BlueKai recently announced a deal with SEM firm Efficient Frontier to provide “BlueKai Intent” which, according to a press release, provides marketers with “another way to buy in-market audiences — defined by existing search keyword lists — and reach them outside the walls of search engines with any media partner.” Read the release.
BlueKai business development executive David Wiener discussed the new product.
AdExchanger.com: How can search marketers be sure that their keyword lists are being mapped properly? Can you discuss the methodology used?
DW: In order to avoid some of the challenges we saw in other products we took a multi-step approach to ensure we offered scalable high-quality keyword mapping. Our analytics practice has put some serious horsepower behind building technology that helps us better understand relationships between the billions of data points we process – we use this to create more accurate data maps and do better data discovery. At a very high level, we crunch large sets of discreet data points, correlate and classify them, but we also use these datasets to help us more accurately tune. There is also an art to keyword mapping – we have built an incredibly talented editorial team with degrees in library science and they will oversee the accuracy of the mapping during the beta process.
Overall we are pretty excited about some of this technology – it was actually the subject of some patents we filed earlier this summer and you can expect to continue to see us push the envelope with analytics.
What is the cost of the BlueKai Intent service? And how long does it take to map a list?
Participation in the beta program requires a financial commitment to purchase a certain amount of the mapped data, but the actual cost of the data will not be marked up in any way. The data will be exposed within each beta participant’s BlueKai account and available for purchase the same way they purchase BlueKai data today. As always, we offer flexibility in terms of pricing model – data can be purchased either on a CPM or CPS (cost per stamp). As far as speed, there are obviously some variables (like number of keywords, match type, etc) but generally speaking the mapping is actually surprisingly quick.
Who is the target marketer for the product – all search marketers, eventually? Or larger SEMs like Efficient Frontier?
The product was designed specifically for marketers that wanted to translate keywords into channels outside the walls of search engines – it just requires a keyword list, but that list can come from your AdWords account, your Omniture account, or even your product catalog. Right now there is a lot of expertise in the search space that is difficult to translate into other highly targetable and scalable environments like display and video. We think this product is well suited to support the larger paradigm shift in the industry whereby search and display planning will interact more closely. We have seen the buy-side begin to morph from channel-specialists (search vs display) into two discreet groups who are defined by how they deal with addressable media (biddable media traders vs. non-biddable media planners). This product is well suited to help support both sides of the market as this transition occurs.
Will it be possible to eventually map SEM lists against other third-party data providers that are hooked into the BlueKai Exchange such as TARGUSinfo or Bizo?
Yes, we will be doing this as part of the beta. Once a keyword is mapped into BlueKai, there is tons we can do with it – mapping against all other data sets is one way to provide a lot of additional intelligence. We do not impose any artificial assumptions about data-source that we use for this product – if there is a strong map to a third party data source, it is absolutely taken into consideration. That said there are a number of complexities with regard to mapping keywords against third-party data sets, so this will be a growth area.
By John Ebbert
