediaconnection. A Clickrate of nearly 3% is fantastic. (although this is what we see every day after clients start using our technology…;-))
Starting this year´s conference season in the UK we thought about a nice way to bring over our unique spirit to English publishers and media-agencies. Read the rest of this entry »
Today we got our first brand-new Sun T5220. We are all really exited about this – this is one of the most powerful machines available at the market currently. And it is really cool – 64 cores on one CPU (see below). Those machines are powered by predictive self healing – where else should a machine with a feature like that run?
System Configuration: Sun Microsystems sun4v SPARC Enterprise T5220
Memory size: 32640 Megabytes
The year is drawing to its end – traditionally the time for retrospectives and previews of what lies ahead. The media are full of these. Yet behavioral targeting, our specialty, is a bit underrepresented. Which is why I’m going to offer my own entirely personal review for 2007, including some thoughts on what awaits us in 2008.
What was
Already a year ago it was only very occasionally necessary to explain the entire concept of behavioral targeting in its entire breadth. Target groups rather than environments – marketers and agencies were quick to pick up on the model even then. At least in theory. Because, unlike today, we often heard arguments like:“We have high-quality content. Targeting is more like something for portals or for marketing unsold capacity”“Behavioral Targeting is a trend; it’ll pass”“Agencies don’t ask for behavioral targeting”“Nobody understands predictive behavioral targeting; it’s all far too complicated”I don’t think these statements require any further comment now, but those were the objections that were being raised just a year ago. And I had to fight my blasted way through them all too often!
What is now
A lot has changed in a year. Behavioral targeting and also nugg.ad’s own new twist, predictive behavioral targeting, no longer fall into the category of “maybe next year” but are already being put to work here and now. There are almost no marketers, almost no agencies or even advertisers left who think the issue is not important. Behavioral targeting is revolutionizing the advertising market by ending decades of industrial mass marketing and the inescapable monotony of the ad blocks, and placing the focus back on the consumer. “Advertising for people instead of pages” – that quite rightly sounds like a battle cry. Behavioral targeting is nothing less then a fundamental and permanent paradigm change for the advertising business.
What is to come
I am firmly convinced that the trend toward advertising based on targeting technology will continue and even accelerate in 2008. My theories on what awaits us:
1) Behavioral targeting will emerge from its niche. Agencies and advertisers will take up the opportunity to control campaigns on the basis of profiles as the primary selection criteria more and more often when making a choice between marketers and advertising media. Targeting push will morph into targeting pull.
2) Behavioral targeting and its continuing improvement (see the next two points for more on this) will bring about a push in growth for display advertising. In the long run, display advertising is going to become significantly more successful than keyword marketing ever was. Unlikely as it seems given Google’s rapid development, the evidence is there to see: Google cannot market Fast Moving Consumer Goods! People just don’t do searches for fabric softener, low-fat margarine or yogurt. Some of the fattest budgets are here in this field; Google just can’t get a hold on them, but intelligent display ads are another matter entirely.
3) There will be a certain sobering up about the potential of traditional behavioral targeting, since there are simply not enough click behavior data and profiles to cover the demand for target markets. And the attractive budgets of stationary businesses and manufacturers of brand-name goods in the FMCG field can’t be won solely on the basis of behavioral targeting.
4) Predictive targeting will take center stage. It is not without justification that eMarketer recently declared predictive targeting to be a mega-trend and that our competitors are meanwhile pursuing this development as well. Predictive targeting allows both profile depth and coverage. Profiles based on predictive behavioral targeting are fuller than pure usage profiles. The demographic and lifestyle information and product affinities they contain are the key to winning a share of FMCG budgets.
5) Media agencies will establish their own targeting products and will strive to form profiles on the basis of their own data collection. One advantage that agencies have in this regard is exclusive access to post-click behavior, that is, information about what happens on their advertising clients’ pages. This is a big step toward forming their own interest and user profiles. The problematic aspect is the convention among marketers prohibiting agencies from conducting their own measurements. Conflicts and difficult discussions about data rights and business models would appear to be unavoidable here.
6) New solution providers for behavioral targeting will enter the market, while others will disappear through mergers & acquisitions, or at the very least will lose their independence. We saw this in the past year with Tacoda (AOL) and Blue Lithium (Yahoo), and I am now expecting the same for RevenueScience (long on the prowl for a buyer) and WunderLOOP (there is supposedly a review of investors and their previous sales cycles going on). Innovations will continue to flow from the USA, but also buttressed from Europe as well. Without patting ourselves too much on the back – looking at the developments made by nugg.ad, United Internet TGP and WunderLOOP, I see Europe as being a technological step ahead of the market leaders from the USA right now.
7) The handling of data privacy issues for online marketing will receive increased attention from a broader public and hence government as well. Privacy protection debates are surely not going to hold up the marketing of websites and thus the success of a billion Euro industry, but they will need to be taken very seriously. In the end, the only ones who can sustain their position will be those who work actively on privacy protection, are not limited in terms of transparency and respect users’ rights without any ifs or buts. As we place a very high priority on these things, nugg.ad has become the first targeting service provider to earn certification from the ULD, a renowned organization with great authority in the industry. We would most emphatically welcome it if our colleagues were to follow our lead here.
nugg.ad is one of this year’s Red Herring 100 Europe companies.
We feel honored and curious, if we made it…