The Chair of OMMA Behavioral got up and said a few words. $775 million spent on online behavioral targeted advertising this year, $1.1 billion next year, over $4 billion in 2012. Since last OMMA Behavioral, privacy has become issue Number One. Introduced Dave Morgan:

The former chair of TACODA, head of AOL Global Ad Sales, and the field’s most visible evangelist, Dave Morgan offers his vision for the future of behavioral targeting. And it may not be what you think, as Dave pursues the contrarian’s view of marketer adoption, public policy and likely market leadership. Also currently the Chair of The Tennis Company (which owns Tennis and Smash magazines).

(Whoops — the first two talks weren’t ‘keynotes’; they were ‘workshops’. I don’t really understand the difference — I didn’t do any more work than I’m going to do for this one.)

Dave used to be a lawyer — but he’s well-recovered now! He’s not a tchnologist but he’s always tried to understand computer technology. More Silicon Alley approach rather than Sillicon Valley — business implications of technology rather than technology itself.

He’s really excited about the substantial market being created in behavioral, that it’s a market that people understand, that there’s a lot of investment and a lot of opportunity, but it’s not new — it’s been around for 30-35 years. This was always one of the critical promises of the information superhighway: addressable, measurable advertising. A lot of early vendors employed these technologies right in the beginning.

He remembers very early in Real Media doing a presentation? to Progressive Networks (now Real Networks) — recognized that you could put cookies and get information, and that Progressive Networks was exposed (you could see everyone in their network), so they made banners with people’s names on them (“Sarah, we’ve been expecting you.”) — this side of it isn’t new.

What is new is the market opportunity.

About people, not just pages, delivering those ads according to historic, actual inferred behavior.

First: most of the ad inventory on the Internet today is dramatically underutilized. How many times do you go to a web page and say, “Wow! That’s a great ad!” (Never.) The only time that happens is in search. This means we’re doing a lousy job, but it also means there’s a lot of opportunity.

There’s no question that when you serve an ad not just based on context but on behavior as well, if you do it right, you can dramatically improve results. In many cases doing behavioral well means you’re going to suppress clickthrough rates (more targeted audience) and conversions are going to go up.

Average yield of behavioral pages went from 30 cents to $4.25 (which pages? I missed it)

Because yield of social media pages is so low right now (7 or 8 cents), being able to yield 11 cents would dramatically change the economic landscape of social media.

One of the macro issues and one of the big drivers for him personally was the emergence of the big screen (TV) on IP networks. We can now see in the mid- and short-term IP-enabled advertising on tv screens in the majority of American homes certainly within 5 years and likely within 3.

Scientific Atlanta is now owned by Cisco (world’s largest Internet router). We have Comcast moving a lot of their own set-top boxes. IP-enabled DVRs. At least this will mean the capacity to measure advertising on a home-by-home basis, as well as the ability to deliver addressable advertising.

Not just looking at what is the opportunity for behavioral on the PC, but also on the TV, which is a much more compelling format. Also mobile, although he’s not sure how much of a role it’s going to play — not a great data format, great data capture, highly regulated industry.

We are looking at a business that is in the multiple billions of dollars very quickly without even leaving the US. The idea that it will be a $10 billion market in 4-5 years isn’t crazy.

Every day you hear that Google is testing something that makes it more about the person and less about the data. DoubleClick purchase fantastic — massive database of behaviors.

He thinks there are a number of challenges that we have to deal with in order to make this industry develop and mature to its potential.

The first is that he lived through the first big development of the Web market and the bubble and the crash. Without question, he hears and sees elements of ‘99 and 2000 today. It’s not because there aren’t great fundamentals, it’s because people are taking their eye off the ball and not solving the basic problems of blocking and tackling. We have to talk less and less about the techniques and more about the problems we’re solving and the solutions we’re offering. He says until it becomes relevant to our parents and the people we know in Peoria, the market will be limited.

We know how to optimize inventory, maximize yield, increase effectiveness… If we don’t have a value proposition to consumers, we’re going to have a big problem. We can offer a system that has a 10x yield, but if there’s no value proposition to the consumer, we have nothing.

We also have to start looking outside of the PC and towards the TV — it’s a more compelling presentation, certainly for advertising.

It’s great to see people in the supply chain (Omniture and creative and analytics) using these tools because one of the biggest challenges to growth is bottlenecks on the consumption side. We can deliver targeting on a massive scale, but if we don’t have creative to deliver to them it isn’t going to be very useful. Understanding how to take out bottlenecks in the ecosystem is going to be critical.

