Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Local Response

Last semester, I had the pleasure of meeting a successful entrepreneur in the ad-tech space by the name of Nihal Mehta. Nihal is currently working on a fascinating project by the name of LocalResponse. The gist of the concept is that when individuals post information on social networks like Twitter or Facebook, that information is a valuable gem for immediately showing them a relevant marketing message related to what they've said. For example, if I were to tweet, "I want Pizza so bad right now!!" , I'm probably the type of person that PizzaHut wants to put an ad in front of within the next few minutes.

This seemed like a really powerful concept to me and a great way to utilize the wealth of social data that we have to more effectively deliver relevant, targeted marketing to the right set of eyeballs. That being said, I was really curious as to how they were actually able to technically pull this off. While they did not get into the details of how the secret sauce is made in our meeting, I did find an article explaining the technology on a high level.

http://adage.com/article/digital/startup-localresponse-targets-twitter-conversations-display-ads/239815/

In essence, they are able to connect cookies to one's Twitter account and track the tweets of the majority of Twitter users. When an individual then tweets a relevant message, they can chase that cookie around the web with a relevant message on a display ad. I find this to be a fascinating merger of social data with traditional online display marketing.

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