Why ADSmart's Targeting Approach Is Most Effective In traditional broadcast media, the only tools available to target a particular audience have been demographic and psychographic profiles. But now, interactive media ­­ such as the Internet ­­ have paved the way for a new, more effective targeting model based on the user's behavior. The ADSmart difference ADSmart's methodology combines demographic and psychographic criteria with behavior­based targeting for the best of both worlds. If you're advertising minivans, demographics can tell you whether a user can afford one. Psychographics can tell you whether he's likely to see himself as "the minivan type." But only the user's behavior tells you he's ready to buy a minivan now. So, the combination of demographics, psychographics, and behavior combine to produce the best targeting of qualified buyers ­­ buyers who are not only able and willing but also ready to buy. It's a methodology ADSmart calls TrueTargeting. Using this TrueTargeting approach, you don't show your ads to people who aren't interested. And you don't miss out on interested buyers just because they didn't meet a particular profile. How ADSmart does it In order to provide the most precise targeting possible, every ad location in every site in the ADSmart network is classified by the type of content surrounding it and the type of audience that content is likely to draw, based on combinations of more than 350 possible characteristics. We enable advertisers to target current needs through the use of search engine keywords. We also factor in any viewership research the site may have and any registration profiles available. That type of highly specific indexing allows ADSmart to more accurately match advertiser campaigns to the best ad locations for them. What other networks call targeting is actually no more than simple filtering ­­ a far less precise method of finding qualified buyers. Still others use keyword ­based editorial targeting ­­ not to be confused with search engine keyword targeting. Advertising on the results page of a search engine's keyword search is an effective way to identify a user's immediate need or interest. But using keywords to target editorial content can result in matching ads to irrelevant content (think about the last keyword search you did) or, worse yet, to inappropriate content. Consider, for example, an airline that targeted editorial content including the words "airline" and "vacation." Keyword­based editorial targeting could match up that advertiser with content about one of its own planes crashing and killing vacationing passengers! Finally, other networks classify more broadly, so they can't match campaigns and ad locations as precisely as ADSmart.net can. For example, a newspaper site might contain many different types of content ­­ sports news, entertainment news, business news, etc. ­­ that draw different audiences who are receptive to different types of messages. Other networks might categorize the entire site under "news" but fail to categorize individual pieces of content as "sports" or, more specifically, "basketball." So there's a good chance your ad targeted to basketball enthusiasts will never appear on that site's terrific sports page. In ADSmart's network, by contrast, each individual content area of every site in our network is classified. You want basketball fans? You get individual pages all about basketball. We can even help you locate even hard­to­find audiences, like fly­fishing enthusiasts or foreign film fans. We're already working on ways to help you target individuals even more precisely. In the first half of 1997, ADSmart will be tracking the clickstream of visitors to sites in our network, so we can serve ads targeted to the composite profiles that their behaviors indicate. And we're even developing ways to predict new visitors' behaviors and interests.
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