Tags containing: "targeting"

Marketers increasingly favor viewability and third-party verification

August 2, 2016 Research Team

The majority of advertisers chose viewabilty as their campaign objective, followed by click thru rate and view thru rate according to a study by data software company Videology. Of all campaigns that ran on the Videology platform in Q2 2016, 43% used viewable rate as an objective KPI. Of those campaigns, 89% chose to measure viewability using the MRC standard (50% of pixels on screen for at least two consecutive seconds) while the additional 11% chose to use their own custom standard for determining if an ad was viewable.

Advertisers continue to emphasize demographic, geographical and behavioral data to target their campaigns. Over half of all campaigns Videology analyzed used behavioral targeting, while TV Viewing accounted for 14%, with advertisers looking to add incremental reach to their TV buys. It is interesting to note that more marketers are emphasizing the need for in-demo delivery of campaigns, a metric originating from the traditional methods of non-programmatic TV buying; Videology has seen a 115% year-over-year increase in the number of campaigns using Nielsen or comScore to measure in-demo targeting success.

Cross-screen advertising saw a 20% year-over-year increase (compared to Q2 2015), with the bulk of the activity consisting of combined PC, mobile, and connected TV placements. Campaigns using PC alone made up just 12%, a fraction of where this was one year ago when they made up a quarter of all placements.

Advertising | Perspectives

Where’s the signal? (And why it matters to digital advertisers)

August 19, 2015 DCN

Philosopher Thomas Wells, in an essay for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, argues that advertising is a market failure:

The advertising industry consists of the buying and selling of your attention between third parties without your consent. That means that the cost of producing the good – access to your attention – doesn’t reflect its full social cost.

…

Since advertisers pay less to access your attention than your attention is worth to you, an excessive (inefficient) amount of advertising is produced.

For the web, though, there is still time to turn advertising into a net positive, if we fix a few things.

The main reason advertising exists is to help deal with information asymmetry. Nobel Prize-winning economist George Akerlof pointed out that, in a market where low-quality and high-quality sellers compete, and sellers know their products better than buyers do, high-quality sellers have trouble staying in business. When the buyer can’t tell a low-quality car, a lemon, from a high-quality car, no buyer can justify paying more than a lemon’s value for any car.

Over thousands of years, people have figured out ways to deal with Akerlof’s market for lemons problem. Licensing of sellers, product reviews, and protecting trademarks are all ways to give some advantage to quality sellers.

Advertising is another piece of the solution. Tom Goodwin compares advertising to stone buildings for banks, and writes:

Old world advertising used to be the same, the very act of investing in TV, buying a premium billboard, taking an ad in Vogue, became brand building because of the cost, not despite. The general public doesn’t know rate cards, but there was a tacit, enduring, innate feeling that companies that advertised were companies of quality.

Perceived advertising costs matter to users. In The Waste in Advertising Is the Part That Works, Tim Ambler and E. Ann Hollier describe a signaling test based on showing “expensive” and “degraded” versions of the same TV commercials to experimental subjects, and found:

[P]erceived expense influences perceptions of brand quality, which in turn is the most critical predictor of a participant’s inclination to purchase a brand.

Wells, however, argues that signaling is a waste. He writes:

Like banks housed in grand marbled buildings, companies which pour vast amounts of money into advertising campaigns must be supremely confident about the quality of their products and its long-term sales. Otherwise they couldn’t afford to burn so much money on ridiculous Super Bowl ads. This argument rather reminds me of John Maynard Keynes’s suggestion that in a recession caused by a collapse of aggregate demand one could solve the problem by burying bottles filled with bank notes and then leaving it to private enterprise to dig them up again.

But signaling isn’t just based on the production values of the ad.

Ads appear with content. Signal is proportional to the value of the content, not just the ad itself. In signal-carrying media such as magazines, a positive feedback loop can emerge. Valuable signal-carrying ads bring in money for content, whose quality and perceived cost increases signaling power, therefore ad rates, and so on. This can make a signal-carrying medium a great business to be in.

