Something to Dwell on

Media Post reported on the new Dwell Partner Network today, a collection of more than 30 design and architectural web sites “to bring together Web sites featuring the people, the experts, the products, the innovative ideas and the ongoing conversations taking place around design.”

Please put aside the fact that the Dwell Partner Network will be powered by Burst Media’s adConductor platform, which is mentioned as part of today’s announcement. The network model that Dwell brings to market is the right one for a distributed, fragmented media economy such as we have today. It marries the need to preserve the relevancy of media to audiences with the need for media to have scale - both good things.

What would Dwell’s alternatives be in a traditional media environment? Buy more architectural and design magazines, or start them from scratch. Perhaps do nothing. Each option is risky and expensive and hard to scale if you want to grow. As a result, the temptation – not at Dwell, but certainly in other places over the years – has been to add content (or programming) tangential to the core editorial proposition and/or to simply make the content more accessible to larger, non-endemic audiences that will be less willing to pay.

Now (long before now, actually) comes the Internet and the chance to scale without compromising media brand promises. Build a network. Imbue it with the power of a dominant brand. Invite dedicated content producers to join your table. Enjoy the reach you need to be efficient for advertisers with the intimacy you need to be effective for them. Add value to audiences by the addition of appropriate advertising messages. 

High reach + high composition. It’s a beautiful thing and something to dwell on.

Behavioral vs. Contextual Targeting — The Verdict

It seems like last year’s video buzz has ebbed, and for the moment the spotlight has been directed at behavioral targeting. Behavioral targeting comes in many forms, including but not limited to: 1) the analysis of clickstream behavior through tracking cookies, 2) remarketing to prior visitors of an advertiser or content site, and 3) the inspection of packets to determine where a web user has been based on their ISP connection.

ValueClick and AdBrite have just announced their versions of behavioral targeting at the OMMA Behavioral conference, and plenty of publishers and ad networks are responding to advertiser’s request for behavioral targeting with the hope of securing more ad dollars. The increased interest in behavioral targeting has raised the attention of not only consumers and web privacy advocates, but also legislators on Capitol Hill who are trying to determine where the line should be drawn in regards to tracking web surfing behavior.

Standards for behavioral targeting will undoubtedly be developed –perhaps through industry efforts, rather than government fiat. Addressing the governance issue, however, does not solve a fundamental problem with behavioral targeting: its reliance on historical behavior data to predict current consumer interest. Firms like NebuAd and Phorm view the clickstream behavior of a user as they surf from home, which allows them to extrapolate where the user has been and how recently they have been there. ValueClick’s new offer has the ability to predict what a customer may want, but not on the basis of what page they’re on at that moment. Because these campaigns are run broadly across networks, portals, and social media sites, they lack relevancy and content.

One of the advantages that ad networks like Burst Media have is that we represent publisher content. Our network is comprised of high quality, interest-based web sites in the mid- and long-tail of the Internet. This is the content that internet consumers search for, bookmark and invest in with their time and attention. Consider the fact that comScore Media Metrix’s June data release reported that the average time spent per visit to a search engine was 1.8 minutes, as opposed to the 5.5 minutes spent on a hobby site, or 4.4 minutes spent on travel information sites. It is clear where internet consumers are spending their time.

Placing a behaviorally targeted campaign next to specific content means an ad is viewed in a relevant environment to the consumer. An ad for a destination like Bermuda is appropriate if the visitor, having previously visited a booking engine and a Bermuda Tourism site, then sees the ad promoting a hotel or attraction on a sports site. Consumers engaged and invested in that environment view the ad in content they eagerly seek out, they care about, and most importantly, they trust. They are more receptive to the content, and likewise to the advertiser. What better place for an advertiser’s message?

Increasingly, high quality specialty content web sites allow for a degree of behavioral “hyper-targeting”. This type of targeting marries content targeting with behavioral targeting and allows advertisers to deliver a highly focused message in extremely focused content. An example of behavioral “hyper targeting” would be a tourist board that targets active travel researchers by placing an ad on travel sites and booking engines. The impact? Behavior + content = results.