Jennifer Zaino
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

By 2020, behavioral targeting will surpass search in online ad spending — that’s a belief held by AudienceScience, whose CTO Basem Nayfeh will be participating in a panel on the evolution of targeting at the Web 3.0 Conference in New York, May 19-20.

AudienceScience, a behavioral targeting platform provider, caters both to publishers who provide inventory and data for use on its advertising network, and behavioral targeting and audience segmentation capabilities to advertisers to deploy over the network. With a large presence among U.S. publishers — enabling a single view of users across their network — Nayfeh sees an opening to deliver next-generation targeting that can leverage content providers’ willingness to share data and make inventory available to other publishers or the network. The idea: The more high-value data you share, the more value you can achieve.

Publishers have had to change mindsets, to move out of their siloed environments to share data and inventory. Their philosophy once was that they had an audience, they monetized it on their site, and they weren’t interested in sharing.

“But now they realize that people’s time online is very fragmented — people are literally all over the place. And publishers are realizing they spent a lot of time building a high-value audience with their content and they are looking for other opportunities to monetize,” Nayfeh says. “The silos must come down. It’s useful for the publisher and the end user to share data in a controlled way that benefits everybody.”

For advertisers, benefits can extend beyond one-time contextual search results that deliver, for example, an ad for a BMW 325i when you search for that in Google. In the current contextual model, an advertiser such as an automobile dealer will pay a lot to deliver a message to someone while they are engaged in activities that relate to car searches. And that’s fine, but Nayfeh points out that you don’t buy a car online at that moment — you buy it later. “So the next big opportunity is in the next 2 to 3 weeks to message that user wherever they are on the web in an effort to influence them.”

The genesis of the data sharing aspect came in the idea that what was once a fleeting opportunity to catch someone’s interest can become more expansive, reaching searchers as they explore other sites, in different contexts, at different rates, and giving advertisers tools to make an educated decision in how they want to reach that same audience. Nayfeh adds, “How do we take some partners with high value data and monetize that audience across the next few weeks across other sites?”

Privacy concerns are addressed by the fact that the platform understands only that someone who was surfing at some site at a given point in time using a browser on a particular computer is now on another site – it doesn’t know the specific name, address, or other personal data of the web surfer.

“The vast majority of time you don’t necessarily care about context, so long as the audience is well defined,” he says. “We look at [contextual] search as simply a behavior, a data point that tells us where you are at some moment, and we assign a value to that data point. And essentially we can target that for the next couple of weeks, or for however long that people decide it’s interesting and relevant. Search ads are one impression, but there may be hundreds of impressions in the next few weeks.”

The new model of behavioral targeting is a mind break for advertisers in many respects, too, he notes, as contextual advertising has been dominant as long as advertising has existed.

“We’re seeing a very fundamental shift away from that,” he says, “with the ability the technology allows, and not just on the web but any addressable media like mobile or interactive TV. The ability to actually message an individual is something that is very powerful, but it took awhile for people to get their arms around it.”

One thing driving them is the need to take better control of defining their audience segments, and another is the need to make sure they’re not buying the same audience over and over again across segments. “They say to us that since you have a unique view across these touch-points, with the same view of the user, if we come and use your platform we essentially can control the message to that person regardless of where they are, so it’s not about buying the same person over and over.”

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