You have to love free promotion, especially when it involves the #1 most visited web page on the planet. Yahoo! recently hand selected the Target Weekly Ad MyYahoo! homepage application to be featured as one of the apps available on user’s Yahoo! homepages. This placement can’t be purchased by an advertiser as an app must be chosen by the Yahoo! Homepage team to be featured within the Yahoo! homepage, and Target won the lottery on this one. It’s great to see this app up there with the likes of the Wall Street Journal, BBC, Mint.com, eBay, Wired.com and WebMD whom all also have Homepage enabled apps.
From the Yahoo.com homepage, if a user clicks on the "+ADD" within the left hand navigation area called "My Favorites", a user is presented a pre-screened list of allowable apps that can be added to one's Yahoo! homepage.
If a user chooses to add the Target Weekly Ad App, it will then appear within the "My Favorites" left hand nav section in an unexpanded state.
If a user chooses to interact with the Target Weekly Ad App, the entire app expands over the main body of content and the user can browse all of the weekly ad steals and deals right there within their personalized Yahoo! homepage.
Target is also helping to promote both the MyYahoo! (and now Yahoo! Homepage) and iGoogle widgets by including them within the header area of their dedicated Weekly Ad email alert. It's a nice integrated tie-in to cross-promote the various ways the Target Weekly Ad is available for viewing online.
This is a really big deal. To fully onboard and integrate around the (below) top portal publishers and ad networks that have demographic AND behavioral (collectively referred to as “BT data herein) data on their users in a way so that Pointroll PaperBoy ads can use these user-level BT insights to actually change WHAT content is actually shown within the ad units. This is cutting edge, one-to-one data driven marketing. Every single ad that gets served has the potential to be different and uniquely tailored (from a content perspective) for every unique user.
- Platform-a: There are two (2) parts that make collectively makeup Platform-a which are…
- Advertising.com (the 3rd party ad network)
- AOL (owned and operated sites that are BT powered by Tacoda)
- quadrantONE
- CollectiveMedia
- Yahoo!
These are the current publisher / ad network partners that ShopLocal and Pointroll have integrated the publisher provided BT data into the PaperBoy product. More publishers are in the works that will be launching soon.
At an unique user level (so for any given ad impression), these premier publishers and ad networks typically can provide the below insights:
- ZIP Code (and sometimes other higher level GeoLocation data is available)
- Gender
- Race
- Age / Year Of Birth (sometimes age ranges and sometimes exact birth year)
- Categor(ies) Of Interest (that the user has shown a past interest in – can be multiple)
- Publisher Property Type (helps determine the context of publisher page were the ad will be inserted – ex. finance.yahoo.com
- Publisher Page Position (helps determine the actual placement of the ad – ex. MPU above the fold)
- Publisher Page Context Keyword(s)
A couple of important notes however around these publishers provided BT targeting data:
- The amount (eg depth) of BT insights for any given ad impressions varies per publisher from some impressions having:
- No BT data available
- Only some BT data available
- Very complete sets of BT data available
- Which BT data points are collected and maintained varies from publisher to publisher. Not everyone for example has age data on it’s users
- The BT data collection methodology greatly varies from publisher to publisher. How extensive and wide any given publishers reaches into web logs, search histories, registration data, etc is all part of the secret special sauce that each publisher maintains
- The frequency of how often the BT data is updated is also a variable across publishers
- Storage, re-use and re-distribution of this publisher owned and controlled BT data is clearly prohibited and ShopLocal and Pointroll tightly adhere to this policy as it helps protects our publisher partner’s interests
- Privacy is one of the biggest concerns throughout the entire process. With all the recent self-imposed industry regulations around BT targeted online advertising, all parties have been very careful to be very respectful of the end users’ privacy throughout all of the design and integrations steps. Our goal is to actual try to offer user a more personalized, more relevant overall site experience which includes the content within the display ads
- From a publisher perspective: All information about any given user is 100% anonymous with no personally identifiable information (PII) being passed over to ShopLocal or Pointroll
- From an ad server (Pointroll) perspective: All ads do not directly capture any PII which includes, but isn’t limited to, e-mail addresses, telephone numbers, and credit card numbers. No sensitive information is collected via the the ads. We even extend this by not allowing the cookies dropped to users machines to associate with any personally-identifiable information. (For purposes of this post, personally-identifiable information doesn’t include IP addresses or ZIP code)
- From a localized content provider (ShopLocal) perspective: No PII is collected or stored or the user
Some of the next steps that the ShopLocal and Pointroll teams are gearing up to undertake:
The possibilities of distribution points for weekly ad content continues to increase. Today two versions of the same core weekly ad application went live for Target. These apps were built to live on user’s start / homepages that iGoogle and My Yahoo! pretty much have a monopoly on. Specifically the two apps that went live were for:
Here is what the two apps look like in their native state once they have been “installed” within a user’s personalized homepage (Note that all throughout this post I use the word ‘install’ very loosely. What I am trying to refer to is the process of allowing and adding these apps/gadgets to a user’s homepage. No real code is actually being installed on a user’s local machine):
This is how the My Yahoo! open app appears on a user's homepage in its native 'small' state
The iGoogle gadget and how is appears on a user's homepage in it's native 'un-expanded' state
Here is what each app looks like once a user chooses to expand them to the ‘large’ view:
This is how the My Yahoo! open app appears in its "expanded" state
This is how the iGoogle gadget appears in its "expanded" state
So now for a quick comparison of these two competing platforms:
- My Yahoo!
- A much more complicated ‘install’ process that involves up to three different clicks, compared to the one (1) click ‘install’ on iGoogle. Yes, Yahoo! Open Apps allow for more user driven privacy controls and a great degree of social features, so these come at a cost of a more involved ‘installation’ process
- The “full” or “expanded” view of the app can be built in Adobe Flash / Flex, which in this case the Target app is. This just opens up the door to a richer, more engaging user experience
- The “full” or “expanded” view has some graphical display ads wrapped around the content. I happened to catch one ad with some layering / shine-through issues going on that was interfering with the right hand part of the app
- By default, it appears that the Target Open app within My Yahoo! is setup to auto opt-in all users into the below two (2) types of communications. Great for the marketer, but maybe not so great for the unknowing consumer:
- iGoogle
- Within the native, non-expanded view, the gadget gets cut-off. This looks sort of odd and is a bummer since this is the view state that most users will see the vast majority of the time
- Built using light, fast and universal coding languages such as HTML, Javascript and DHTML
- Since it is not built in flash, in this case a much deeper integration is exposed at the item detail page that pulls in an Amazon.com hosted layer that brings in all sorts of rich functionality like local inventory look up, one-click add to cart, add to lists, ratings and reviews
- If a user decides to ’share’ the app with friends, within iGoogle the app makes some useful suggestions as to which friends of yours you might consider based upon your emailing habits within Gmail. With Yahoo!, this is just one big blank box that is nowhere as user friendly
Here is a complete set of production screen grabs of the widgets from both iGoogle and My Yahoo! posted up on Flickr just in case. Finally, a bit of well deserved recognition to the Target and AKQA teams that did all of the heavy lifting to get these fairly complex apps launched.
(4.00 out of 5)
Loading ...
(4.33 out of 5)
Comments: None