October 01, 2008 | Wednesday

Big brother technology in big bother

By Stuart Thurstan - Digital Media Director in Display |News

I met with Phorm at ad:tech last week and had a look into their OIX (Open Internet Exchange) powered by Phorm’s proprietary ad serving technology, which uses anonymised ISP data to serve the right ad to the right user at the right time http://www.oix.com . This is highly, and I mean highly, targeted advertising. Settings are based on a users recent journey and behaviour to deliver more relevant advertising.

In principal, it seems very controllable - a piece of kit that involves as much management and nurturing as a search campaign with similar skills required from the campaign analyst. Learning’s can be gained quickly from the Data* gathered so a campaign can be optimised to a performance level targeted more quickly. As market conditions change a dynamic digital team can adapt using this technology.

Again, it is being trialled this week with BT users in the UK. Press are creating uproar. The investment so far has been huge and Phorm H1 pretax loss widens to $24.67m. So things need to get moving quickly!

This is another example of technology leading the way to allow display advertising to show its value, as businesses are under increasing pressure to plan media that gives a direct response.