Check out the rest of Rob’s post here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rob-leathern/just-in-time-advertising_b_1177429.html?

Marketers can use the knowledge available in one social domain to inform targeting decisions in another, letting the full richness of data in the social web bleed through an entire portfolio of digital campaigns.

For example, LinkedIn lets advertisers target its users according to more then 140 sector classifications.   We took LinkedIn’s sector taxonomy and applied it to the 70,000+ workplaces addressable to Facebook advertisers.  We then looked at how fans of presidential candidate and Ames Straw Poll victor Michele Bachmann index by sector, on Facebook.

So, for example, a Michele Bachmann fan on Facebook is 3.4 times more likely to work for a religious institution that an average Facebook user.  The results jive pretty closely with what you might expect from a Republican primary candidate like Bachmann.  She indexes very highly against  stalwart Republican sectors like energy, defense, and religious institutions, and she performs poorly against traditionally liberal sectors like entertainment, technology, and education.

So, what cities on Facebook have the highest proportion of college graduates?

Find out now on our optim.al blog!

I am incredibly bullish on the future of the display business. Online advertising is now the second largest advertising medium, behind television, and  the growth in display is outpacing that of the overall ad market. New technologies are enabling incredibly exciting campaigns, as well as making it possible for advertisers of all sizes, large and small, to benefit from what display has to offer. Right now, the display business is estimated to be around $20-25 billion. At Google, we believe it has the potential to grow to $200 billion, as ad dollars continue to follow consumers online, and as the barriers to entry such as complexity and cost diminish. I believe we are in a new golden age of advertising, powered by technology, and I, for one, can’t wait to see what happens next.

Remember that Google also thinks that 75% of online advertising will be social by 2015. Which I certainly won’t argue with – we believe that this is a huge shift that people have not realized yet, for the most part. I don’t see how it’s a $200 billion business UNLESS it’s very different from just putting the same messages up in a banner online – that means interactivity, creativity and virality are paramount in the new advertising paradigm.

Audience valuation, the trends underlying it and how they change are all key parts of what we do everyday at XA.net. When you think about audience value, you should think about a few components – which I helpfully frame as questions here:

1. How difficult is it to identify this audience, find the audience, and is targeting it even possible at all? (fundamental, not trivial questions!)
2. What is the premium to target this audience versus the audience that contains it?
3. How much response lift does targeting this subset of the larger audience provide?
4. Does the targeting method/medium place any special constraints on the message you can deliver?
5. What operational costs are involved with targeting the audience via this methodology?
6. Is it possible to measure effectiveness using controls, and/or does showing something to this audience make it impossible to properly measure effectiveness (a la Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle)

A silly example to think through some of the above might be let’s say, identifying coffee drinkers. So while it is easy to identify someone who drinks coffee (ask them!), finding them in our chosen medium (online) is far more difficult than offline. The value of this audience is also probably fairly low compared to the cost to target it  — 54% of US adults drink coffee daily and so the general value of someone who is a coffee drinker may not actually be that high. In Part II, we’ll share some ideas and thoughts here on other ways to think about audience targeting, and provide some specific examples.

The idea is to compare the distribution of conversions or successes (e.g. sales of a product) as against the distribution of the online audience. So for a given segment, if I see 1.5% of the converted audience matching that segment, and 0.75% of the online audience typically being in that segment, I would have an index value of 200 ~ my converters are twice as likely to be in that group as an average online user.

Here is what a chart of this looks like for a single product, for example. The upper line is the conversion cumulative audience count by segment and below it in yellow is the segment distribution for the online audience. In this case we can see the first vertical line and box indicates that about 20% of the typical US online audience accounts for 40% of conversions — and depending upon what basis we pay for the segment data we have we could continue to buy data up to a point on the right.

We’re conducting this analysis for both cpmatic.com and optim.al clients right now to help come up with the unique audience-conversion concentration picture we can harness to drive extraordinary results!

