AdBrite‘s just announced Open Targeting Exchange is an intriguing idea. If I understand it correctly, makers of targeting technology compete to determine which of AdBrite’s ads is best suited for an individual impression, without having to own any of the ad relationships themselves.
From the press release, it looks like the technology providers are bidding, and these bids allow them to set their own margins – so the technology providers are presumably taking some risk if the ads don’t appropriately perform, and are likely only working with CPC & CPA ads (all parties know the value of a CPM ad already, so AdBrite doesn’t need to use a third party’s optimization algorithm here.)
I’m quite curious about the information the targeting companies get about the user. Contextual information, yes, but do they see all the ads the user has viewed in the past? The URLs of the pages those ads were on? Do they see what the user has clicked on? In other words, do they get what they need to really construct an appropriate behavioral targeting profile? Or do they have to do this themselves based solely off the impressions they’ve bought and won? Can they combine the best of both worlds by getting a thorough user profile from AdBrite and also dropping / reading a cookie from their own domain, so they can take advantage of off-AdBrite knowledge? Now that might actually be powerful, if they can do the analysis with an acceptable level of latency.
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