But when advertisers try to target users individually, signaling breaks down. Targeting turns an ad into the digital version of a cold call. Targeted ads tend to “burn out” the medium in which they appear, through a Peak Advertising effect. Each new targetable medium falls in value and popularity as users figure it out, filter it, or get their governments to restrict it.

Even when a web ad appears on expensive content, it fails to carry the signal that it would convey in a less targetable medium. Users are aware that ads “follow them around,” so instead of viewing an ad as part of an expensive, signal-carrying ad buy, even an ad on high-quality content could be an example of cheap targeting.

Solutions
The two extreme positions on web ads each miss something. Ad blocking everywhere and eliminating ad-supported content is clearly suboptimal. The existence of magazines that people voluntarily subscribe to is proof that some level of advertising can work.

The other extreme is anti-adblocking, telling users to stay in an unprotected, targetable state. This doesn’t work, not just because of the malvertising problem, which make some protection a necessity, but because of signaling failure.

A third way is needed. Fortunately, tracking protection tools are able to block cold-call-like targeted ads while permitting signal-carrying ads. Instead of waiting for more and more users to give up on advertising and get an ad blocker, publishers can help and encourage users to run tracking protection tools instead. But if sites fail to turn the web into a signal-carrying medium, web ads could slide into a no-win struggle like email spam/anti-spam, and anti-advertising philosophy could turn out to be right after all.

Don Marti (@dmarti) is a contributor of code and documentation to the aloodo.org project, a low-friction way for sites and brands to reclaim the value of online advertising from fraud and ad blocking. He is the former editor of Linux Journal. Don is the subject of an out-of-date Wikipedia article, which he will not edit himself, but wishes that someone would.

Industry-Research | Perspectives

MMA Releases Guidance Report on Location Audience Targeting

June 15, 2015 Research Team—DCN

Drawing from its SMoX Study, the Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) has released a new Guidance Report entitled, ‘Location Audience Targeting’. From the report:

Mobile has changed the way we think about digital audiences. Before the advent of the ubiquitous mobile phone, traditional marketing and advertisement strategies that were “location based” had a very different meaning than “location based marketing” does today. Options for location-based mobile audiences have expanded far beyond the simple geo-fence campaign, and offer both sophisticated targeting options and insights on reaching the consumer on their mobile device with the right message at the right time.

No longer just a tool for “in the moment” targeting, major brands are now leveraging the rich contextual information that location provides to create highly-targeted audience segments, enabling them to strategically target consumers at specific points in their day, not just when they’re within close proximity of a brand’s store or restaurant. For many major brands, the use of audience targeting is still a fairly new tactic, yet one that is predicted to explode in popularity in the coming years due to its ability to yield an incredibly high lift in store visitation (SVL), particularly when used in combination with more common proximity targeting tactics such as geo-fencing.

Detailing how brands like Denny’s, Goodwill and Walmart are using audience targeting to increase store visitation, the report builds on an earlier MMA white paper released in February. The Report provides key insights and takeaways on:

How to create location based audiences
Leveraging the data behind location-based audience.
Incorporating non-location data to enrich profiles
Guidance on optimal ad formats and creative
5 case studies detailing how brands are using audience targeting

Innovation | Perspectives | Revenue

Collective Patents its Cross-platform Targeting Technology

March 10, 2015 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

Collective, Inc. has been granted a patent for its technology that targets online advertisements to consumers based on their TV viewing habits by anonymously linking linear television data to digital across multiple screens. They filed for the patent in 2011 when they launched TV Accelerator, and CEO Joe Apprendi describes the four years since as “pretty interesting” given the industry’s increasing desire for cross-platform measurement in that time.

