Barry Diller’s InterActiveCorp announced a minor enhancement to the demographic and behavioral ad targeting available across its sites today—something it is calling “Audience Cubes.” Advertisers can now run ads targeted at different demographic slices including 18 to 34-year olds, sports fans, homeowners, and parents on 26 IAC sites (Citysearch, Evite, Match.com, Ticketmaster, and others). Judging from the coverage the announcement received, though, you would think that IAC just launched an entirely new ad network.
Some typical headlines:
Diller Fashions IAC Ad Network(Ad Age).
InterActiveCorp launches ad network, including for brands it’s ditching (Cnet).
Separate, Yet Together: IAC Creates Ad Network With Its Split Businesses (paidContent).
IAC To Bind Spin-off Companies In Ad Network (Silicon Alley Insider).
Sounds good, except that IAC has been selling ads across this very same ad network for the past three years. It’s called IAC Advertising Solutions. Maybe nobody noticed.
The company consolidated the ad serving technology from all its properties last year on Microsoft’s Atlas, and even before then was selling ads across the network. The news that this ad network will remain intact even once IAC splits into five separate companies is not really news.
And the fact that IAC is just now turning on some extra behavioral targeting capabilities is not that big a deal. Every advertising network is doing that. Even Yahoo.
(Photo by endolith).
This is good journalism. You listening MSM?
@Erick – Interesting observation!
I suppose you have to give them credit for the extra work in packaging/branding the new features. I think most companies (like M$,Google,Yahoo,etc) will do that too.
It’s just how companies build the hype and interest for these “new” products. And from the news, it looks like online advertising is focusing strongly on behavioral targeting for an awful long time. I think there is a much desired creativity/innovation to be filled in this void.
What’s next after behavioral targeting?
It will be something exciting
Best regards,
Darren Lee
http://www.adexcel.com
It is really slow news day.
way to attack the other sites!
In other news, Glam CEO puts on a new shirt, people think he took a shower
18-34?! Is that supposed to be that awesome “targeted advertising” I’ve heard so much about the internet being so good at? Even with all those data breaches and credit card thefts “18-34″ is the best they can do?
“Sports fans” = people on sports sites; “homeowners” = people on apartmenttherapy and home fixit sites. Is this really not as oldschool and pathetic as it sounds? What exactly is the problem that they’re providing a “solution” for?
Lots of question marks, I know, but that’s because “Audience Cubes” seem to be the answer to nothing.
Actually, this is new. Having done buys before, and working with them recently on targetting. What they have never done before this release was taking behavioural data from one property and aggregating it across multiple others.
Taking salary info from Match + mortgage application info from lendingtree + search queries from ask means your actual knowledge about a user is vastly higher than just inferring “high income” based on something like “visited the Lexus site”, which is what so many others do.
There are only a handful of companies in the world that can aggregate this kind of data (yahoo, facebook, google, IAC), and even fewer that are ACTUALLY doing it.
You can’t, for example, target based on someone’s use of Yahoo Mail, their tagging on Flickr, their searching on Yahoo and their favourite bands on Yahoo Music. Ditto Facebook.
The reality is most behavioural targetting is 2 dimensional at best. IAC’s created one of probably 3-4 truly 3 dimensional behavioural/historical ad server implementations on the planet.
Not that it’s perfect, just saying that it is actually new, and the AdAge article enumerates why/how. Listing it in your article as an example of bad journalism is shoddy at best.
Also, this offering doesn’t actually replace the other internal IAC ad network, which is actually just a cooperation engine internally to allow teams to cross-sell inventory.
nice ending “Even Yahoo.” *ouch* you guys really have it in for Yahoo. A second-place-still-profitable just doesn’t cut it at TC eh?
It’s unfortunate you fail to recognize the difference in selling individual sites and packaging the inventory based on user behavior. It’s much more attractive to both brands and advertisers because it segments customers in a format similarly used by companies, consultants, and strategy groups. Hint- it’s not one big mass market out there, and folks pay a premium for better access to their desired audience.
In the end, it’s a great “ATTENTION GRABBING HEADLINE” with (atypical for your site) poor analysis.
Repackaging happens everywhere so I don’t get the purpose of this article. TC repackages its content into pseudo-verticals to lure advertisers and increase page views. Repackaging is common in marketing. What’s the fuss?
Diller always seems to fail to create shareholder value since getting into the web full-time.
#7 and 9 nail it.. After reading the Ad Age article this does sound more new and interesting than TC makes it out here.
Barry should stick with something he understands, like Infomercials.
Jerry Yang has been abducted by aliens. Hear more tonight on Coast-to-Coast.