Because we believe data is the future of marketing. It will govern nearly all interactions between consumers and companies, creating a more valuable, informed experience for both. We also believe data-enabled marketing is still in its early stages-and only technological innovation can drive it forward.
interclick's years of experience in behavioral targeting gave us a key insight: first and second generation data targeting platforms were falling behind the evolution of the online advertising market. In their time, these platforms were important industry innovations. But largely based on older technologies, they had trouble with new developments in data, inventory and messaging.
That's why we designed our proprietary data valuation platform, Open Segment Manager (OSM). Our goal was to develop the most relevant and capable data valuation platform in the marketplace. We identified four core areas where innovations were needed:
Managing many diverse and dynamic data sources
There's a big difference between integrating with multiple data sources and managing them. A platform must do more than apply one type of data at a time, or handle simple combinations. It must leverage all available data for your campaign simultaneously. It must be able to manage new and changing taxonomies, variable audience qualities, multiple pricing structures, dynamic audience distributions, and much more. And it must be able to consume any type of data from any source-even ones that do not yet exist.
Sophisticated abilities to build and manage targeting audiences
Any platform can target an audience or two for a single campaign. But an ideal platform requires far more sophistication, including the ability to build any articulated audience, easily create testing and reuse segments, incorporate real-time feedback, and provide information on performance, distribution, growth, and cost across a myriad of inventory sources.
A completely new approach to analyzing data effectiveness and value
Analytics was the area we believed needed the most innovation. We wanted to move the focus from index-based "tendency reports" to more relevant analysis, answering such core questions as "Does this data improve my ad campaign?" and "How much is this data worth to the marketer in financial terms?" By incorporating campaign performance, data cost, inventory cost, targeting restraints, and other real-world factors, OSM's analytics guide marketers to the best choices from innumerable available options.
Solve the scale issue in behavioral targeting
The biggest challenge in data targeting was the perceived lack of scale. The scale issue partly stemmed from technical and statistical problems. But we also believed that "single algorithm" approaches had severe limitations. OSM's new multi-algorithm approach overcomes this by appropriately dealing with core statistical challenges faced in digital advertising: enormous dimensionality, sparsity, noise, rare events, and more.
After 18 months of design and prototyping, OSM began powering the interclick network in late 2009. Since then, OSM has successfully powered thousands of campaigns, nearly doubling our business in less than a year. interclick has become one of the largest players in online data, effectively managing and leveraging one of the most comprehensive targeting sets in the market. With OSM's version 2 in early 2010, we provided demos of the platform to leading clients, receiving enthusiastic feedback on its functionality and design.
OSM is a major step in the development of digital advertising. It has created significant value for our customers. As interclick grows toward the future, we'll continue to refine and evolve OSM's capabilities to give our clients the winning edge.