While Collective has been successful deploying its own solution, Apprendi says “now that we’ve got the patent, we’re excited about trying to make this as the standard in the market and establishing a licensing model around it.” Their U.S. Patent 8,949,890 protects the company’s offering and reinforces Collective’s expertise in multiscreen advertising.

Certainly, as audiences increasingly consume content across multiple devices, media companies and marketers are interested in understanding their behavior and, of course, the impact of advertising in various contexts. Interestingly, Apprendi says the origins of Collective’s TV Accelerator solution can be traced to Nielsen research that showed the remarkable lift in ad recall when consumers were exposed to a television commercial and online video. With the Nielsen process, however, this could only be measured when it “randomly happened.” Apprendi says his team realized that “Collective was in a unique position to make this happen intentionally.”

Nielsen’s recent acquisition of Exelate, a company that connects identities across all channels and devices, signals that others would also like to be in that position. Apprendi notes that Nielsen was in the “ad effectiveness and audience measurement business, which they are good at. Now it looks like they are moving into targeting, using data to target, not just measure.”

Collective, says Apprendi, has a head start given that they’ve been doing this for a decade already and have core capabilities focused on data-driven programmatic advertising and on providing audience contextual data to deliver targeted ads across platforms.

Apprendi believes that most marketers are buying publishers’ channels as a proxy to reach a target audience but they should actually flip that thinking in order to make better decisions about where to make big direct investments. “Let’s not make those decisions until I buy programmatically across platforms, screens and media brands to see which avenues and media brands perform the best.” Then, he says, marketers can make better decisions about where to make a significant direct investment.

And, while he sees signs of progress with more and more agencies having a unified video buying practice across screens, he says that “The Holy Grail is that eventually, we’ll see marketers start with audience first, rather than ‘this is what I did on TV now what should I do to support that.’”

At a minimum, Apprendi encourages marketers to use data and analytics to determine which media outlets make the most sense for their objectives. And on the publisher side, that data can help them respond or optimize their content strategy. “Data makes everyone smarter at the end of the day.”

The long term goal, however, is “full transparency,” says Apprendi. This is not just cost transparency, but includes issues of inventory quality and viewability. “We need transparent relationships if we want to help marketers make smarter media decisions.”

Industry-Research

InSkin Media/RAPP Study: over 50% of consumers are put off buying by retargeted ads

October 23, 2014 Research Team—DCN

In a survey of over 1,600 people aged 20 to 60, ad tech company InSkin Media and ad agency RAPP found that more than half of the consumers are put off from buying a product if the see the ad multiple times, particularly on unrelated sites. The study also showed that ads displayed on a well known sites are likely to be viewed more favorably by the the consumers.

To see MediaTel coverage click here.

Innovation | Revenue

About.com’s Data-driven Overhaul

September 4, 2014 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

About.com debuted a major redesign this week, which CRO Brian Colbert says was, “long overdue.” While the site holds the enviable number 15 spot on Comscore’s list of most trafficked websites, About.com had fallen behind on design, usability, social and the ability to effectively monetize its traffic. “And if you aren’t innovating,” says Colbert, “you are falling behind.”

One significant challenge in undertaking an overhaul is what has always been one of About.com’s strengths: its deep well of content. About.com boasts 3.5 million pieces of content covering about 1,000 topics. “We amassed so many assets over time and we couldn’t just flip the switch all at once, so we opted for a phased rollout.”

Starting with a redesigned homepage in July, then working through the most popular verticals, Colbert says they were able to evaluate what the users responded to and what was most effective from an advertising standpoint “We made tweaks and modifications based on our analysis as we went. So we feel pretty confident of our major release Tuesday, and we rolled out the final two channels Wednesday.”

User Experience and Relevant Content
What’s readily apparent is that the new site has a much more modern, visual sensibility. “The content was always good,” says Colbert, “but it wasn’t presented in the most elegant way. In fact, the user experience had become really dated.”