Public policy: without question public policy is a huge issue for us. All we need to do is get a little perspective on what’s happened with people who have come before. Tech companies need liberal arts people to think about issues. He’s spent a lot of time in Washington and the biggest issue is that you get lumped into the spyware box.

Seven senators said spyware polls in the top three of constituent issues and sometimes number one. They need to get rid of spyware and they believe that whatever damage is done to the behavioral advertising industry is acceptable collateral damage. A lot of work to be done to overcome this situation — email randy (AT) iab (DOT) net and contribute to IAB PAC to make sure we’re being heard in Washington.

Great presentation.

Matt Boyd is the SVP of US Media from ValueCick. They just launched Precision BT: predictive behavioral targeting.

They handed out laser pointers and the guy put up multiple choice questions, then asked us to point at the answer — what a great way to engage people at the start!

How should our industry best handle the privacy issue? (most people said education)

Increasing spend on behavioral targeting is attracting far more vendors

Joshua? Koran somebody came up — obviously the more tech guy — to talk about the behavioral targeting landscape

Behavioral targeting enables marketers to match creative to visitors, based on their prior activities

In the shifting landscape, as we begin to use this data for more activities, we’ll begin to shift the name as well. As behavioral data becomes more mainstream, we’l need to change the name because we don’t just use it for targeting

Why is BT growing faster than contextual? Contextual doesn’t discriminate between the drive-by browsers and the enthusiasts who are not in-market

Behavioral targeting identifies the most qualified customers, based on frequency and recency of observed behavior

Ad Server identifies best context to reach each consumer — requires extensive reach to deliver BT with scale

When you’re writing an email to a friend, you’re unlikely to click away from the email even for a highly relevant ad

Behavioral targeting approaches:

• How many events?
  • Retargeting (single events)
  • Inferred interests (multiple events) — have to have an incredible investment in collecting, processing, etc
• What do you do with them?
  • Vendors differ in inputs, categorization, process and outputs, scale and how they deal with PII
• Cluster (Tacoda)
  • Visitors are assigned to a single cluster at any given time
  • Finite number of available clusters
  • Problem is that people have more than one interest
• Business Rules (RevenueScience)
  • Marketer defines segments in a manual process
  • Requires ongoing testing and monitoring
• Predictive (ValueClick Media)
  • Groups visitors based on predicted future activities
  • Multiple interest attributes per visitor
  • Continually adapts to changing behavior

Transforming experiences into profiles

Their BT technology assigns visitors to segments based on their likelihood to click or convert in hundreds of categories:

• Predictive (based on likely future performance)
• Granular (goal-driven algorithm assigns visitors to multiple segments in real-time, providing more timely and accurate predictions)
• Adaptive

Precision BT uses predictive technology to help you reach the right consumers, while their ad server optimization reaches them at the right place and time

Cricket Wireless phones case study from Red Door Interactive. Goal for Cricket is always to increase online purchases of phones and calling plans. Solution: ValueClick Media recommended a geo-targeted run of network campaign with optimization and precision retargeting, and Precision Profiles mobile segment. Overall conversions outperformed other media partners 11 to 1.

Pretty impressive. I’ll be talking to Matt Boyd later this morning.

I’m blogging today from OMMA Behavioral, a behavioral targeting conference being put on by the same folks who publish Search Insider (which I write for). This is an absolutely fantastic conference for me to be at, because it is 100% aligned with what VortexDNA is doing.?

Questions they’re hearing from publishers:

1. How do I hit my revenue targets?
2. How do I increase my audience size?
3. How can I simplify my advertising relationships?

Yahoo! is the largest publisher on the Web. They’re ranked among the top 3 sites in 26 key categories: email, real estate, web hosting, home pages, etc.

A new OPEN Yahoo!: We’re opening our doors and making the people, insights and technology we use to grow Yahoo! available to partners for the 1st time

By combining their global reach with their partners’ unique strengths they can each deliver unmatched solutions to advertisers and drive new growth

A foundation for results: Powerful, flexible and scalable tech platforms and services powered by insighes to increase relevance, etc.

Acquisitions over the past year — Yahoo Advertising Services, Yahoo Search Marketing, Right Media, BlutLithium, Maven — their potfolio spans their existing strength to the world’s largest ad exchange and cool video content management and ad management platform, have combined all these teams together for a team responsible for the whole package.

Integrated Advertiser and publisher platform — comprehensive

• guaranteed & preemptory campaign delivery
• behavioral targeting/remarketing
• open exchange platform/ad network management
• professional services
• contextual ad serving platform
• video content management & publishing
• video advertising platform

Your users also spend a lot of time on Yahoo! — you can leverage these insights to fuel revenue growth and create better user experiences

Are seeing as high as 300% improvements in clickthrough rates by running the right ad at the right time. Smart ads can create dynamic ads based on individual user behavior. Higher eCPMs — understanding audience intention enables premium pricing. (KC: emphasis mine — this is the key value proposition for VortexDNA!) Insights make your users even more valuable.

