You don’t need a degree in advertising jargon to understand how behavioral advertising works. But knowing a few basic terms will help you decipher different companies’ advertising practices:
Advertiser – The “advertisers” are the companies whose products or services are being advertised. For example, you may see ads for Netflix; Netflix is the advertiser.
Publisher – The publishers are the companies running Web sites where ads appear. Thus, for example, CNN.com, where you may see an ad for Netflix, is a publisher.
Ad Network – Ad networks are companies that serve as intermediaries between advertisers and publishers. Most ad networks have contracts with many different advertisers and many different publishers. They have access to many different ads and deliver them into advertising spaces on Web pages of publishers. In the context of behavioral advertising, ad networks compile profiles of Internet users and decide which ad is shown to which user.
Cookie – A cookie is a small piece of text that a Web site saves on your computer and retrieves when you revisit that Web site. Cookies used for behavioral advertising usually contain text that uniquely identifies your Web browser, so that advertisers or ad networks can recognize the same Internet user across different Web sites or multiple times on the same site. Here is just a snapshot of what the list of cookies stored on a typical Internet user’s computer might look like:
First Party and Third Party - When you visit a Web site, it may seem like all of its content comes from one place. In fact, many Web sites draw content – and advertising – from multiple different sources. The site itself is known as the “first party,” while all other sites and companies that deliver content there are known as “third parties.” First-party cookies are delivered by first parties, whereas third-party cookies are delivered by third parties.
Internet Protocol (IP) address – The address of your computer on the Internet. Your IP address gets transmitted whenever you communicate online or surf the Web so that the content you’re looking at or the people you’re talking to can know how to find your computer on the network.
Personally Identifiable Information (PII) - Traditionally, PII has been considered to include information that can directly identify you, like your name, address, email address, or telephone number. This is what most companies means when you see them use the term “PII” or “personal information” in their privacy policies. Recently, however, there has been some debate about whether other kinds of information — like the IP address that identifies your computer on the Internet — should be considered PII, so this definition is somewhat in flux.
First off, PII stands for Personally Identifiable Information. What this basically translates to is the key data points needed to identify you as an individual. Where me being a “35-year-old male working in technology marketing in Chicago” would not be PII, “Marcus Tewksbury – Alterian’s Customer Intelligence Director” would be. The difference is that you can use the later to track me down.
The next thing you need to know is that PII as a distinction is no longer really relevant. In their February ’09 findings the FTC found “any data collected for online behavioral advertising that reasonably could be associated with a particular consumer or a particular computer or device” is bound by the same privacy considerations.
In the short term, most marketers won’t be impacted by the PII conversation. Where it starts to become relevant is when large players (namely Google and Facebook) start to utilize the hordes of data they capture to target advertising on an individual basis – a practice becoming known as “behavioral advertising.”
From a marketer’s perspective data enabled, targeted advertising is the future. This type of advertising is simply more efficient and effective. If you aren’t doing it today, you should be figuring out how you can. The issue to keep in the back of mind is what steps you are putting in place to protect the consumer at the point of data capture, and at the point of ad delivery.
Again, thank you to everyone for the support and enthusiasm for the presentation. Certainly this is something that has hit a nerve and I’ve heard you loud and clear. Over the coming weeks and months I will be devoting more time documenting the approach we are deploying at Alterian and sharing insights on what is and isn’t working.
To download a copy of the presentation, please visit the Alterian site:
Honestly, I’m overwhelmed at the feedback I’ve been receiving for the upcoming December webinar. I know a lot of people have taken it upon themselves to reach out to their friends and colleagues to get them to the event. I’m extremely grateful to you all!
Okay, so yes, on December 17th I am hosting Alterian’s December webinar. My topic for the session will be how to make social media part of your strategic marketing planning. Yes, I will cover some of the blocking and tackling of deploying to the channels, but the real point of emphasis is how to incorporate in a measurable, accountable way into an overall demand generation program. Below is the most recent write up…
What you already know: Your emails are starting to fall on deaf ears; the quality and ROI of your PPC campaigns are on the decline; and your prospects and customers are spending more and more time online, but not necessarily on your site.
What you need to know: Social media can address all of these issues in a measurable, programmable way by taking the brand experience to the community and engaging people where they form impressions and find answers.
In this webinar, I will walk through the steps that can make you a social star. He will cover:
Tracking customers online and identifying the right social channels
Creating content that sticks and sells
Crafting calls-to-action that are tailored to the social media
Being accountable, and showing straightforward ways to demonstrate lift and ROI
Developing a search strategy that gives your content the best chance of being found
Enabling new social channels like LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter to cheaply and efficiently spread your brand message
Recently I was blasted by someone for not having more Twitter followers. It certainly gave me pause. For sure, from a personal branding stand point “followers” and “views” can be a barometer of success in the social space. I would argue, however, there are other valid approaches. Below is in part the rebuttal I sent, but this is something I will certainly start to pickup in greater detail….
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… My perspective on social media, which is rooted in the idea’s of 1:1 and true customer centric engagement, is that it opens new avenues to deepen and broaden your customer relationships. I like to use this visual to make a point:
(actually, I usually use a slightly different one, but at any rate…)
I’d rather be engaged with the right 300 customers than 30,000 of the wrong ones. This is the focus of my forthcoming webinar. To present a framework for how you can systematically use social media as part of your greater demand generation program to weed through the chaff so you can target and pull through the right prospects.
A big component of this is transparency and traceability. I spend a lot of time covering how you can track asset performance and combine it with other channel data, particularly financial, to identify what’s working and what’s truly moving the needle. Friend Mark Wright (president of TargetBase) I think said it best, “a click is just a click if you can’t relate it to revenue.” Too much effort in the social media space I’m afraid falls in this category.
Flip the funnel. Flatten the funnel. Get rid of the funnel! These aren’t some loony, fringe ideas, but rather the thinking of some of the leading marketing minds of our time like Godin, Meerman, and Brogan. Everyone recognizes that social media is having a huge impact on successful demand generation. The problem lies in identifying how to apply it to the greatest benefit.
Some argue that you should rely entirely upon social media. That if you position things properly you can just sit back and let the customers come to you. Well… I don’t know about you, but I don’t know of any salesman that’s made his numbers by sitting around and waiting for the phone to ring. As with all good things, and social media is a good thing, when done to excess it can be bad. Like Twinkies and margaritas.
When done right, however, social media can have a profound impact on your demand generation efforts. At a time when it’s getting a lot harder to fill the funnel with email blasts, PPC campaigns, and cold calling social media offers an alternative way to engage with your prospects and customers.
In this webinar we will show you how to cost efficiently keep the top of your funnel primed using a repeatable 4 part framework that covers:
Be Interesting
How to understand your audience’s pains and crafting relevant, interesting stories
Be Accessible
How to use digital to be available at a place and time of the customers choosing
Be Findable
How to use SEO and tagging to get your message in front of high value prospects
Be Measurable
How to use asset and lead tracking to monetize the impact of your efforts
… but funny. Thanks to silicon cloud – a consulting partner of HubSpot – http://www.siliconcloud.com/blog/bid/31078/Traditional-Marketing-versus-Social-Media
There is really only one way to measure this – is it generating revenue from net new business? This is the singular most important thing your demand generation efforts need to net. In this deck on SlideShare we explore some specific ways you can assess the shape of your own funnel:
Posted by tewksbum 
Posted by tewksbum 
Posted by tewksbum 
