Peerset Says Forget Demographics, Advertise by Interest

Written by Dana Oshiro / October 13, 2009 3:02 PM / 9 Comments

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In an effort to help advertisers reach key consumers, Peerset is launching what it describes as a "psycho-graphic targeting tool." Not unlike dating algorithms, Peerset's targeting algorithm takes keywords and meta data from online profiles and matches them with relevant information. With dating sites, users receive recommendations on potential mates; with Peerset, users receive advertisements and deals on relevant products and services. Video life-streaming network Justin.tv is just one of the groups already reaping the benefits of this system.

Said Justin.tv's Director of Advertising Operations, Scott Newton, "Peerset gives Justin.tv's advertisers the ability to target users in unique and powerful ways. The company enables Justin.tv to go beyond demographic targeting and target by user interests. Advertisers benefit from a higher response rate when ads are targeted to passions and interests."

In the past, marketers have centered campaigns on a specific demographic group. Clients define key stakeholder groups, like 18- to 35-year-old urban male techies, and marketers look for corresponding ad placement packages. With Peerset, stakeholders are targeted after a brand has already been audited.

Peerset scrapes data from millions of sites, profiles and status messages and compiles a series of word clusters. While seemingly unrelated, Grey's Anatomy, John Mayer and Starbucks coffee are clustered together simply because a large number of users have expressed interest in all three topics. These users might come from vastly different demographic groups, but their interests are the same. The system can then serve ads to them by matching general word clusters or by targeting specific users who have expressed an interest in one or more core concepts. Peerset operates on the belief that this interest-based targeting outperforms traditional demographic targeting. The service price varies based on a percentage of your ad buy.

Says Peerset CEO, Mike "JB" John-Baptiste, "We're betting on the fact that if you can find commonality in data, you can scale it and generate sales." To try Peerset visit Peerset.com.

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Comments

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Interesting strategy. Easpecially for the the side hopingto gemrate click-throughs. But, if I like John Mayor on facebook then I'm already a fan. If I like Starbucks, maybe the ass convinces me to download a coupon. But, if you think about, this model is hard if your brand is unrecognized - you know - you find yourself needing to spend advertising $ to be known. Unless, you can convince your advertisers to latch on to well-known brands - the ones you may referenced in social profiles. Also, if your unknown happens to have placed on a users profile - maybe that's bot who you need to advertise to. In any case, it's an interesting model especially if they can prove higher click-throughs which they probably CAN.

In the future we could see some neat big brother stuff, if this were to find itself swith mapping applications, Twitter apps and other hyper-location- aware services.

Posted by: Rob Colburn | October 13, 2009 3:42 PM

very intresting post. I as a buiness owner is always looking to target my advertising! so something like this would be great.

Posted by: Tony | October 13, 2009 4:25 PM

I think they already did this. This is a good tool though. It would be stupid not to use it, if you had the traffic to.
Two Voices | Two Guys

Posted by: Jeffwillis | October 13, 2009 4:33 PM

Uh, this is called BEHAVIORAL TARGETING... and there are tons of companies out there that do this: Audience Sciences, Tacoda/AOL and Yahoo just to name 3 I know of immediately.... this is nothing new.

Posted by: debunker | October 13, 2009 4:42 PM

Dear debunker,
We at Peerset have no interest in copying models that already exist and the BT companies you have mentioned have been around for years and people, including us, are very familiar with what they do and what they don't do. The core offering in BT is to offer up categories of users to advertisers based on explicit and tracked behavior those users have demonstrated that suggest their likelihood to buy something like a car or airline ticket. This is Intent-based marketing. In contrast, Peerset has built a database of Interest(not-Intent)-based data that is used to determine an expanded set of interests going from say 5 to 200 that are predictive of the sets of things that users like. Advertisers then decide to advertise against that more complete picture of that person in real-time through the Peerset platform, or they can purchase an audience segment. Those BT companies have some good technology but trust me it looks at completely different datasets. If you need further explanation you can write to us at info@peerset.com.

Posted by: JB | October 13, 2009 6:38 PM

As a marketer not focusing on demographics makes no sense to me.

If I'm looking to hit a certain target demographic, I'd much rather target sites/units with that demographic than interests (which doesn't matter to me).

We would never advertise on Justin.tv because of the brand concerns.

Posted by: Kelly Wilson | October 14, 2009 6:46 AM

Kelly Wilson,
For me it's not a question of choosing demographics over psychographics(interests) in fact we have tools to help discover new demographics you may not think are relevant. Psychographics have been largely ignored in online marketing while in traditional marketing demographics, psychographics and behavioral all have a role. Can you really argue that if you are a marketer selling staple guns that instead of finding websites that are profiled against an age,gender & location is a better starting point then finding people who are explicitly talking about staples or related interests such as unexpected things like TV Sitcoms?

Posted by: JB | October 14, 2009 9:23 AM

As someone with a previous life in advertising and PR, my clients have always been more interested in sales and member acquisition than in which demographic they're targeting. I think it's an interesting concept and definitely worth a try.

Posted by: Dana Oshiro | October 14, 2009 9:25 AM

we had to write about something that changed society. i did the invention of the chocolate chip cookie and got away with it (honors class too:). you have to make it sound good though…

Posted by: cartouche | October 15, 2009 12:34 AM