Yahoo!’s global sales force helps publishers access new sources of demand for their audiences. A single partnership and a unified sales foce across all demand categories to grow revenue — Video Advertising Relationships with over 75% of the top TV advertisers. Relationships with thousands of top brand marketers, expertise in remarketing and behavioral targeting capabilities, monetize user searches with global sponsored link marketplace, they manage your network relationships to maximize yield, video advertising relationships

It’s likely that your high-value customer segments overlap with Yahoo!’s audience by as much as 80%, and view as many as 28x pages on Yahoo! sites. Retargeting your user on Yahoo properties creates incremental sales opportunities for your sales force — with your highest value customers

Yahoo is opening up our starting points — which means we will now send our users to you.

From front page placements on Yahoo, some people are seeing over 1 million uniques in one day. Us Magazine clocked the 2nd highest traffic day in their history.

“Obligatory partner slide” — AT&T, Estee Lauder, a hundred others

They provide the broadest range of technology and compelling opportunities to grow revenue and traffic.

If you are asking any of these questions, they want to hear from you:

1. What is your inventory really worth?
2. How much is every 1% increase in yield worth to you?
3. How much would you need to get a 10% increase in traffic?

A few questions, including how behavioral targeting companies can integrate with Yahoo!… very interesting.

War for Talent: Realigning Academic Pursuits with What Business Demands

Shekhar Murthy is presenting this paper on behalf of herself and Padmaja N

Is war for talent for real?

Geography? In the changing globalized and competitive world, war for talent is escalating. Excess supply of talent in places like Mexico, Brasil, India.

Sociology? Who is affected? IT, Manufacturing, Marketing, Finance

Emerging tech advancements across the globe:

• Mexico ? construction
• Poland ? high tech, automotive
• Russia ? software engineering
• S Korea ? ICT, Genomics
• China ? Telecom, petrochem, pharma biotech nanotech
• Taiwan ? semiconductors

IT manpower gap (2009) Alarming shortfall in manpower. If you look at the IT scenario in India the total demand is 1,120,000 but total supply is only 885,000

Decreasing workforce: future recruitment crisis, demand for offshore talent, employable talent, skill gap, developing talent, hiring and retention of human capital, balance of power (employees have the power because of high demand), talent management

Emerging markets: countries in the transitional phase between the developing and developed status

Global talent supply: Asia produces 45% of science and tech engineering graduates Future growth of industry dependent on this talent

The way ahead:

• Sourcing People: Influence the quality of resource base, focus on enhancing supply
• Developing People: Continually move people from the learner category to expert category
• Engaging People: Talent management, nurture professional aspirations

Because of this competition for world talent, instead of looking for existing talent, it’s time to generate the talent

Focusing on the supply base: nurturing talent with 21st century skills: adaptability, high order thinking skills, sound reasoning skills with quality consciousness, lifelong self-directed learning, interactive behavioral and social competencies, result oriented professionals with practical knowledge
Pedagogy as the enabling factor: evaluation parameters

Portability, flexibility, scalability, economics of investment, collaborative learning, asynchronous mode of learning

Case study: MSIT creating global IT professionals

Their program is entirely focused on preparing students for their professional careers.

• Learning by doing, problem/story centered curriculum: Create virtual environments with role play — students taking the part of VP Engineering or VP Sales
• Soft Skills
• Team-based learning, collaborative work
• Mastery model — instead of 40 or 50% they have to get between 70-90% to pass
• Mentors ? for every 10 students they have one mentor
• e-Learning ? rich resources ? course being offered in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University

Salient findings of case study

• Project-centric curriculum has been a critical success factor
• Soft skills training has turned students into all rounded professionals
• Instructor led component to be strengthened
• Internships can give the professional edge
• Weblogs and focus learning groups can promote knowledge sharing

Conclusion
Good relationships between academia and industry
Learning emphasizing on practical knowledge
Mentoring with collaborative learning
Introduction of mobile learning, podcasting and game-based learning

Swarm Shopping: The Simulation of Herd Behavior

Supermarkets have two opposite goals: retailers want to keep the customers in the store as long as possible, customers want to leave as soon as they’re done shopping

More profit and sales are the number one priority for every manufacturer to live, succeed and stay in business

Two ways:

1. out?store tactics (direct mail, etc.)
2. in-store tactics (bargains, everyday low prices, limited offers, etc.)

