Looking back at the last two years, and looking ahead at what's to come.

It’s been almost two years since my last blog post. It’s amazing how much we’ve accomplished since I wrote about the “new ad targeting platform” that we were working on inside of Zoom. At the time, I was in the middle of cobbling together a crazy itinerary from San Francisco to New York to announce the launch of the bizographic targeting platform for ZoomInfo. Since then, we’ve transformed a seed of an idea into the world’s first bizographic targeting company, Bizo. Amazingly, other than incorporating feedback from a lot of customers and partners, very little has changed in our vision or thinking since the initial concept.

When we were first starting out, display advertising was almost entirely the domain of B2C companies with appeal to a large consumer base. The targeting that was available was primarily focused on consumer behaviors (like in-market automobile shoppers) or used the most basic of demographic data: age, household income, location, and gender. It was a wide net in deep waters, which yielded a good enough catch to justify its use.

The B2B marketer was underrepresented. We knew that B2B advertising could benefit from the same type of targeting, but it had to go much deeper. In the B2B world, the ocean is smaller and the decision maker is a very specific person. That means the targeting has to be relevant down to the individual level, and has to address a difficult question to answer online: what job does this person hold? That’s what makes bizographic targeting so important: It lets marketers reach people based on their specific business demographics and not just through broad brushstrokes, which have never worked for B2B.

Taking a look at the initial concept two years later, it’s pretty clear that we’re on to something. And we’re not the only one on the soapbox anymore shouting that B2B needs online advertising solutions. Display ads are being given much more attention as their role in the online world is evolving. More people understand that online display advertising is more than just viable; it’s a valuable element of brand engagement. And as the click continues to lose market share as a key metric, precision bizographic targeting becomes that much more valuable to guarantee the right ads are getting to the right audience.

It’s clear that the advertising industry is moving very quickly towards a model that values data, a shift that has only been accelerated by the down economy. Most of the major networks are actively building out “data cloud” strategies to be able to leverage data as necessary for every advertising impression. That includes everyone from the top three players—Google, Yahoo and Microsoft—to the mid-tier companies like interCLICK, Turn, X+1 and Collective. New data pure-plays such as Exelate, Blue Kai and NextAction have launched to take advantage of shopping data, travel data, demographic data, etc. New data and inventory exchanges are launching that have goals of creating ultimate efficiency by matching up the right person with the right impression at the right time. If 2007 was the year of ad networks and 2008 was the year of ad exchanges, 2009 has shaped up to be the year of data. Ad networks that 1) don’t have a data strategy and 2) can’t execute on the inherent quantitative needs that a data strategy requires probably won’t survive.

This has the potential to be a very good market scenario for Bizo for obvious reasons. B2B data is particularly interesting for networks because it is a significant differentiator and has a higher value (both real and perceived) than consumer data, maximizing the value of each impression. Bizo remains the largest (and only true) B2B audience network focused on monetizing bizographic data and we have technology to take B2B data in scale, optimize it, anonymize it, and safely use it for targeting across the web.

Next for Bizo: continuing to grow our market share by utilizing data for personalizing and delivering relevant content in addition to advertising. But that’s a different blog post!

So what have we learned? Plenty, but here’s a start:

1. Online display advertising is back. It’s a vital piece of the brand-building process—and as an industry we are beginning to prove the lift it can create.
2. But it’ll only be as big as it is relevant. Which means data and bizographic targeting will play a vital role in connecting each unique visitor to the right ads.
3. And measurability will prevail—as B2B marketers realize that a display advertising component creates lift across all activities, they will be spending more in online display advertising.