how would define a relevant ad for you?

thanks,

gaby

I mistakenly attributed this to BT after seeing the Tacoda domain in my status bar, which turned out to be audience data collection not ad serving on the page. I corrected that in an update to the post.

Lifting it above the level of who is responsible, it seems unbelievable at this point for a site like NYTimes.com to be serving up these kinds of ads — I’m a (more or less) desirable advertising target in a high-end context. Why should the NYTimes.com be reduced to serving junk? I realize that “junk” pays more than house ads, but as a user, I have higher expectations.

As other have stated – the rest in this series of ads looks to be “distressed” or “remnant” ads. This could come from the lower-CPM end of the networks such but it looks to be pretty low-grade stuff.

As you point out – it is striking that no one that I know of in the Ad Management / Ad Serving / Ad Network space has successfully hooked up ad serving technology to user data held by the publishers/site owners. I guess this come next. Given the lack of usability/functionality with most ad management software this is hardly surprising.

http://www.businesscommonsense.com/story/story.bsp?sid=56176&var=story

Large media sites can’t live on the the CPMs this haphazard model produces. The banner ads on most content sites are uniformily uninteresting, irrelevant or worse, not there. I popped over to CNET. Found an article on “auto tech”. No ads the page. This would have been a perfect place for BMW or Sirius or LoJack to place a banner. Instead nothing.

The solution is for CNET to have a preexisting relationship with BMW et. al to allow them to place their ad next to a story when deemed appropriate by the ad salesman/engineer. Compensation would be based on CTR not CPM.

Naturally if this model is embraced by the NYTs and CNETs of the world, we’ll see more advertising-friendly editorial. Well duh. If subscription revenues disappear as they will, content will follow advertising.

The problem with behavioral targeting is that no matter how large the network, the web is SO large that it’s easy for me to come to NYTimes.com without having visited any other Tacoda network sites, thus giving Tacoda NO data to use for targeting ads to me.

In such an instances, NYTimes.com might be better off running house ads than these crumby network ads and annoying me as a user — the CPM is so low, they might just hold the line and say we’re not going to run anything here unless we can sell it and make it worthy of the user experience.

If it came out of Tacoda’s network, and not from a rotation between Tacoda and the NYT ad server, that would suggest Tacoda’s network isn’t exactly sold out of targetable campaigns.

Now, I know I’m connecting the dots from speculation to speculation, which is risky, but this would seem to back up the point that behavior targeting needs both very consistent means for applying targeting rules AND truly massive scale. If mighty NYTimes.com hasn’t the scale nor the addressable user profiles to do it, what hope is there for smaller online services?

It’s weird cause I knew what it was, I put it up but it still felt invasive.