Behavioral targeting has been a hot topic on and off for a few years now, with companies like Tacoda dominating advertising news and contraversy in the 2D web. Now, a German company called Inworld Advertising Network together with Nugg.ad, a German targeting specialist, have put together a demonstration of behavioral technology in the virtual world of Second Life. I visited Future Ad Park [SLUrl] to look at the demonstration Sebastian Otaared from IAN had put in place, and was pretty impressed.
As I wandered around the park, the billboards altered to a relevant ad for a furniture store as I came within range of them (just yesterday I had been shopping for furniture for the new Metaversed offices). A little spooky, but relevant and timely. The technology appears to work off of publicly available information from a users profile (and possibly thier history of visited places). The IAN blog says:
Depending on the interest-profile of an avatar, ads are replaced immediately on billboards to deliver a personalized and relevant advertisement. The interest-profile is not only determined on the basis of where an avatar sojourns, but also combined with inquiries-data to make a prediction what he is really interested in.
Though I've made no secret of my disdain for billboards as a viable ad medium in Second Life, the addition of behaviorally targeted relevance to that format changes the game. Just as Google Adwords appear in context to your searches as contextually relevant messages, IAN billboards deliver advertising messages relevant to what you have been / will be doing. So regardless of what you happen to be chatting about (there are already companies working on picking out chat keywords for targeting), the ads in theory at least, should be relevant.
More on how the ads work on the IAN blog. Special thanks to AdverLab for taking the lead on the story and bringing us first word!
Thanks for the coverage.I honestly have to say that we didn't knew, that you have been looking for furniture the night before and that this was definitley a coincidence.The system only works on the test area and tracks you interest depending on where you are there. (have you seen the six areas labeld with different topics?) But your example is of course excactly that, what it could be like if it would be rolled out on our whole billboards. Cheers,Sebastian Otaared
hehehe... pretty good coincidence :)
Thanks for clarifying Sebastian!