Data Portability & Behavioural Targeting: A Tale of Two Opportunities

Achieving scale through consolidation can be executed in a number of ways. There is the obvious M&A avenue, with the transfer of assets from one balance sheet to another, and then there is the consolidation of IP, or knowledge about one’s market. How’s this?

Imagine capturing or centralising customer data across a range of brands and suppliers which is then supplied back to the enterprise in an aggregated form. Having a more comprehensive perspective on their own customers, the enterprise is more empowered to use this shared (but limited) customer data to enhance (or optimise) the customer experience.

These enterprises could be within the same industry, or more interestingly, could be complimentary in nature – a car service centre, a personal lending group and a travel agency, for example.

Recent announcements about Google’s OpenSocial program spun the line that this sharing of APIs across participating social networks would free up resourcing and introduce new efficiencies for operators, their members and API developers. If there wasn’t already, these audience economies will justify further development on even larger scale API-type projects, along with a host of possible backend set-ups and processes.

Critically, the sharing of personal data (sign-ins, registration details etc.) will possibly re-activate a percentage of dormant accounts along with the stimulation of general activity, such as search, frequency and time online.

One obvious commercial outcome is the strong possibility of a virtual ad network spanning several key social media platforms, including MySpace, YouTube, Facebook and interestingly salesforce.com. Targeting rules based around frequency could, for example, include exposures on other platforms aside the immediate publisher.

In the context of consolidation, data portability (or more correctly data integration) is a sophisticated and innovative method of achieving scale without the merger of brands or cultures.

From an advertising perspective, data portability could be a very powerful component to the whole discipline of behavioural targeting. There are essentially three key data streams needed to optimise behavioural targeting: a) the person’s click stream, b) registration details and their c) user generated content, which creates a semantic component to their profile – what was the tone of their comments? What was referred to in their comment? Did they use terms like “recommend”, “advise”, “good”, “very poor” etc.?

In turn, these variables develop a type of master key, or CRS score, hopefully on the fly. The appropriate architecture is to feed these scores through to ad servers and CMS systems to generate dynamic, score-related content and advertising environments.

Where is all this going in terms of data portability? Well, couldn’t a visitor moving between sites carry their CRS score with them? This ensures ad and content targeting on the immediate site responds to the visitor’s behaviour on the prior site (s). This network of participating sites is now differentiating themselves through the two concepts of data portability and behavioural targeting.

The pertinent commercial question is: could a group of online publishers in Australia, loosely affiliated through the local chapter of the IAB, agree on standards that would facilitate data portability, particularly in the area of behavioural targeting?

A network of sites, for example, which already experiences substantial audience cross-over, could take advantage of this ‘migration’ by identifying premium page customers moving from one publisher to their own site.

Should these same ‘premium’ readers engage with unsold inventory (remnant inventory) of another publisher, then these unsold pages can be re-classified as premium (with a corresponding rise in CPM). This is all based on the reader’s broader, intra-publication profile.