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As Chief Executive Officer at BlueKai, Omar is responsible for the overall management, growth, and vision for the company's groundbreaking exchange business. Prior to founding BlueKai, Omar was the Chief Advertising Officer of Medio Systems, the leading provider of mobile search and advertising solutions for carriers such as Verizon and T‐Mobile. He joined Medio from Revenue Science, where as Chief Marketing Officer and General Manager he was instrumental in founding and growing the company's leading behavioral targeting businesses, which provide services for many of the largest Internet publishers. There he was actively involved with key industry leaders in defining standards for behavioral targeting.

Omar earned Master of Computer Science and Industrial Engineering degrees from Stanford University and a Bachelor of Engineering degree from MIT. While at Stanford, he was a computer science researcher at both the Stanford Logic Group and HP Software Labs. Omar's research on formalizing content was published in the American Association of Artificial Intelligence. Omar is also an active speaker and commentator on topics such as behavioral targeting, mobile advertising, and consumer privacy. He was listed in Media Magazine's Media 100 for 2008.

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Reel in New Search Solutions: How a Fisherman’s Tale Can Better Explain Search Retargeting

Written on
Sep 18, 2006 
Author
Omar Tawakol  |
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Reel in New Search Solutions: How a Fisherman’s Tale Can Better Explain Search Retargeting

After time went on and the Bay Area fishery matured, it became clear to many that there were three other hidden rules that made fishing a bit tricky.

1. 97 percent of the fish that nibbled ended up leaving your net — only 3 percent remained! Most fish just needed to nibble several times before they let you catch them. The fish that got away spent most of their time back in the wide ocean far away from the fishery. Some of them could be caught later if you paid the fishery again, but many were simply caught out in the ocean by a competitor.

2. The money attracted some nefarious types and it turned out that a good portion of nibbles were merely simulated. Some analysts were afraid this would kill the whole industry (they pointed to rates of fraud as high as 40 percent). Others merely pointed out the resilience of the industry as evidenced by the increasing bid prices. This bid price logic would have been fine if it weren’t for hidden rule #3.

3. Even though a fair, open market was used to set the price for every single species of fish, something was not normal. Some species got bid up irrationally by bidders who got caught in the thrill of the auction. Other times, certain species would just disappear from the marketplace and reappear at a higher minimum bid price.

Taken together, these three hidden rules made life painful for the fishermen, and reminded the fishermen that there was a big ocean beyond the bay where the hungry fish spent 90% of their time. Just at that moment, a new fishing method that helped fishermen better handle the three hidden rules of pay per nibble fishing appeared. The service called fish search retargeting, tagged the fish that nibbled so that fishermen could catch the hungry fish back out in the ocean. The fish retargeting service had its own three rules:

1. No fraudulent fish! The fraudsters that faked nibbles were simply unaware of tags.

2. No other fishermen could steal the fish tagged by you. That meant that you could fish in the quiet without the clutter of other nets. That also meant that the other fishermen couldn’t bid against you for your fish! They were yours at a fixed pay per nibble price that was often lower than the original fishery price.

3. You could finally fish the way fish wanted. The fish needed multiple nibbles to be convinced that the bait was tasty enough to eat. This technique gave the fishermen the mechanism to keep working for the final capture.

Now fish retargeting gained notoriety because it was effective and complemented other techniques. Even though tagging was not new, this style had different rules from generic tagging: it enabled you to price each species differently, it was a pay per nibble model, and unlike generic tagging techniques that treated a nibble from a turtle like a nibble from a tuna, this technique allowed you to use a different hook for the different species. These rules were close to the rules of the fisheries and fishermen could easily use it to tap into the same thriving marketplace.

The rest of the tale is still to be told.





Reader Comments.

This whole fish adage is annoying. Just say what you’re trying to say.

- Clay

Posted by Clay | 3:59 pm on September 29, 2006.

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