Mobile Location Data and the Advertising Targeting Opportunity
So I’ve been getting a re-education recently on the latest and greatest in digital ad networks and targeting. Things like behavioral targeting and re-targeting have been around with us for ages, even before the Doubleclick & Abacus Direct controversies of the dot com boom years over a decade ago. But for whatever reason, the whole hyper targeting and re targeting seems to have been placed back on the front burner of the industry, thanks in large part to the availability of inventory via advertising exchanges and the success that ad networks have seen in recent years… both of which have attracted a new category of entrants, including advertisers and agencies alike, back to the space.
So to those not in that industry here is the best I can do in summarizing what’s going on here.
The amount of display ad inventory available online is absolutely massive… far more than the supply of advertising dollars chasing it… so the price someone is willing to pay to serve any old advertisement to a random Internet user is pretty negligible. Meanwhile, the internet advertising industry long ago went down the path of selling itself as a data intensive, highly measurable and result oriented medium… and for better or worse is generally stuck with that description.
So… the name of the game nowadays is to not just serve anyone on the Internet any old ad and call it a day, but to serve a very specific group of people, sometimes a very specific ad, and measure what happened afterwards to see if it ‘worked’ in terms of driving clicks or purchases… rinsing and repeating until one gets the desired result or gives up and tries for a new result instead. The more highly correlated a given piece of information is with some desired activity like a click or purchase, the more valuable it is. Read more
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