[x+1]’s VP of product development, Howard Fiderer explains in iMediaConnection how to make consumer data actionable so that you can tailor users’ experiences to their tastes on their very first visit in Predict Your Audience’s Preferences.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the company, [x+1] is the former Poindexter. Originally a primary ad serving company, Poindexter raised an eight-figure round of private financing in March of 2005 and used the funds to re-define the company from product, to target market, to brand. Starting with adapting the mathematical formula x+1, Poindexter reset itself in the marketplace. “We’re using this as an opportunity to mark a stake in the ground for a category we’re trying to define, marketing optimization,” the company’s CEO Toby Gabriner told ClickZ News in April 2005. [x+1] proposed to focus on advertiser-marketing within the advertiser’s site while maintaining their advertising business, or ad serving business. Ideally, they saw the opportunity to integrate the two products into a prospect-drawing and customer-targeting model as the ideal go-to-market.
First problem to overcome, Poindexter’s ad server was not viewed as a tier-one ad server in the market. Although it had respectable market share, their reporting capabilities were commonly considered to be sub-par. Major advertisers like American Express, who had termed contracts with Poindexter, complained about the lack of report diversity and the limitations of data availability. Other agency users also had issues with their reporting, when their advertiser clients forced Poindexter on them. That was the model for Poindexter, they sold to the advertiser so the agency would have to use them.
Actually, it was more of a resultant model. Poindexter sold to advertisers because they were looking to sell their ad serving and their developing predictive customer targeting back-end solution. They promised improved reporting but it was not coming fruition on the ad serving side for customers.
A Perfect example with regard to reporting shortfalls is the concept of ‘view-through.’ A view-through is when a user sees an advertisement served by an ad server but does not click on it. Later that user visits the desired landing page which is tagged by the ad server and can be measured back by the ad server as having seen that particular ad on the associated site (placement) where it has been displayed. This is known throughout the industry as a ‘view-through’ and [x+1] can not measure it, or at least does not report on it to its advertising customers.
But what [x+1] was particularly good at was/is the site-side customer analytics and applying those anaytics for targeting. Like Howard’s article describes. This is what secured their relationships with large advertisers who were using their ad serving as well. The conversion from Poindexter to [x+1] was incredibly intelligent because it was a migration toward their core competency. Following the April announcement, rumors spread that [x+1] would be abandoning their ad serving business altogether. However they have maintained their media+1 product line, which is their ad server. With that, however, they are hardly ever encountered as a competitive bidder in the ad serving sales arena.
One likeable aspect of Howard’s article was that it was not self-promoting. Howard opens the door to site-side predictive modeling and website customer conversion and retention but he kept it very high level. In fact, it would have been nice if he had gotten more granular for us so that we could have a better understanding as to how to apply his concepts. I never have a problem when people mention providers – even their own companies – so long as they mention competitors and highlight the best solutions without bias.
[x+1] offers up two primary products: media+1 and site+1. Howard’s article is focused on a capability delivered by the latter, a tool that matches messages and offers with audience segments to simplify and optimize visitor acquisition, enable a site to up-sell conversions and promote customer retention. This of course is according to the [x+1] web site.
My experience, and the feedback that I have received from clients is that site+1 is [x+1] true wheelhouse offering. As I have described, this is where their ability to enable an advertiser to confidently target excels. Ad serving is a secondary competency. In fact, [x+1] has partnered with ad servers like DoubleClick to allow an advertiser to take advantage of site+1 while working with another ad server. If not already, I would expect integration with more ad servers to come. Clearly the company respects to obvious stats. The first is that people are not going to change ad servers to utilize site+1 – they are not going to adapt media+1, known to be inferior, just to have the ability to utilize site+1. Secondly, if someone is already using an ad server – and DoubleClick represents like 50% of the market (good first partner to choose), then better to enable integration to open up a new customer base than to compete.
Reactionary with Insight
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