In an AdExchanger.com article published at the end of last year, Bill Demas outlines his view of where online advertising will be going in 2010. In particular, The Guru thinks that all users of OpenX should take note of the following:
“In another paradigm shift, audience targeting will take on a whole new scope with the continued practice of advertisers buying ‘people’ instead of ‘pages’. These advancements are creating new efficiencies and transforming the way display advertising is bought and managed. They’re also having a bubble up effect upon advertisers, who are demanding improved performance and massive reductions in wasted ad spend. Another unforeseen effect is in the way it is changing the behaviors of media buyers: As one industry luminary put it, the ability to manipulate data and hand-pick your audience is “addicting.” In the near future, having a deep understanding of a target audience will be more important than having a broad reach, and any organization that brings this kind of knowledge to the table – coupled with the ability to execute upon the information – will be the big winners.”
So, if you’re a publisher using OpenX to run ads on your websites, how can you take part in this paradigm shift? How do you sell people to advertisers, instead of just impressions?
One way to do that is to enable the collection of information about people that you serve ads to, in order to enable retargeting. You can read all about how retargeting works — from an advertiser’s point of view — in a recent isocket blog post.
Of course, most OpenX users are not advertisers. So, how can you get involved in retargeting as a publisher?
Well, the team at Ad Server Plugins have just announced their behavioral targeting and retargeting plugin for OpenX! This plugin will let you, as a publisher, capture information about user behavior on your websites, which can then be used later to target advertising directly to specific ‘people’, instead of just to ‘pages’.
If you want to get involved, you can request pricing information from the Ad Server Plugins team via their site.