Mashable - The Social Media Guide - Latest Comments in Lotame Grabs $13 Million in Funding for New Advertising Idea

Re: Lotame Grabs $13 Million in Funding for New Advertising Idea

Daniel Buca — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 17:38:24 -0000

@IdeaTagger: as far as I know, the way behavioural ad targeting worked (and works) is like this:
- I have a ecommerce website or a search engine or anything that allows the users to interact with my content
- I track all their action on my website
- I have a primitive profile of a user
- I target ads based on that profile

In many cases this was used by ecommerce websites.

A very good example, and a pioneer in the field, is Amazon. We all know the emails we get from Amazon and how the first page looks when we return.

The challenge in social advertising, lotame's case I presume, is building a profile based on the user actions in different enviroments where he feels comfortable. The challenge is to have a profile that is very similar to the person's personality. Be sure you will never ever get 100% match :) .

I will tell you now a little more about how I was planning my social advertising project.
Think about what lotame is doing now, social profiling, expand it to the person's networks and expand the profile and then profile the consumer behaviour of the closest individuals to the person we monitor.
In most cases the needs that conduct to buy decisions appear in the person's mind based on some patterns. The patterns for a person can be determined based on his profile and the patterns of his close friends (the people around him, the people that are simillar to him - the two groups are not always equal).

To make a long story short: you are not only able to show to a person the ads he is interested in but also you know when is the best time to do it.

As I wrote in the first post: this is only the beginning of a long road.

Regards,

Re: Lotame Grabs $13 Million in Funding for New Advertising Idea

IdeaTagger — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 14:32:48 -0000

@Daniel Buca, again I have to say - hasn't this always been the point of behavioural ad targeting? Is Lotame really the first to do it?

Re: Lotame Grabs $13 Million in Funding for New Advertising Idea

Daniel Buca — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 16:44:48 -0000

I do not want to be considered as an advocate for lotame but I am an advocate for social advertising.

The idea is not to deliver ads to people based on what they say they are but based on what they do.
There is a very big difference here.

Imagine that I tell everybody in my social network that I am an Audi R8 fan and I put pictures with this car in my profile but in the same time I'm an active user in the Opel cars forum.

What does this tell you about me? That an ad from Audi would make me buy the Audi R8? No. I should be targeted for Opel cars campapaigns.

If you want to expand the ideea a little I would go a little far and tell you that even the fact that I have the Audi R8 references in my profile tells something about me. It tells a smart advertiser that I dream of a better car but I can only afford an Opel. So, I should be targeted when some bank makes a campaign for a car loan, something called "upgrade your car".
Here we can also introduce a new concept, personalization inside a segment. That would mean that for me the ad from the bank would say something like "dream of an Audi R8 but you can only afford and Opel Astra? Try now a loan from Dream Bank and you can get your dream car" but for a ford owner the text and graphics would be changed.
This would be a natural step in the evolution of social advertising in the near future.

Regards,

Re: Lotame Grabs $13 Million in Funding for New Advertising Idea

Charlie — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 15:07:51 -0000

Did anyone else think the author sounded a bit like a shill for Lotame...

"As you can see, Lotameâ€™s take on advertising is extremely different and snubs conventional wisdom on a number of levels."

I agree with IdeaTagger. I don't think delivering more relevant ads is snubbing convention. Smart advertisers have always tried to find better ways of doing that. Lotame sounds nice, but I wouldn't call it "extremely different."

Re: Lotame Grabs $13 Million in Funding for New Advertising Idea

IdeaTagger — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 13:48:53 -0000

Is this really novel? I always assumed that this was the whole point of social advertising - profile people based on their and their friends' stated interests and actions on one or multiple websites and target ads to them on that basis.

Re: Lotame Grabs $13 Million in Funding for New Advertising Idea

Daniel Buca — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 11:31:58 -0000

@Christian Busch :
I wrote in my first post that already made a research for such a profiling engine and I can tell you that money can go in many directions, not only servers.
Money for server:
The amount of data that needs to be processed is huge and it's growing exponentially even if you do not expand your profiling techniques too much. That means storage.
Also, as you grow you start having a database of profiles that are not up to date and that can affect you relevancy in front of the customer. This means processing power.

But, as I told you, this is not everything.
You must have on the payroll people that can transform social realities (that are always evolving) into profiling rules.

@Richard Jalichandra :
I think is more, I think is the beginning of a road that is needed very much by the market.
For too many years the CPM ruled the online advertising market and we all know that is not effective since long time ago so somebody had to do something.

-----------
We are all living in the times where people (that want to advertise online) should focus on micro-communities, micro targeting techniques, segmentation of target and such.

Re: Lotame Grabs $13 Million in Funding for New Advertising Idea

iKlax — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 10:54:25 -0000

Definetely the way to go, if they keep the browsing behaviour & such separate from the users identity... and does Lotame not need to get lots more partnerships? How do they share their profits with their partners? What would it be like with http://www.iklaxmusic.com ? (one of my sites!)

Re: Lotame Grabs $13 Million in Funding for New Advertising Idea

Daniel Buca — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 09:47:26 -0000

No, it is not spyware, it's just a social study.
If it's done as it should be the result will be that they will know very much about you but not who you are.
The thing that separates spyware from social study it's the link between the data and the individual.
This has to be controlled by the website that feeds the information in the Lotame system.

This is a very interesting news for me considering that I work in an online company and I proposed an idea like this to my boss last year, after months of studies. My idea was a little more complex by monitoring not only the individual in order to create his profile, I wanted to extract profile informations based on his interaction with his social networks and the actions of the individuals that had strong relation with him (from his network). Anyway, a nice idea but one of the ideas that went to the garbage can like many others.

So this news makes me happy because I see that i was not wrong :) and some people actually did it!

Good luck for you Lotame and keep improving the profiling algorithm because the possibilities are infinite.

Best regards,

Re: Lotame Grabs $13 Million in Funding for New Advertising Idea

Ran — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 09:00:59 -0000

Doesn't it sounds like a spyware?
You are writing that they collect data on the users, they will know my gender, my age and more, and what I have done on that site.
Than, I will be presented ads based on all the data they collected on me.

That's spyware, isn't it?