Do Yahoo, MSN, and AOL Have Something Google Doesn't?
As online and other emerging media become less about sites and more about user data, individual sites, ad networks, and even Google face an uphill challenge keeping up if the big three portals get the next step right.
A couple months ago I was in the market to buy a car. Having visited the major auto sites like Edmunds, cars.com, Yahoo autos and others, I wasn't surprised to see that nearly every ad I was served over those two months was auto-related. A fine example of behavioral targeting. However, in that same time frame I used the mobile web on my cell phone a number of times and never once saw an automotive ad. What a lost opportunity!
This is where the big three portals have a tremendous advantage of they can move quickly. Because they have subscriber or user data - and tons of it - and their users inevitably access their content from both mobile and online, the ability to target users from one medium to another seamlessly for an advertiser should be no problem at all.
Not to say that networks can't do this at all - it'll just be harder. An online network, mobile web network, and video game network could form an alliance to share and use data between media but how do you identify the person as they move from one medium to another? With Yahoo it's easy. They log on to check their email online, and then do the same on their phone. Not much guesswork there. However, online cookies don't transfer to other media. It would require behavioral partnerships with properties that do have access to consumers that log in across multiple media platforms and the ability to share and compile that data.
And what of Google? Well, if the DC acquisition does indeed go through, they'll have access to pretty much any and every piece of online data they could want. With mobile being a 2007 priority for DC, it brings us right back to the suggestion that one or all of the portals not just implement these capabilities, but that they do so very quickly.
A couple months ago I was in the market to buy a car. Having visited the major auto sites like Edmunds, cars.com, Yahoo autos and others, I wasn't surprised to see that nearly every ad I was served over those two months was auto-related. A fine example of behavioral targeting. However, in that same time frame I used the mobile web on my cell phone a number of times and never once saw an automotive ad. What a lost opportunity!
This is where the big three portals have a tremendous advantage of they can move quickly. Because they have subscriber or user data - and tons of it - and their users inevitably access their content from both mobile and online, the ability to target users from one medium to another seamlessly for an advertiser should be no problem at all.
Not to say that networks can't do this at all - it'll just be harder. An online network, mobile web network, and video game network could form an alliance to share and use data between media but how do you identify the person as they move from one medium to another? With Yahoo it's easy. They log on to check their email online, and then do the same on their phone. Not much guesswork there. However, online cookies don't transfer to other media. It would require behavioral partnerships with properties that do have access to consumers that log in across multiple media platforms and the ability to share and compile that data.
And what of Google? Well, if the DC acquisition does indeed go through, they'll have access to pretty much any and every piece of online data they could want. With mobile being a 2007 priority for DC, it brings us right back to the suggestion that one or all of the portals not just implement these capabilities, but that they do so very quickly.
posted by Jay Friedman - Goodway 2.0 @ 8:53 AM
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