They looked at real-time datamining, i.e., while customers are in the market

Impulse shopping: pure impulse, reminder impulse, suggestion impulse, planned impulse (sale or bargain)
Impulse shopping accounts for 40% of all shopping in supermarkets (wow!)

He keeps skipping past interesting-looking slides

People have a natural tendency to follow the crowd ? knowing what is being purchased by other people in real-time will affect others to purchase the same product

Ideally the implementation of our model can provide customers with a better shopping experience and retailers with a higher sales level, thus easing the tension that we described earlier between the customers’ and the stores’ goals

Using RFID shopping carts, provide users with real-time information about popularity of items, real-time, personalized offers based on what they’re currently buying

The Swarm-Moves simulator attempts to capture the collective average choice that customers are taking ? no need to worry about WHY (age, sex, status, pay, etc.), just WHAT

Database contains the inventory of swarm mall (the virtual supermarket)

120 products with various attributes

Customers do not care about others’ purchases until it reaches a certain threshold

Goes through the simulation and the equation that produces suggestions, based on that threshold

Swarm model is able to increase sales by 29% over just using discounts and promotions

How will people trust the system? The supermarket can just add ‘cheaters’ to influence the count. So they tested that, and found that they would need as many cheaters as customers in order to influence the system! Not feasible (KC note: it’s really a silly argument. No customer will ever investigate the technology to find out that level of detail — they’ll either trust the system or they won’t. And in the end it may not even matter — everybody knows laugh tracks are fake but we still laugh louder and longer if they’re used.)

Effective marketing tool for supermarkets to increase their sales volume based on collective choice of customers

Environmental information can be used to influence customers to buy more on impulse

Future work: Addition of multiple entrance and exits, combine bargains, effect of other factors, like price, weight, size, etc.

With RFID, amount due is already prepared when you get to the front of the store

KC: I think this guy could be a billionaire in the next year or two…

GroupShare — Designing an Awareness-Rich Online Groupware System

Groupware
Groupware is software to support groupwork
It can include online learning environments, email, discussion forums
Groupware can be organization-based (e.g., Lotus Notes, MS Exchange), or fully online (e.g., BSCW, Yahoo! Groups)
Online groupware is becoming increasingly sophisticated, and is often free/cheap to use

Awareness
Awareness defined as ‘an understanding of the activities of others, which provides a context for your own activity’ (Dourish & Bellotti, 1992)
Implicit and taken for granted in face-to-face group work (if all of us fall asleep, he can just see it and stop talking), but all but gone in online group work
Seen as crucial to effective online group work
Awareness mechanisms are features in groupware which help to increase awareness
Awareness systems have to be autonomous ? you can’t ask users to upload their awareness information

GroupShare
GroupShare is a fully online groupware application built by Baatard as basis for ongoing awareness-related research

Built with two core design goals:

• To be as centralized, flexible and generically applicable as possible
• To provide a rich set of awareness mechanisms

Currently implemented in a university environment

Showed demonstration of app ? files (can see comments, open, etc), asynchronous chat, awareness feature, forum, live chat, personal workspace showing files you’ve uploaded and trophies you’ve collected

GroupShare Awareness Mechanisms
GroupShare strives to provide a rich set of awareness mechanisms
These mechanisms recognize both direct and indirect participation to provide a better understanding of group members’ actions
Some mechanisms aim to specifically encourage sustained participation, and provide a better understanding of actions over time

• GroupShare Recent Activity: Simple event-based awareness mechanism, can be customized to suit needs (KC: kind of like FB NewsFeed)
• GroupShare File Statistics: lists number and timeframe of views, downloads and comments on shared files, per user; paints a picture of how group members have responded to a file shared within the group
• GroupShare Trophies: Trophies are collectible rewards for participation-related events and milestones; encourage participation and gives group members an ida of the participation of others (e.g., contributor, silver = 5 submissions). He says it’s a silly thing but people go crazy for it!
• GroupShare Participation Awareness: processes and aggregates logs of all actions to provide an at-a-glance measure of participation

(KC) This is a great system! The awareness features are sorely lacking in BlackBoard, which is the de facto standard for e-learning

Groupware design recommendations

1. Keep the system simple by avoiding superfluous or overly complex features, while still supporting a wide range of group work activities
2. Provide multiple forms of communication, both synchronous and asynchronous
3. Provide a rich set of awareness mechanisms to encourage and support sustained participation and collaboration
4. Minimise the cognitive load of the system by using a simple web-based interface and allowing users to create content in the applications they are accustomed to
5. Avoid building unnecessary amounts of structure or workflow control into the system ? make the system as generic and flexible as possible

Unfortunately, only available for research purposes ? maybe if somebody gives him money for it he’ll make it available elsewhere!