Tacoda Systems, Inc. has launched AudienceMatch Network, a text-based, pay-per-click ad unit system through which online ads will be served to Netizens visiting AMN-affiliated Web sites based entirely on each surfer’s online habits – and seeking, or trying to glean, absolutely no personal information. And Tacoda said they plan to do it without the privacy headaches that bedeviled DoubleClick and its competitors at the height of the first dot-com boom.
Think of it this way: If you’re reading a newspaper on the Internet and you happen to look at personal or general financial stories, and the paper’s site is an AMN affiliate, you’ll see a small text ad on the page(s) for a financial services company or for other financial services related products and offerings.
The ads themselves are sold on the open bid, auction principle, Tacoda said announcing the program, and those advertisers bringing in the highest per-click compensation get their ads served to pre-defined audience segments like in-market auto buyers, home buyers, investors, travelers, technology mavens, and so forth.
The AMN program will start with a two-month launch phase, the company continued, operating with about 60 Web sites including those for USA Today and the Tampa Tribune, and a limited volume of advertisers. They’re hoping to swell to over 1,000 sites and 1,000 advertisers by the end of the launch phase, representing about 60 percent of the monthly American Internet audience.
USA Today’s vice president for technology and business development online, Adriaan Bouten, is encouraged. “Tacoda’s AudienceMatch Networks brings together search-like paid listings and behavioral targeting, two of the biggest drivers of new online revenue,” Bouten said at the AMN launch. “We are pleased to be charter members of AMN and are confident that once again, Tacoda is at the forefront of a smart new development.”
Also nodding is Vonage chief marketer Dean Harris. “The opportunity to reach millions of consumers with behaviorally-targeted ads is what the market needs today,” he said of AMN.
For Tacoda, this kind of audience-based targeting should transcend standard search and context, as chief executive Dave Morgan puts it, calling them both just proxies for audience types.
“Our audience management services clients have consistently proven that ad/audience relevance drives higher response rates and conversions,” Morgan said at the AMN launch. “With contextual networks, the context of many pages is simply too generalized for precise targeting, and contextual networks’ relatively poor targeting means wasted audience and page inventory for publishers. Moreover, the best keywords are sold out in the market.
“[AMN] will also offer more transparency to buyers and sellers who are now largely blind to what pages or people they are buying or selling in contextual search, and for how much,” he continued. “There will be much more disclosure to advertisers and publishers of all aspects of bidding and buying, measurement and optimization than they are used to.”
Tacoda has a sizeable enough volume of heavyweight participants so far: the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Cox Newspapers, The Weather Channel, iVillage, the Associated Press, Scripps Networks and Scripps Newspapers, BusinessWeek.com, About.com, Bizjournals.com, SFGate.com, Forbes.com, the Tribune Company, BURST! Media, PlanetOut, and more.
AMN ads also sell on what Morgan calls the simplicity of self-service buying and selling. “Sites in AMN will continue to sell their own display and rich media ads to national and local advertisers, and will also be able to continue taking ads from contextual networks,” he said. “Being part of the network will simply enable them to capture direct marketing and search advertising listings that will perform better than current contextual networks or brokered ads because of the behavioral targeting aspect of the ads. AMN will complement their current offerings.”
The key to non-personal information, Tacoda said, is clustering surfers into segments named for apparent common interests, such as technology enthusiasts, sports fans, business travelers, and the like. After initially large audience segments are created from the nonpersonal information gleaned through standard tracking cookies, Tacoda said, the information will be disbursed back to the client sites which collect and keep the information, and Tacoda itself will not give clients any personal information.
In fact, the company said, all AMN sites are required to maintain higher privacy policies and practices than are deemed standard in the current Internet undustry, and the company explicitly disdains spyware. “Unlike spyware or adware, AMN does not download applications onto users’ computers,” Morgan said. “It only uses cookies and does not involve any personally-identifiable information. It meets the highest privacy standards anywhere on the Internet.”
The Network Advertising Initiative, in fact, whose own privacy principles have been praised by the Federal Trade Commission, has hailed Tacoda for just that kind of privacy scrupulousness. “Adherence to these principles,” said NAI executive director Trevor Hughes, “means that Tacoda has taken critical steps to protect the privacy of consumer data.”