Given the opportunity to speak about remarketing/retargeting, XA.net CEO Rob Leathern, was pleased with the crowds and session attendance and had this to say:

“People across online advertising disciplines are committed to learning all they can – to incorporate best practices and new technologies for improved campaign performance. Remarketing connects search and display advertising efforts like no other technology, and, when used correctly, can drastically improve conversion metrics for both mediums. It was good to see so many people engaged on the subject.”

Rob’s portion of the panel presentation focused on case studies that showed the best practices XA.net has used implementing retargeting/remarketing for clients’ display campaigns.

Check out Rob’s Introduction to Remarketing presentation slides.

Grill the Vendors: Real Time Bidding

According to some predictions, up to a third of network advertising may be moving through real-time bidding systems by the end of this year. This latest technology trend promises to match the right ad to the right person within milliseconds of their entering the page. The technology and the algorithms are complex, but do they always work as advertised? Do agencies and brands know what they are buying…and what they are buying into? Are the RTB systems out there working in the publisher’s best interests or the media buyers? We bring in some of the top competitors in the field for a class OMMA grilling in order to determine how RTB vendors differentiate themselves and answer the hard questions both publishers and media buyers must bring to the table.

If you’re going to be at the event and would like to catch up with us, send us an email.

Register and Get $400 Off OMMA Ad Nets with Code: ADNETSXA

The code is only good for the first 20 registrants, so act now!

The conference takes place on Monday, July 19, 2010 at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza, located on 2025 Avenue of the Stars, Los Angeles. We hope to see you there!

Rob will be featured on Tuesday, August 17th as a panelist during “Introduction to Remarketing”. In this session industry experts will share their experiences with Remarketing (also known as retargeting) and the impact it has had on advertisers’ overall ROI. The panelists will also address the lack of awareness and the issues that have arisen surrounding Remarketing as a result.

Lotame and XA.net Partner to Offer Audience Segments and Targeting Capabilities to Advertisers and Agencies

SAN FRANCISCO, CA–(Marketwire – June 1, 2010) –  Lotame (www.lotame.com) and XA.net (www.xa.net), pioneering providers of advertising technologies and services, have partnered to offer advertisers and agencies access to Lotame’s audience engagement segment data through XA.net’s advanced online media management and optimization platform.

“XA.net strives to provide advertisers and agencies the widest variety of robust, audience-targeting data available,” said Rob Leathern, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of XA.net. “Having the opportunity to add Lotame’s high-quality audience data into our platform represents a huge win for any client using our platform to optimize online media buys, campaigns, and creative.”

Advertisers and agencies no longer need to waste time and resources duplicating campaigns across multiple systems: They can utilize Lotame’s 23 audience segments directly through XA.net’s platform, and manage and optimize their online media buys across top publishers, ad exchanges and aggregators, reaching 94% of the US audience and significant international audiences.

“This partnership further empowers advertisers to drive meaningful engagement with Lotame’s data through XA.net’s platform and services, resulting in online advertising investment returns,” said Andy Monfried, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Lotame. “XA.net provides management and optimization in real- and near real-time through their highly intuitive media buying interface, so advertisers can make the best use of Lotame’s deep insight-driven audience segments.”

About Lotame and XA.net
Lotame (www.lotame.com) is a marketing technology company powered by the superior segmentation of audience data. Lotame’s flagship targeting and analytics platform, Crowd Control™, collects and interprets unstructured publisher data to make audience planning as easy as keyword buying. We activate audiences for advertisers with comprehensive online marketing solutions, provide publishers with multiple revenue streams from data and media, and sell to data buyers Lotame Audience Segments derived from our unparalleled knowledge of human behavior.

XA.net (www.xa.net) provides technologies and services that enable advertisers to buy, manage, and optimize online media and audience data through one intuitive, easy-to-use platform for the most efficient, targeted, and performance-driven ad spend possible. XA.net’s platform accesses inventory from all major publishers, ad exchanges, and aggregators, and data from a range of providers.