Friday, May 18, 2007

Future of small Behavioral Targeting Networks is grim

With Google, MSFT and Yahoo buying Doubleclick, Aquantive and RightMedia receptively and more acquisitions coming in near future, seems like these giants will own the online advertising space. Most of the acquired or acquirers have behavioral targeting capabilities and together they broaden their reach and strengthen their capabilities. (Check out my other posts on the same subject
Behavioral Targeting Moves by Yahoo and Google and Google and Behavioral Targeting) With such large networks in the market does it make sense to have standalone behavioral ad networks such as Revenue Science Tacoda? These networks don’t even have their own ad serving system they just provide the technology to identify segments and then rely on other ad servers like double click or atlas to serve behaviorally targeted ads. Google/Docublick, Yahoo/RightMedia and Microsoft/Aquantive all have or are building behavioral targeting capabilities (technology) plus they have the reach.

I believe Behavioral Targeting will become important but advertisers are long ways out from just relying on behavioral targeting. Behavioral Targeting is one part of the whole targeting mix. With Google, Yahoo and MSFT with their vast reach further strengthened by these acquisition do not need smaller behavioral targeting networks (with limited reach) when they can do it own their own. Advertisers/Agencies also don’t need to worry about several smaller networks when they can use one of the exiting ones such as Google, Yahoo or MSFT.

What do you think?

1 comment:

  1. This is a very interesting question.

    One way to think about it is that perhaps targeting will be more appropriate for display or branded advertising, and as such there will be a role for independent players who can specialize in those areas, not as networks per se, as that term is used, but as analytics providers developing new segments.

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