Relevance is the key to winning on the internet. As advertisers, we’re always striving for relevance, but we’re not really competing with each other. Most often we’re competing with the adjacent content. And average click through rates of around 0.05% makes me think we’re not winning the game.
As I move around the internet, I’m seeing amazing increases in relevance. I can sign up for a new web service like Plancast via my Twitter account and OAuth, and have my first site experience informed by information about me and my social graph. I can read e-mails in GMail and have Rapportive pull in data from Rapleaf showing my correspondents’ Flickr account, Twitter accounts, and LinkedIn account. When I visit LinkedIn, they apply an uncanny intelligence to my social graph, suggesting “People You May Know” that I either do know or would truly like to meet.
Across the web, new levels of relevance are driven by data that is:
1) Persistant — The data doesn’t get erased, so it continues to get smarter
2) Portable — The data goes everywhere I go
3) Personally Identifiable — The website is speaking to me, Greg Hills, not some approximation of who I am
The data driving these new levels of relevance is organized around user names, email addresses, and other persistent, portable, personal identifiers. It is transferred largely through API’s.
Online advertising data is stuck in the ghetto of cookie based storage. How could a cookie-targeted ad compete with content that’s informed by open API’s? Its like bringing a knife to a gun fight — and their guns are only getting bigger! With the accumulation of time, user data is becoming richer. With the growing pervasiveness of API’s like OAuth and Facebook Connect, the data is becoming more ubiquitous at the same time. Advertising relevance is growing incrementally while the relevance of the content I consume is experiencing hockey stick growth.
When will we move past the cookie?
In small (and slightly less small) ways we are moving away from cookies. Or rather we're building a bridge from our cookie-based mechanisms to more durable, federated model. The server-side user ID maps maintained by DSPs are a good example of this evolution. Approaches in the non-PC browser-based media world (read: mobile devices, STBs, gaming consoles, etc.) for dealing with the lack of cookies are other examples.
So, we are evolving but we're not nearly there yet. And I'd add that directly leveraging APIs like you mention may not be appropriate, at least not without better/more sophisticated ways of honoring opt outs, etc. (something the DSPs need to account for, too).
Server-side cookies and the opportunities for federation are a big leap forward. But when the user clears their cookies you're still back to square one, unless you key your server side profile to someone with a log-in. At which point, it seems like you're just doing technical workarounds for privacy considerations. Would there be a more direct route, like allowing someone to log-in to an adserver via OAuth in a 300×250 to get more direct ads? Or will we just build on top of advertising platforms which own the log-in (Google & Facebook) and make cookie concerns irrelevant?
What are the approaches in the non-PC browser world? Device ID's?
Server-side cookies and the opportunities for federation are a big leap forward. But when the user clears their cookies you’re still back to square one, unless you key your server side profile to someone with a log-in. At which point, it seems like you’re just doing technical workarounds for privacy considerations. Would there be a more direct route, like allowing someone to log-in to an adserver via OAuth in a 300×250 to get more direct ads? Or will we just build on top of advertising platforms which own the log-in (Google & Facebook) and make cookie concerns irrelevant?
What are the approaches in the non-PC browser world? Device ID’s?
[...] Online advertising data is stuck in the ghetto of cookie based storage. How could a cookie-targeted … [...]
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