If you don’t already strictly monitor the content you put on Twitter, now is the time to start. A new advertising technology product is mining your tweets for keywords, and using them to serve you relevant banner ads around the web. On the Internet, your past browsing history can come back to haunt you in the form of banner ads. Sophisticated ad networks know where you have been, what product you have looked at, and how to get ads for these products back in front of you. In the industry, this is called retargeting. Now, a new ad technology product is being offered up that allows marketers to retarget you not based on the webpages you’ve looked at, but based on the mere mention of a brand on your social media channels. LocalResponse –based in New York City – just announced that it is launching a new product called Intent Targeted Advertising. Through this initiative, brands are allowed to connect with an audience based on a concept called Intended Social Media Expression. For example, just mentioning a brand on a social network allows marketers using Intent Targeted Advertising to serve you ads relevant to your mention. If you tweet about the Pepsi you are drinking, you might start to see ads pop up around the web for Coca-Cola because the company now knows that you like to drink soda. “Our ability to make ads more relevant by customizing them based off social media expression allows us to target against very unique data sets, which creates a massive opportunity for advertisers to achieve engagement on campaigns that are in many instances two or three times greater than any campaign they’ve been able to run before,” said Kathy Leake, president and co-founder, LocalResponse. While this might be great news for advertisers, there are a few potential problems with trying to serve more relevant ads based on intended social media expression. One potential issue that arises from serving banner ads is that Twitter has already tried this with its internal ad platform based on its Interest Graph. It confuses users more than it delights them. The number one problem that LocalResponse’s new product is trying to solve is to make digital banner ads more personalized and seamless in the web content experience. This experience has become so seamless that many users who don’t understand retargeted ad technology find themselves annoyed by being “chased” around the internet by the same brands. The ad product is even sophisticated enough to be a little creepy. For example, copy on LocalResponse’s website remarks that when a user tweets “I’m hungry,” the product can serve the user an ad for Pizza Hut on the mobile web within five minutes. Still, the product is a marketer’s dream come true. LocalResponse has already begun testing Intent Targeted Advertising with consumers in partnership with major brands, including Coca-Cola, General Motors, and Aveda since late 2011. Image by pond5 – the world’s stock media marketplace
