Audience Targeting

Brand Safe. These two words have been the root cause of more lost hours of sleep for me than I care to imagine. Branding is top of mind for most companies today, and with good reason -- a great brand is one that not only generates awareness, but also builds trust and relationships prospects and customers. On the surface, achieving brand safety seems so simple: find and display advertising to the right business demographics on brand-safe Web pages. Once you dig into it, you quickly realize you’ve...

As an online publisher, you undoubtedly look at your unsold inventory (or excess, or bonus, or discounted…whatever kind of spin you put on it) and wonder how you can make money with it.  In the days of old (circa 2010) you considered putting it up for sale with an ad network. More recently, you may have thought about a Data Management Platform (DMP) to help you extract the “hidden value” in such inventory.  Perhaps you’ve even sat down with your counterparts and considered the possibility of a...

This week we had some pretty big news over here at Bizo – we secured a $10 Million Series B funding, which is a great testament to the value of our customers and our business.

Sure, this means a lot to us – but what I wanted to know was, who else cared about it?

We talk a lot about the importance of knowing who your target business audience is, and how one of the best gauges of how well your marketing programs are doing is whether or not you’re driving the right audience to your corporate website....

If you’re just starting to learn about Bizo and what we offer, we help marketers reach and engage business professionals, wherever they travel online. How do we do this? At the core of the Bizo platform is online business audience data -- specifically anonymous business demographic or "bizographic" data including a business professional's industry, company size, job function, seniority, and more. Advertisers can use this data to target specific business audiences through display advertising and...

I ran across a short NY Times article last week that summarized a new study by the Pew Research Center Project for Excellence, and I was pretty shocked by the general gist of the story.  According to the article, the Pew study concluded that large media sites – specifically large news sites – are significantly behind the times when it comes to the ability to segment their media and target ads to specific audiences.

My first thought was, “I must be reading this the wrong way.”  In my role at Bizo,...

I recently spoke to the NY Times about how political candidates can use targeted online display advertising to precisely reach their audiences—in this case, voters. While the article focuses on how geo-targeting, online behavioral targeting, and even voting records are being used to determine how many of today’s political ads are being targeted, one of the biggest opportunities lies within the ability to target voters not just as residents of a specific state or by which websites they tend to...

Once a month at Bizo, the engineering team has what we like to call “hack days” -- days in which our engineers can individually work on their own projects. Hack days can be incredibly fruitful for companies seeking to foster innovation and creativity when it comes to product development. A great example is Bizo Switchboard, our social media marketing tool, which was created during a hack day.

On our last hack day, we decided to take things to an entirely new level, and announced that the day...

There’s a lot of content out there about the “typical” marketing/sales funnel when it comes to business purchases. Marketers put a lot of weight on this funnel, as it can be a good indicator of what type of content we should provide, how often and in what ways we should nurture leads, and what sort of marketing investments we should make in various online marketing channels.

But it’s always good to have a reality check. Bizo recently migrated to a new blogging platform, and I thought this...

Who is leading the pack?

Once upon a time, B2B publishers had it good. By providing valuable online content, they were able to attract equally valuable eyeballs, which online advertisers found impossible to resist. Placing an online ad with a publication such as The New York Times, Forbes or The Wall Street Journal was a no-brainer—in order to reach these discriminating business audiences, B2B advertisers would pay the price. Furthermore, there was value in even being associated with a brand like The New York Times.

But...