In another example that investments in Internet advertising startups are far from cooling, eXelate is announcing a $4M investment from Carmel Ventures.
The Israeli company offers a marketplace called the “eXelate Targeting eXchange” which is focused on what they are calling “Delayed-Ads.”
Here’s how it works: An ad network participating in eXelate’s exchange purchases from publishers the right to place Delayed-Ad cookies on users with vertical-specific interests (travel, automotive, etc.). When such users later visit publisher sites that fall under the realm of the ad network, they are shown targeted ads relevant to the interest-specific site they received their Delayed-Ad cookie on. Hence, “Delayed-Ad.”
Is this basically a twist on behavioral targeting and retargeting? Generally speaking yes, except that eXelate restricts itself from building user profiles like traditional behavioral ad networks such as TACODA. Nor does it retarget traffic within the ad networks employing its system.
eXelate may not be revolutionary, but it doesn’t have to be. The online marketing pie is huge and many players, even the non-revolutionary ones, can still claim their stake. This is especially true in international markets where the US-based heavy hitters are at a cultural disadvantage.
I did not get the concept. Anybody explain in plain English 2.0?
Stop with the Crunchbase plugs. It’s as annoying as Adsense. We get it. You have another little site to plug.
Great idea, wish I had thought of it!
I’m surprised no one else had done this yet. It takes the heavy lifting out of targeting ads.
I’m surprised no one else has done this yet.
I think I’ll take it for a spin and report back…
Allen
Famesource.com – Claim your fame!
http://www.famesource.com
Yeah, the CrunchBase plug ins are f’n annoying…geezus.
“Nor does it retarget traffic within the ad networks employing its system.”
ok so where do they set the cookie?
Velioncho @1
Looks like, as opposed to traditional Ads which show you sequence/personalized ads based on what you’re looking at now, that their network will show you ads on what you were previously interested in.
Example could be that you go to http://www.ford.com and get cookied. Now you go to CNN.com which also is in the eXelate network and instead of getting CNN ads like joe public, you’ll get automotive ads.
Now here’s an idea for a startup: “Nah, not interested in this anymore” buttons overlaid on ads, or a “I’m in the market for” profile and temporary mailbox system.
Why do you guys think the crunchbase plugin is annoying… I personally think its a nice summary. It reminds me of the opening/closing summary on a music video … back when MTV used to show music videos
The challenge for these services is that they need to have massive inventory. Let’s say I’m at a travel site and I go to other sites in the service. I’ll get shown a travel ad. If they don’t have a lot of travel related advertisers I’ll see the same travel ad over and over again. So for each ‘vertical’ they service they’ll need a couple dozen advertisers so the banners displayed are as fresh as they are relevant.
Another problem is you can’t know why the person was on the original site. If I go to a baby site once to buy a present I may be tagged a parent and shown lots of baby ads that will never get clicked.
So for this to work you need both large-scale click history and diversity of advertisers within the vertical.
We control ads now!
We are ‘hell-bent’ on succeeding in ads …
We just had our FAD (Financial Analysts Day) in Redmond, Wash; and what a FAD we had!
I threw out a couple of crowd pleasing zingers, like I tend to do and the crowd of employees went crazy!
Doing my patented “preacher karate chop” in the air, I whipped arround and screamed:”We are hell-bent and determined to allocate the talent! the resources! the money! the innovation to absolutely become a powerhouse in the ad business! Say yeeees!”
Ray Ozzie and Bill did a little dance in the aisle.
I then did a linebacker stance and exclaimed:
“We are tackling disruptive technology changes head-on, namely the shift to advertising-supported Web services!” Then I stomped on a styrofoam Google logo!
The crowd was going ape!
I wound it up with the old pep-rally arm wave while chanting:
“We are going to be an advertising com-pa-ny,
and we are going to be a devices com-pa-ny!”
The whole crowd joined in;
“We are going to be an advertising com-pa-ny,
and we are going to be a devices com-pa-ny!”
“We are going to be an advertising com-pa-ny,
and we are going to be a devices com-pa-ny!”
“We are going to be an advertising com-pa-ny,
and we are going to be a devices com-pa-ny!”
I did my running skip (high fiving everyone) off stage …..
Whew! That was some FAD!
http://fakestev...er.blogspot.com
@TedRheingold, so the upshot of your analysis is that they’d be a great acquisition for Google, Yahoo!, et al., as those big players all have massive inventory, lots of click data history, etc. Though unless it’s patented, I’m guessing that the big networks can just add this functionality–and as a few others have said–I’m surprised they haven’t already… Or have they?
@BradC…..While I think this is clever, this would be an example of a bad software patent. Providing a cookie throughout a ad network is not new. I believe Engage/CMGI back in the dotcom days provided a similar functionality where if you visited sites on their network they would display different ads based on the profile they built up based on the sites you visited.
Sounds like exelate is a derivative of this idea. If true, it shouldn’t be patentable (IMHO)….But who knows, I’m not a patent examiner and I don’t play one on TV.
Nice idea but I delete my cookies each time I close my browser and wipe the HD clean of any tracking systems as well on a daily basis… so this “ad-delayed” thing wouldn’t work on me… and as people get smarter about their online presence, for them neither. Now, if it tracked IP address instead of cookies – then you may be onto something.
Jon
It is not that much easy for behavioral targeting through such system though I have not gone into depth into that site.
So Misery (#7) got it right except one point – eXelate doesn’t serve the ads – actually the Ad Networks (ie ValueClick) serves them. We just let them place thier Delayed Ads and based on those Delayed Ads, when they find the user on one of thier sites, they serve an actual ad to him. Try the demo on our site it’s very self explenatory.
Now this answers Ted Rheingold (#9)’s concern as we just have to partner with Ad Netwroks and they bring the big volume. We are actully already working with 15 such Ad Networks, 4 of which are in the top 20 list of com score.
I hope this makes sense …
For me this seems to be nothing revolutionary. This kind of mixture between retargeting and behavioral targeting a la Tacoda (with a huge network of sites) is only evolutionary.
More interesting is the approach of predictions:
http://www.emar...info_sitesearch
Companies like nugg.ad (http://www.nugg.ad/en/) offer predictive behavioral targeting.