Most marketers/advertisers are increasingly concerned with ROI, which is news to no one. Having executed campaigns on ‘top publisher sites’ claiming a superior demographic audience and having executed behavioral campaigns across multiple and massive ad networks, I will say the performance metrics we have generated — for many campaigns, not just a few — point to ad network behavioral as the clear-cut winner for our CPA-oriented (ROI-focused) goals.

Results for generic, mass-reach, demo-targeted efforts pitched by ‘passionate salespeople’ have simply PALED in comparison to results we have delivered to the client using behavioral.

For sophisticated online marketers, it’s a matter of ROI. It’s NOT a matter of ‘being sold’ by a brand name publisher who smacked their fancy logo on a PowerPoint deck, then sits down with a smile and wants you to buy their ‘best pages’ for a $40 CPM or wants to create a ‘custom landing page’ with content that would be redundant to what’s already on your existing site and/or landing pages.

Ultimately, our campaigns must deliver results. Ad network behavioral has done that. I can’t remotely say the same for ‘top publisher sites.’ Based on our experience, technology is king.

The networks can’t create custom programs that work and have a blended ecpm the client loves.
Although I believe that ad networks have their place in the market, I still believe in the organic sell using the strengths of one’s property.

At the end of the day, the critical factors are (a) touchpoints/user and (b) how the behavioral technology works.

The number of touchpoints (or data collection points, pageviews) per user is critical, since we as web users shift our attention continually. Publishers generally have fewer touchpoints than networks, but even a network with 200 touchpoints/unique/month is not nearly enough to compete with the big 4. For that reason, today’s networks are better off sharing behavioral data (like an MLS in the real estate world) and competing on the basis of sales, ad ops, and their publisher relationships.

Next is the behavioral technology itself, which each network defines differently. Many networks’ behavioral offering is simple retargeting which doesn’t offer a whole lotta scale. Others drive behavioral targeting via simple contextual matching technology — If I go to a few pages with content about new car buying, I’m now an “in market auto buyer” for some period of time, even though it may have only earned a truly insignificant portion of my overall attention span.

However networks define it, their problem is still the same — in a world where online attention is changing continually, how do you know how much I really care about any given topic? What’s top of mind for me right now? Over time? A simple count of the number of pages I go to doesn’t do it.

Effective behavioral targeting requires a model of what the user cares about. To truly understand what a person cares about (anonymously of course), you need to have many many touchpoints and leverage from that a continually evolving picture of the topics they show an interest in, with an affinity strength for each topic, at various timescales. Affinity strength is key, provided there are sufficient and continual reinforcement/decay mechanisms in place.

As far as the “insight” ad networks have over a single publisher, this is perhaps overestimated. I think you are underestimating the importance of the information about a site’s users vs. the network’s users. But I’ll concede that in certain scenarios a view overlooking multiple sites can provide value.

This site is supposed to be a news source man, not a sales channel. A more objective viewpoint is needed to maintain credibility for this news site. Before confirming that you are in fact the founder of an adnetwork, I assumed it after reading the first few sentences.