At Bizo we talk a lot about bizographics as the cornerstone of our targeting technology. And while it’s true that we’re doing our part to popularize the term, bizographics have been around in some form or another for decades.
Everyone has a bizographic profile: your job function, your industry, the size of your company, etc. In the print publishing world, this information was used to support targeted trade publications who could tell their advertisers exactly who they’d be reaching and charge a premium for reaching them – it was called controlled circulation.
As Dana Gardner recognized early on, at Bizo, we’ve taken that same idea and brought it the web. Working with partners, we gather bizographic data, normalize it into targetable categories, and then go through a process of cleansing it and making it anonymous so that no personally identifiable information is contained in the data.
This collective set of bizographics allows Bizo to offer our advertisers very specific targeting capabilities without violating anyone’s privacy.
Our goal is to help marketers get their advertising in front of the right audience. Furthermore, call us idealistic, but we intend to do our part in changing the game for online display advertising by making ads relevant — even useful — by matching them to the professional profiles of the people seeing them. This will go a long way to change the conversation about ads from being annoying online clutter to being integrated pieces of the information ecosystem.
Curious what your bizographic profile looks like? You can see yours here. Feel free to edit it, and even opt out of the Bizo network if you don’t want to see more relevant ads!
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Data Drives Bizo
I asked Bizo's Director of Engineering, Donnie Flood, to write a post about the technology behind the Bizo ad targeting platform. He obliged and here it is:
Bizo's technology is built around three things: data, data and data.
More specifically, we make it easy to collect, classify, target, analyze, and report on bizographic data. Whether creating drop-dead simple integration code for our publishers to gain insight into their traffic or providing deep bizographic analysis of an advertiser's campaign, the engineering team eats, drinks and sleeps data.
The reason we love data so much is because it allows us to make users happy by showing them ads that are relevant. We believe happy users are the secret to success in the ad industry. Here's why: happy users (e.g. users seeing relevant ads) lead to better performing ads. Then the rest of the equation falls into place: happy users = happy advertisers = happy publishers.
As a result, Bizo's technology is very much a cyclical process. We take in raw data that we classify into targetable bizographics (we'll go deeper on bizographics in a future blog post.). We target advertising at these bizographics and take in raw data about ad performance which we use to tune our classifiers. And the cycle continues: Raw data begets targetable bizographics begets ad performance data begets better classifiers begets better targetatble bizographics and so on.
In terms of technologies that we employ at Bizo, we take pride in being on the industry's bleeding edge. Our entire infrastructure runs atop the AWS Cloud and uses nearly every web service. We code mostly in Java but have bits of Scala, Ruby, Bash and Perl. Like many organizations that make use of huge amounts of data, Hadoop is a major aspect of our data processing along with the recent addition of Hive for our data warehousing needs. Finally, GWT — or the Google Web Toolkit — is a recent adoption that we are seriously investing in for the future.
Our technology team relishes being ahead of the curve on new trends and we're also passionate about passing on what we learn. Most of the technical "aha" moments we share on our technical blog (dev.bizo.com). Follow us there to learn more.
Bizo's technology is built around three things: data, data and data.
More specifically, we make it easy to collect, classify, target, analyze, and report on bizographic data. Whether creating drop-dead simple integration code for our publishers to gain insight into their traffic or providing deep bizographic analysis of an advertiser's campaign, the engineering team eats, drinks and sleeps data.
The reason we love data so much is because it allows us to make users happy by showing them ads that are relevant. We believe happy users are the secret to success in the ad industry. Here's why: happy users (e.g. users seeing relevant ads) lead to better performing ads. Then the rest of the equation falls into place: happy users = happy advertisers = happy publishers.
As a result, Bizo's technology is very much a cyclical process. We take in raw data that we classify into targetable bizographics (we'll go deeper on bizographics in a future blog post.). We target advertising at these bizographics and take in raw data about ad performance which we use to tune our classifiers. And the cycle continues: Raw data begets targetable bizographics begets ad performance data begets better classifiers begets better targetatble bizographics and so on.
In terms of technologies that we employ at Bizo, we take pride in being on the industry's bleeding edge. Our entire infrastructure runs atop the AWS Cloud and uses nearly every web service. We code mostly in Java but have bits of Scala, Ruby, Bash and Perl. Like many organizations that make use of huge amounts of data, Hadoop is a major aspect of our data processing along with the recent addition of Hive for our data warehousing needs. Finally, GWT — or the Google Web Toolkit — is a recent adoption that we are seriously investing in for the future.
Our technology team relishes being ahead of the curve on new trends and we're also passionate about passing on what we learn. Most of the technical "aha" moments we share on our technical blog (dev.bizo.com). Follow us there to learn more.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Where we stand on online privacy and transparency
More news broke this week about lawmakers working on legislation to better protect the personal details accumulated about online users.
I take Rep. Rick Boucher at his word when he says, “Our goal is not to hinder online advertising.” Many in the industry don’t, however, and worry that rigid laws will hamper a still-evolving advertising model and mire the online experience in a web of opt-outs that will hinder both advertisers and publishers.
But the bottom line is, whether it comes from an industry’s self-policing efforts — which numerous ad organizations have promised to step up as an alternative to legislative action — or from a newly minted law courtesy of Washington, transparency is vital to the success of online advertising.
I’ve been vocal on this point, speaking out in industry forums including AdWeek and Adotas. And I’ll continue to talk about it because it’s something that the industry needs to grasp in order to succeed.
Providing options for people to understand the quid pro quo of their online activities — I get access to the content I want in exchange for looking at a targeted ad, which by the way, I may even find helpful or interesting — will only help online business models evolve to legitimacy.
At Bizo, we are building a company from the ground up with total transparency as one of our main tenants. Anyone can go online to view their own bizographic profile, edit it, and even opt out of targeting. Ultimately, this puts the control in the user’s hands, and let’s them decide on their own quid pro quo.
The advertising industry will continue to be mired in this controversy as long as its practices are conveniently hidden. Avoiding transparency is a losing battle and on the wrong side of the ethical argument. Transparency is critical to industry legitimacy and we’re looking forward to seeing more industry players move in this direction.
So where do we stand on online privacy and transparency? We want more of it!
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
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:
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)