24/7 Invades Behavioral Marketing Space

Interactive marketing and technology company 24/7 Real Media Tuesday is expected to launch a behavioral targeting product that coordinates with its analytics and ad serving offerings, with major implications for the up-and-coming behavioral marketing arena.

The company will also release Open AdStream 5.7, an upgrade of its ad management solution. With the new release, users can choose between four languages. There’s also more inventory and reporting. Also, performance metrics and monitoring from Open AdStream 5.7 can be integrated with other enterprise systems.

Insight ACT, the new behavioral targeting product, links Open AdStream’s ad serving capability with Insight XE, 24/7’s analytics system. Insight ACT does behavioral segmentation and targeting through analysis and clustering of user segments. The product also does inventory forecasting and control and performance reporting by behavioral segment.

By unleashing a behavioral targeting product, 24/7, which serves roughly one-third of the ads seen online today, is bringing a formidable presence into the blossoming behavioral marketing space. Until now, the notable players were Revenue Science, which just added two new clients, and Tacoda, which recently launched a streamlined version of its services.

The idea behind behavioral targeting is that users’ behavior suggests what type of advertising they might be receptive to. For example, a user who visits employment classifieds might be a good target for ads from employment agencies — even if he is no longer in the employment section. Like search and desktop marketing, two fast-growing sectors of online marketing, behavioral targeting focuses on “hand-raising” behavior that indicates an interest on a user’s part and serves ads accordingly.

Because 24/7 also does analytics and ad serving, the company is hoping the “one stop shop” argument helps it win customers. Indeed, some clients of its competitors already use 24/7 for ad serving, which the company hopes might cause them to defect in favor of what Dave Hills, 24/7’s president of media solutions, calls “a seamless solution.

“This is part of the company’s strategic focus to bring publishers as many benefits as we can possibly put onto the system to help them increase their revenues and profits,” said Hills.

Citing 24/7’s interest in the area, Nate Elliott, associate analyst with Jupiter Research, which is owned by the parent of this publication, predicted that behavioral targeting is going to “open up” as a market. “Behavioral targeting is very effective,” Elliott said.