In terms of content, Colbart says About.com will continue to use “a lot of the strategy that has worked well for us in the past with our narrowly focused experts that run a wide gamut of topics.” However the new site reflects an increased emphasis on social sharing and on building topic-centric user destinations. Each vertical has its own dedicated general manager and a customized social strategy. In the near future, About.com’s GMs will be making a concerted effort to seek out “personalities in their verticals who will bring more credibility and panache.”

Though the vertical landing pages and article templates are very similar at launch, according to Colbert over time they will begin to look more distinct. “The Money section will include rate tables and stock tickers; each will feel like their endemic brethren,” he said. The objective is to become less reliant on search to drive the site’s traffic and to become a place that enthusiasts and information-seekers routinely rely on.

Data-driven Relevance
Another objective of this relaunch is increasing users’ time spent on About.com by serving its 85 million daily visitors relevant content once they’ve found their way to the site. “We are aggressively surfacing related content. Recirculation is a real focus for us.” This goal is underpinned by About.com’s increased emphasis on data analysis, which includes a three-person (and growing) data science team. Colbert says their efforts have yielded a new understanding of how users interact with About.com’s content. “We’ve developed a proprietary tool that helps us understand which articles are related to each other, even if they may not seem relevant at first.” For example, if you are “reading up on million dollar investments, you might also want to read an article on Cayman travel.”

This data focus will also help About.com better monetize its audience by offering advertisers a better context for their messages so that they can be included on areas of the site where one might not immediately think to look – essentially in-house behavioral targeting.

In addition, About.com is betting heavily on content marketing. “That term gets tossed around a lot these days, but to us it means enabling advertisers to surround their content with ours in a way that makes it all relevant. We are very well positioned to take advantage of native and do it right because the nature of our content lends itself to native.” Colbert cites a current native campaign on How to Train for a Long Hike by the Merrell shoe company that is running in the Hiking section. “They already have authenticity in the space so users feel the advertiser plays a positive role through content. Done right, native should feel additive to the user experience.”

And in 2015, look for a major video push from About.com. Colbert says they have a new studio and are actively producing a significant volume of “video that will enhance the user experience.” With the relaunch and future plans, Colbert says that user experience will not be measured by clicks alone. “We are judging the effectiveness and success of the redesign through engagement. We want people to visit more often, stick around longer and do more on the site.”

Innovation | Perspectives

Q&A: Avi Steinlauf, CEO Edmunds Inc., on Putting Data to Work

April 22, 2014 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

This Q&A interview is part of OPA’s “Three on Three” series where we ask three industry executives the same three questions on a topic to uncover actionable insights… If you want to learn more, keep an eye out on our site for more interviews. This Three on Three interview is with Avi Steinlauf. CEO Edmunds Inc., on Putting Data to Work.

Q: Please describe the value of data to your editorial and advertising efforts:

A: Data is the backbone of Edmunds.com. Consumers who visit our site use our automotive data to shop for a car. And, with a deep regard for individual privacy, we collect clickstream, lead and transaction data that illustrates aggregate car shopper behavior in order to present our automaker and dealer partners with tangible insights that they can apply to their business.

We also analyze traffic to specific dealership inventory listings and carefully monitor consumer reviews of dealerships to ensure legitimacy and to help dealer partners pinpoint issues that may be hampering sales. I’m pretty sure that our attention to our consumer reviews is likely one of the reasons that Edmunds.com was named — along with TripAdvisor, Zagat and OpenTable — one of the most trusted prominent online review sites in Maritz Research’s 2013 Online Customer Review Study. That study examined 13 high-profile ratings sites; Edmunds.com was the only automotive site listed in the top ten and it ranked fourth overall, outperforming Yelp, Google+, Hotels.com, City Search and others.

Of course, we also collect data that allows us to make improvements to our own website user experience.

