[privacy] Firm Mines Offline Data To Target Online Ads

["Richard M. Smith" <rms () computerbytesman com>]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119258320189661423.html?mod=todays_us_market
place
 

Firm Mines Offline Data To Target Online Ads

By KEVIN J. DELANEY and EMILY STEEL
October 17, 2007; Page B1


Acxiom Corp. knows a lot about you. It has scoured public records for how
many cars you own and what your house is worth. It has accumulated surveys
that show if you are married and how many children you have.

And for years Acxiom
<http://online.wsj.com/quotes/main.html?type=djn&symbol=ACXM>  sold that
information to marketers eager to use it to send mailings and make telephone
pitches to consumers most likely to buy. Now, the Little Rock, Ark., company
is putting those hundreds of millions of bits of data in the service of
customizing which display ads to show people browsing the Web -- a
development that has raised red flags with some privacy advocates.

Acxiom's latest effort, announced yesterday, is one of the most aggressive
in a broad push by Internet and online-ad companies to target display ads to
specific groups of users.

Yahoo <http://online.wsj.com/quotes/main.html?type=djn&symbol=yhoo>  Inc.
and Microsoft <http://online.wsj.com/quotes/main.html?type=djn&symbol=msft>
Corp. are among the Internet companies that engage in so-called behavioral
targeting, using information such as users' Web search habits and the pages
they visit to pick which ads to show them when they visit their own or
partner Web sites. Time
<http://online.wsj.com/quotes/main.html?type=djn&symbol=twx> Warner Inc.'s
AOL unit recently bought behavioral targeting firm Tacoda Inc. and is
planning to include more targeting technology in its online-ad offerings,
which includes the network Advertising.com that sells ads on thousands of
Web sites.

Behavioral targeting allows a Web publisher, for example, to charge premium
rates for a luxury-car ad even on a lightly visited site about needlepoint,
if the user's previous Web activity shows an interest in buying an
automobile.

In the U.S. this year, advertisers will spend $575 million on these
behaviorally targeted ads, rising to a projected $3.8 billion in 2011,
according to research firm eMarketer Inc.

Acxiom -- which recently had private-equity buyers break off a proposed
$2.25 billion deal for the company -- has been building up its online-ad
business, including the September acquisition of behavioral-targeting firm
EchoTarget Inc.

"The way targeting happens in the online world today isn't all that
sophisticated," says Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer Rich Howe.

Acxiom's new service, Relevance-X, goes further, drawing on the company's
database of 133 million households to determine which ads to show. Acxiom's
consumer database includes information gleaned from sources such as public
real-estate and motor-vehicle records, surveys and warrantee cards consumers
fill out. Estimates of annual income, marital status, average ages of kids,
home ownership and property value, educational level and travel histories
are also available.

The company classifies each U.S. household into 70 clusters based, it says,
"on that household's specific consumer and demographic characteristics,
including shopping, media, lifestyle and attitudinal information." Clusters
range from "Married Sophisticates" to "Penny Pinchers."

Acxiom contracts with Web sites that collect consumer addresses, such as
online retailers and those offering sweepstakes and surveys. In a blink,
Acxiom looks up the people who provide their addresses in its database,
matches them with their demographic and lifestyle clusters and places
"cookies," or small pieces of tracking data, on their computer hard drives.

...

 

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