Once
upon a time, media teams bought broad categories of audiences in the hopes that
a portion of these groups would be interested in the ad’s message or product.
Then they turned to content and started buying keywords, which unleashed
bidding wars and worries about online media becoming a commodity. Behavioral
targeting flew in with angels’ wings, and media buyers wanted its benefits but
refused to pay a premium for it or build the infrastructure to standardize the
process.
Today,
we understand we need an innovative-targeting approach.
A company I’ve been
following, called Peerset, thinks it has
the perfect proprietary data tool to provide psychographic recommendations and
ad placement.
(Peerset’s
Twitter feed provides daily posts consisting
of random connections such as, “Did you know people who like BMW also like
Armani and Miami?” Some
connections may surprise you.)
The
company’s focused and confident CEO, Mike John Baptiste, has been putting the
finishing touches on the company’s product set, expanding the marketplace for
customers and partners, and seeking additional investment capital for future
growth. With his 14 years of technology and investment banking experience, it
seems he’s poised for success.
Watson: Your
proprietary technology provides marketers with better information about their
target audience. Exactly what kind of information? And how do they use it to
improve their campaign effectiveness?
Baptiste: Peerset’s
technology does two primary things: it will find users that have explicitly
affirmed their interest in a brand or brand category and deliver them relevant
ads; and the technology can also discover a more complete set of psychographics
that describe the person in a target audience and find those users that were most
likely missed using other targeting methods.
Our
system architecture can solve a major business problem: we take input data from
highly structured formats to highly unstructured formats and extract
interest/psychographic elements. We use those elements to produce interest
connections and audience segments. Peerset takes on the entire universe of interests, which is
what we refer to as psychographics.
Marketers
and ad networks can use Peerset to reach their audience with precision (touching
only users that demonstrate interest) and to reach larger relevant audiences
whose psychographics are aligned with their campaigns. We provide marketers with
better information about their target audience and help them connect through
display advertising, both inside and outside of social networks.
Watson: Until now,
why has it been so difficult to compile psychographic information?
Baptiste: Frankly, I’m
not sure why. Marketers have used psychographics as a key lever in customer
segmentation for offline marketing for a very long time. Companies like comScore
and Nielsen have set a standard around demographic targeting and have made it
very easy for advertisers to use their research tools to find the most
appropriate sites, so now marketers at ad agencies have gotten used to planning
that way. The disruptive technology that makes psychographics so relevant is
the advent of Web 2.0 and the popularity of social media, social networks and
the comfort levels users now have around sharing details about their interests
with friends and with the public as a whole.
We‘ve
spent the last three years performing scientific research to understand how
people’s ideas, thoughts and opinions join together, and what assumptions can
be made about how their explicit expressions of interest translate into related
actions.
Watson: How do other
targeting methods miss potential consumers?
Baptiste: Most
targeting methods that I am aware of are based solely on what is known at that
time. Behavioral targeting is a great innovation that has consistently fallen
short of marketer expectations because the size of the relevant and targetable
audience is informed by actions. Contextual and keyword targeting is informed
by the marketer’s choice of words or content categories they’ve deemed relevant,
based on intuition and, to some degree, experience with other campaigns. Even some of the targeting efforts by the
high profile social networks can be reduced to keyword or aggregated
interest-based segments that are based solely on what users have listed as
interests in their profiles. All of these methods have the same effect of
delivering highly targeted ads, but sadly, they’re only reaching small audience
segments that don’t move the dial enough for large advertisers.
We’ve
filed patents on the method we developed to expand upon explicitly stated
interests to produce a significantly larger, but still highly relevant audience
segment, and we give marketers the opportunities to increase or reduce the audience
expansion based on their campaign goals.
Watson: What are
some of the responses from executives at social networks to whom you’ve
presented?
Baptiste: The revenue
arms of the social networking companies we talk to or partner with like us
because we bring advertising to their platforms that will succeed. The brands
then attribute the success of these programs to the social network, while Peerset
is behind the scenes determining the right users to receive the display ads. We
expect that our partners will use us to optimize their own inventory in
addition to our current model, where we deliver agency-led campaigns to their
platforms.
Watson: What’s your
revenue model?
Baptiste: We earn a
fee either from the advertiser or the social or ad network, depending on the
source of the ad campaign.
Watson: Anything
else you’d like to add?
Baptiste: I think it’s
really important to understand the history of this company, which I joined
earlier this year. I believe that we have benefited from our newness to the
advertising industry in that we built a product that was fully focused on
people—the users of the Internet—and advertising became a natural application
for our concept.
Peerset’s
original ideology was rooted in extending human creativity through the
discovery of hidden, yet intrinsic, connections between disparate concepts. An
effort couched in the premise that a creative
leap occurs when two seemingly unconnected ideas are brought together and
resonate and now this has all come together with our first commercial product—a
powerful tool for marketers. And it’s not just for targeting but also for
influence. Advertisers and their partners will see significant improvement in
the efficiency of their campaigns and find new users and markets to promote
their brands. We’re very excited about
accelerating the shift away from demographics as a proxy for marketers getting
to their ultimate goal, and that is to discover whether a specific person based
on their full set of attributes is right for their message and what exactly
that message should be to have the greatest impact.
People
like to find out about new things that actually interest them, and for the
user, seeing advertisements that are truly relevant, and often unexpected, will
lead to a better experience for the user and a huge increase in click-through
rates for publishers.
Watson: The
technology sounds incredible. How can people learn more?
Baptiste: We’ve created a
simple interactive tool on the Peerset.com
homepage. I suggest that those who are interested in working with us (or
frankly, just for kicks) you should go on there and discover
what things may be connected attributes or psychographics. It’s a new
way to experience discovery, and it’s completely free to see a little piece of
our system.
(Image source: bryfield.com)
