Targeted Ads Mine Social Connections

Tom Phillips - President and CEO Media6Degrees

Media6Degrees is a relatively new type of ad targeting company, one that mines online social connections to deliver advertising not only to a company's customers but also to the people who are connected to them. eMarketer senior analyst Debra Aho Williamson spoke with president and CEO Tom Phillips about his company's approach to social ad targeting, the challenges of managing data ownership and what might make social targeting really take off.

eMarketer: What is Media6Degrees' concept of social ad targeting?

Tom Phillips: It's quite different than the common perception. The way we view social targeting is using Web data to construct custom audiences for brands at scale. That data tends to be enabled by the social Web, but it is not literally social media data.

"Instead of using demographics as the basis for constructing an audience, we use data that comes from connections between prospects and customers."

What we do is turn the old model of demographic targeting on its head. Instead of using demographics as the basis for constructing an audience, we use data that comes from connections between prospects and customers.

So we start with a base of brand loyalists, as we call them. Those are our seeds. We get those directly from the clients when we sign them up. Then we examine and evaluate—with our technology and our algorithm—all of the connections we can observe between the [Web] browser of the brand loyalist and other [Web] browsers. We can identify an audience based on the data.

eMarketer: When you refer to connections, do you mean actual social network friend connections?

Mr. Phillips: All of our connections at this stage are derived from common visitation of rarely visited content. It sounds obscure, but if you think about it, it's not. We look at sites the browsers of our brand loyalists are visiting, and we look to sites that are not visited frequently. Personal pages and photo sharing pages are good—but not exclusive—examples of that.

And then we look at other browsers we find at those same pages. And those are the connections that we value, that we find are distinctive and good predictors of shared brand affinity.

eMarketer: So it's not an explicit connection between Person X and Person Y on Facebook, but noticing that Person Y has looked at photos or blog postings that Person X has done and assuming a connection based on that information?

Mr. Phillips: Yes. But it could be someone I don't know; we both end up at the same obscure food blog or political blog or sports blog—or whatever it may be. And it's all empirical, so the value of those particular connections is something we weigh and measure as we run campaigns, and we find the most productive of those connections.

eMarketer: How does Media6Degrees operate in terms of mining those connections for your clients?

"The two metrics we measure our performance by are view-throughs to site visits and view-throughs to conversions."

Mr. Phillips: The business we have is a performance ad network. The way we then take advantage of those connections is by running performance campaigns for major marketers. The two metrics we measure our performance by are view-throughs to site visits and view-throughs to conversions.

eMarketer: What do clients want to accomplish when they come to Media6Degrees?

Mr. Phillips: They want performance. They're looking at those two primary metrics—site visits and conversions.

eMarketer: What's in the future for social targeting?

"If all the trends are in our favor, then we'll do a better job finding audiences for marketers than the conventional way."

Mr. Phillips: I don't think we've made demographic targeting obsolete, but I think this approach is more important. If all the trends are in our favor, then we'll do a better job finding audiences for marketers than the conventional way.

eMarketer: Are there key hurdles that need to be crossed before the industry can really take off?

Mr. Phillips: More competition would help us. Honestly, if Facebook started talking about doing this kind of thing—they would do it differently, right, they have different kinds of data than we're getting—then it would help us. If they could move beyond demographics and think about the data in the more abstracted form, and construct audiences that way, it would be huge for us.

http://www.emarketer.com/mobile/article_m.aspx?R=1007578

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