Q: Please describe a recent advertising initiative that leveraged data, how it did so, and how that generated a better end result:

A: Well, I think the way that we approach the use of data for advertising in general might be a better answer here. We have an innovative “dashboard” through which our account managers can help our business partners understand all sorts of performance data. For example, we can show how many Edmunds.com visitors spent time shopping online for particular vehicles—slicing the data by make, model and/or segment—to help our partners market their vehicles.

Our sales team can also help an Edmunds “Promise Partner” dealership review its performance relative to other dealerships. For example (see picture below), data might show that a dealer is providing Edmunds.com visitors only with exterior colors of its inventory 60% of the time. This means that in nearly half of the searches in which car shoppers are specifying a desired color, this dealer’s vehicles will not be included in search results.

Additionally, this dashboard illustrates that the dealer is below average in its designated market areas, both in terms of number of consumer ratings and reviews, and in terms of the score, for sales and service. So, when this dealer’s inventory appears on the Edmunds site, its listings will show no stars to 2 stars based on 1 review, which does not make them very competitive. These dashboards make our clients aware of opportunities to make positive changes that will affect their bottom line. We find that the real-time analysis is tremendously valued by our clients, and is a huge differentiator from our competition.

Q: The notion of “data” raises concerns with some. Please describe your take on the issues around publishers’ use of data and how you address some of the common concerns/issues:

A: Privacy is extremely important to us here at Edmunds.com. We have been told by our site visitors that they trust us, and we intend to always be as helpful and reliable as a friend. We use non-PII [personally identifiable information] data to help build better products for our website visitors and clients. By entering a ZIP code, car shoppers can gain access to locally relevant information such as nearby dealership inventory, regional True Market Value® prices, and average vehicle ownership costs specified by year, make and model.

Many of our site visitors choose to also give us PII data in order for us to help make their car shopping experience easier. For example, to receive a Price Promise certificate (which guarantees a locked-in, upfront price from a dealership), a car shopper will opt in to provide to Edmunds.com his or her name, phone number and email address. We make it crystal clear that this information will be used by Edmunds.com to facilitate a useful connection to the dealerships selected by the car shopper. Our site visitors know what we will do with the data, and we don’t do anything more. From a process perspective, that data is segmented and has strict access control so that we can maintain the privacy of our site visitors as we deliver a service that they requested from us.

Avi Steinlauf is the CEO for Edmunds Inc. He is responsible for managing Edmunds’ operations, including its 550 employees headquartered in Santa Monica, CA, its satellite office in Detroit, MI, and its field sales force located across the US. Avi also serves as a Director on Edmunds’ Board of Directors. Since joining the company in 1998, he has been responsible for developing and cultivating relationships with a number of Edmunds’ key partners. Positions Avi has held at Edmunds include President, Chief Operating Officer, Executive Vice President of Strategy & Development, Vice President of Revenue Management, and Vice President of Marketing. Before joining Edmunds, Avi was a Senior Industry Analyst for Coopers & Lybrand’s Knowledge Strategies Group in New York.

Since 2006, Avi has been a Board Member for the Online Publishers’ Association, a not-for-profit trade organization dedicated to representing high-quality online content providers before the advertising community, the press, the government and the public. Avi is also a member of the Young Presidents Organization (YPO), Golden West Chapter and serves as the Communications Chairman for YPO’s Automotive Network.

Note: This Q&A is part of OPA’s “Three on Three” series where we ask three industry executives the same three questions on a topic to uncover actionable insights. Also in this series:

Q&A: Vikram Somaya, GM Weather FX, The Weather Company on Putting Data to Work

Q&A: Colin Decker, Group Operating Officer, Discovery Digital Networks on Putting Data to Work

Perspectives | Revenue

Q&A: Colin Decker, Group Operating Officer Discovery Digital Networks, on Putting Data to Work

April 8, 2014 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

This Q&A interview is part of OPA’s “Three on Three” series where we ask three industry executives the same three questions on a topic to uncover actionable insights… If you want to learn more, keep an eye out on our site for more interviews. Today’s Three on Three is with Colin Decker, Group Operating Officer of Discovery Digital Networks, on Putting Data to Work.

