Brad Alles, Exec VP Sales, Yahoo Canada
Brad Roker, CTO, Adzilla New Media
Presentation #1 – Brad Alles, Yahoo Canada
It was a dark and stormy night, and the yet-to-be famous but very savvy Internet marketing community of Vancouver gathered at the downtown YWCA to hear the latest wisdom from Yahoo and a Vancouver start-up about the trends in online advertising that are accompanying the massive shifts in usage and reader attention to the Internet.
Steve Deller set the agenda for the evening, and after some mercifully short and sweet blab la, introduced Brad Alles of Yahoo and Robert Rogaine of Adzilla as the evening’s presenters.
Brad Alles of Yahoo kicked things off with a presentation titled “Truly, Madly, Deeply Engaged – The New Era for Marketing to Canadians Online”.
Engagement is of course the new word du jour amongst Internet marketing strategists (and sometimes it seem like everybody else, too). It seems we now live and work in a world of ever-shortening attention spans and in which we get our most vital information via Twitter tweets (such as where to meet for drinks after another day in the electronic salt mines thinking up new ways to get and keep people “engaged” with good ole marketing content) or other missives that we sort ourselves into the inboxes of our social network “friends”.
Anyway, Brad confirmed for us that more and more of peoples’ attention is engaged online, but that often this attention is pre-conversion (marketing speak for people still buy in stores, by and large). Who knew ? He then went on to describe how Yahoo has been asking itself (with the help of studies) whether and how targeted advertising might impact “lift” (the effectiveness of advertising in stimulating or supporting purchasing behaviour after exposure to online advertising.
He went into detail about studying demographics, basic searching and browsing behaviour and then “inferred” behaviour which can be used to target advertising to specific groups (which I have always thought of as understanding your customer and supplying what I have always called “ambient” advertising … like beer ads with the SuperBowl, or Rolex watches somewhere near a feature on exotic Italian supercars).
The key point Brad wanted to, and did, make in the first half of the presentation was that targeting based on behaviours works and is a good thing, from an online marketers perspective.
In the second half of the presentation, Brad turned to social networks and the effectiveness of word of mouth, reviews and recommendations being targeted and distributed into social networks. The basic answer from Yahoo’s perspective is “Yes !” .. it is effective to target and distribute ads into social networks. I have a sense that all of the attendees at the IIMA evening are aware that social networking online is currently a “hot” phenomenon, but that social networking and word of mouth review and recommendation is as old as the hills, figuratively speaking ( appoint made by Brad in introducing the social networking section). It’s sometimes amazing how much we have to dissect and explore human behaviour in new or unfamiliar contexts, when the old maxim “plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose” is so often appropriate.
The two key points offered in Brad’s well-delivered presentation were:
- Online Advertising Drives In-Store Revenue
- The Internet is Key in Pre-Shopping Research (especially if you run into or seek out advocates)
The basic answers to the three presentation agenda items ?
- Is Targeting a true game changer ….. Yes !
- Can Social Networking drive the bottom line ? …. Yes !
- Online Marketing: Offline revenue driver ? …. Yes !
Presentation #2 – Brad Roker, CTO Adzilla
With the second presentation, Brad Roker mnoved the audience into mopre technical territory with his explanation of ZillaCasting ™ , Adzilla New Media’s leading (or bleeding?) edge offering that embeds clickstream analysis into servers at ISP’s. This allows for aggregation and analysis of Internet users’ clickstreams at arms-length distance (figuratively), and purports to create an “ad ecosystem” in which:
- Ads can be delivered with greater reach and frequency and more predictable targeting
- Publishers and ad networks can generate more / additional revenue from revshare deals (presumably by increased clickthroughs and conversions)
- ISP’s can participate in revshare deals, given that they manage their captive users experience (in a sense .. more on this later)
- Users will have a better browsing experience (faster, more relevant ads)
It is probably not a secret to anyone involved in Internet marketing that there has been (and continues to be) a large shift in terms of advertising spend to the Internet. Along with all the marvels a digital interconnected infrastructure (aka the Web) brings us, there is unprecedented opportunity to aggregate, mine and analyze content that represents peoples’ “behaviour” and, using the results of that analysis, target and deliver advertising to the places and spaces where people are browsing, interacting or engaging in prohibited activities of one sort or another with alien life forms (Second Life ? 
.
Brad gave us a good, short and clear explanation of ZillaCasting ™ , what’s in it for advertisers, for publishers and ad networks, for ISPs and for Internet users. The presentation (available on the IIMA web site) is laid out clearly and (while somewhat technical, maybe perhaps, for some) is easy to understand. The basic point of the presentation was that through embedding the technology and what it does at the ISP level, it makes the possibly intrusive part of clickstream analysis and data mining less visible to Internet users whilst allowing their behaviour to be targeted and thus enabling the placement of advertising with higher CPM rates.
During the Q&A perid, there were some attempts to understand how users might feel about this targeting, given that the issue of privacy and nion-intrusion is always (and will always be) an Internet advertising hot button. Brad assured the audience that ZillaCasting ™ complies with all ISP’s terms of service regardiung privacy, but I got the sense that some of the attendees (and I was among them) felt that it may be somewhat tricky explaining this to the end users who are not apathetic, and not necessarily inclined to offer up their clickstream behaviours to advertisers just through signing up for Internet access. I suppose time and experience will tell .. and if it turns out that people do not care so much, it may well be that Adzilla’s Zillacasting ™ will have made the targeting of ads based on user behaviour even more a part of the infrastructure of the Web than it is today.
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