Briefs

By Elyse Tager, The ClickZ Network, Apr 16, 2008

Two products related to behavioral targeting recently appeared on my radar. One just launched this month; the other has been around since 2004 in stealth mode. It's now being formally introduced to the market.

U.S.-based online marketing company ValueClick Media will launch a platform this summer offering advertisers behavioral targeting based on predictive analytics.

...

ValueClick Media's algorithm takes into consideration visitors' observed behavior and creates predictive models for future behavior, all based on attributes provided by anonymous cookie data, not personally identifiable information. The resulting profile data define each visitor as belonging to one or more categories (mobile, finance, retail/shopper, travel/air, etc.). ValueClick can then leverage its extensive inventory (over 130 million unique visitors per month) to give advertisers greater potential per category than a smaller ad network could supply.

Another product, dubbed aCerno, has been in stealth mode for nearly four years. It collects anonymous information from an association of over 375 major multichannel retailers' Web sites (that aren't identified to one another), representing 140 million shoppers. The information is completely private and tagged only with an ID, with no cross-reference to personal information. ACerno compiles this anonymous data using cookies. The concept borrows heavily from the blind cooperative databases catalogers have been using for over a decade. In fact, aCerno is a wholly owned subsidiary of I-Behavior, one of the major co-ops.

ACerno's analytics provide two exclusive tracks of predictive information:

• Who customers are. Knowing what people shop for correlates strongly to who they are. For example, someone who buys a dress and a crib is almost certainly a woman with a baby.

• What customers will buy next. Large populations with similar purchase behavior patterns can be discovered and sold.