Q: Please describe the value of data to your editorial or sales efforts:

A: Having a solid foundation of data-driven decision-making is really mandatory at this point. You simply must have a well-defined methodology for the “why” of using data as well as talent and staffing to handle the “how”. And it’s not just a matter of generating reports. To really use data means that every member of your team must feel confident asking questions and be enabled to proactively seek the answers without depending on a separate research group. At Discovery Digital Networks, we use a combination of publicly available data sources as well as a series of proprietary purpose-built systems to inform what we do day-in and day-out. On both the Editorial and Sales sides of our businesses, the ability to react in real-time to audience demand is a critical capability as we define the digital video marketplace.

Q: Please describe a recent content or advertising initiative that leveraged data, how it did so, and how that generated a better end result:

A: We spend a lot of time mining data for signals and trends. At Discovery Digital Networks, we have many shows that publish multiple times per day so a typical exercise is to look at topic and category performance throughout the week. DNews is our twice-daily science and curiosity show that covers all types of weird, geeky cool facts. As we mined audience, engagement and sharing data over the course of several months, we noticed a small signal that seemed to indicate that space-themed programming performed better on Fridays. To test the signal, we created “Space Fridays” and saw a near 4x increase in all our audience metrics. The next natural question is “why space and why Friday?” but for now, we’re content to have better served the DNews audience with what they are wanting to see from us.

Q: The notion of “data” raises concerns with some. Please describe your take on the issues around publishers’ use of data and how you address some of the common concerns/issues:

A: It’s a reasonable concern when you think of user retargeting or leveraging transactional data to inform programming selection. While it’s great when Netflix makes a relevant movie suggestion based on your prior consumption, I don’t think I want my Kindle to suggest “Mr. Mom” because I just ordered diapers online! On a more serious level, the Edward Snowden NSA affair has opened everyone’s eyes to the fact that you don’t need to break the law to invade privacy. Data “triangulation” threatens to open too much information up to bad guys and marketers alike. I think we’ll see an inflection point in the coming 2 years where the average consumer grows to understand this and we’ll see more meaningful push-back to the harvesting and misuse of personal data.

Colin Decker is a media leader who has played a guiding role in the confluence of Television, web, video and social media. He has held programming, strategy and executive management roles at Current TV, Yahoo! and Virgin Investments. Colin is a frequent speaker on emerging media and has held teaching appointments at Boston University and Harvard University.

Note: This Q&A is part of OPA’s “Three on Three” series where we ask three industry executives the same three questions on a topic to uncover actionable insights.

Also in this series:

Q&A: Vikram Somaya, GM Weather FX, The Weather Company on Putting Data to Work

Innovation | Perspectives

Q&A: Vikram Somaya, GM Weather FX, The Weather Company on Putting Data to Work

April 1, 2014 Michelle Manafy, Editorial Director – DCN

This Q&A is part of OPA’s “Three on Three” series where we ask three industry executives the same three questions on a topic to uncover actionable insights… If you want to learn more, keep an eye out on our site for more interviews. Today’s Three on Three is with Vikram Somaya, GM Weather FX, The Weather Company on Putting Data to Work.

Q: Please describe the value of data to your editorial and sales efforts:
A: I think we’ve been in a unique position given that the weather itself is such a unique data set. Weather is real. It isn’t household income, it isn’t level of education or other standard demographic information. It exists as a tangible thing. That helped us envision how data can work for us, as a publisher.

At The Weather Company, data has two particular areas of impact:

For marketers, we combine weather and messaging with our data engine, which is integrated with our media delivery platform. In the retail world, for example, a company with 4,000 stores might let us know when a product is selling well—or not—and other information. We take this data and line it up against varying weather conditions for two to three years and effectively create predictive sales models. We can tell them that, in Miami, on a January morning, this is what people are likely to buy.

On the content side, which is well-run by Neil Katz, our VP/editor-in-chief, what has been interesting is not only the weather itself, but other information around it, which we are integrating into the experience. Certainly, people interested in weather are interested in other types of content as well, such as science and nature. We’ve begun to look at what content people look at based upon weather in their area.

An interesting piece here has been that their actions are based not only on what the weather is, but also on how it makes them feel. Weather has not only a direct impact on sales, but also on sentiment. If, after many days of bad weather, there are a few days of sunshine, it affects how people feel, which in turn affects what they are interested in.

Q: Please describe a recent content or advertising initiative that leveraged data, how it did so, and how that generated a better end result:

A: Okay, I have an example that combines both data and weather information that underlays, from a project we did with Pantene, a P&G hair care brand. Behind the weather information for any city there is a canvas that might show raindrops or bright sun and have a special type of ad format for our mobile application that can replace that canvas with weather-specific brand creative for our clients. We can match the ad to the specific weather condition.

So, for Pantene, we created an index that mapped a range of hair conditions to weather conditions—which we called “the fizziness index” internally. Depending on which city you checked, we would analyze the weather for that location, then pull up the corresponding ad with the appropriate Pantene product.

The results were measureable in actual sales. In towns where the ad appeared, retailers saw spikes in product sales. This is an ad unit that actually worked in the real world for sales—not just engagement and other click-through metrics. Our goal is to actually move sales. We can’t think of a more compelling argument for our marketers.

Q: The notion of “data” raises concerns with some. Please describe your take on the issues around publishers’ use of data and how you address some of the common concerns/issues:

A: So I have something I frequently do at conferences where I speak that illustrates the data position we are in at The Weather Company:

I ask everyone at the conference to stand up, introduce themselves to the person next to them, and then ask that person five questions. That person does not need to answer. Instead, they should think about how uneasy each question makes them. The questions are:

Social: How old are you?
Third party data: How much money do you make?
Search: What are the last three things you searched online while alone?
Purchase: What are the last three things you purchased online while alone?
What is the weather today?

For that fifth one: No privacy concerns.

The Weather Channel is in a different position than many content companies. We have been, for 30 years, the brand people come to know how to behave around weather. We don’t ask your name or personal information. We collect business data around weather data. And weather information is 100 percent opt in—you have to ask for it.

I think we’re in a strange and unusual time where it is not clear who owns the information. Though I’d say that every time a publisher or marketer has cause to question “Am I doing the right thing?” the answer is probably no. With data, erring on the side of caution is the way to go. The right, fair thing to do is to protect the consumer.

Another thing to keep in mind is that what we are doing with data is natural and organic to the brand itself. There are certainly other publishers for which this is true. Some are trying to put a square peg in a round hole with data. We should use data to bring value to the experience, not to shoehorn data because it is the hot thing. If there is a fundamentally organic way to build value for the user, it is worth doing.

As general manager of The Weather Company’s WeatherFX division, Vikram Somaya leads the team that creates localized ad targeting solutions using Weather’s access to location data and the best, most comprehensive weather data in the world. Vikram joined The Weather Company from Thomson Reuters, where he served as vice president of global operations and audience. Previously, Vikram helped build out data-driven marketing company Bluekai as managing director of business development and channel sales. He served as executive vice president of sales and marketing at Milabra, consulting an early-stage company in machine-learning-derived technologies. He also served as vice president of strategic alliances at Phorm, an online behavioral targeting technology company, and as vice president of strategy management at Operative Media, an advertising business management company.

Note: This Q&A is part of OPA’s “Three on Three” series where we ask three industry executives the same three questions on a topic to uncover actionable insights.

Also in this series:

Q&A: Colin Decker, Group Operating Officer, Discovery Digital Networks on Putting Data to Work