Crowd Science today announced the first results from customers on [the performance of] CITRUS, the unique first party audience segmentation and targeting platform for online publishers and content networks. The announcement was made during Internet Week at the Conversational Marketing Summit in New York City. Federated Media Publishing is hosting the event. Since launching CITRUS last October, Crowd Science has acquired an impressive list of online publishing customers including Ziff-Davis, Federated Media Publishing, Huddler, ifood.tv and IndieClick.

Results confirm that CITRUSʼ first-party segmentation and targeting capabilities change the game for publishers by allowing them to differentiate themselves to advertisers and increase monetization from more of their online audience. The power of the platform comes from its combination of psychographic research and behavioral and contextual targeting, which is then overlaid with proprietary machine learning. The resulting output creates highly accurate audience segments across every pocket of a site or network of sites. This innovation drives a level of detail and clarity for online publishers that are not available using standard analytics or targeting solutions.

Ziff Davis

Ziff-Davis works with Crowd Science to supplement its powerful BuyerBase targeting system and offer new audience segments to attract advertisers. “CITRUS segments allow us to include precise targeted line items in our RFPs that attract our advertisers and win business,” Marcella Reginault, VP of Marketing & Sales Operations at Ziff Davis said. ”We incorporate Crowd Science audience segments to hone in on specific targets within our owned and operated sites.”

Federated Media Publishing (FMP)

Federated Media Publishing (FMP) partners with Crowd Science to understand and segment its diverse audience across more than 350 sites. Last month, FMP began selling Crowd Science audience segments within its advertising portfolio. The first segments include “digital gadget sharers,” “recipe sharers” and “Twittering moms,” with dozens more in development. “We look forward to using this intelligence to inform FMPʼs ad products and boost the way our brand partners get their messages to the right audience,” said Michael Goodman, Director of Market Research at FMP.

ifood.tv

ifood.tv recently joined forces with Crowd Science to help leverage their first party data to better define, segment, and target the niche audience theyʼve cultivated. “For example, a BBQ food product company can now reach just the BBQ enthusiasts they are seeking on ifood.tv and not have their ads blanketed blindly across the site,” states ifood.tv founder Vikrant Mathur. “Given the specificity with which consumers are now selecting their food, it is imperative that brands target the correct audience. “The technology Crowd Science provides helps us connect brands with the right audience, at scale.”

Huddler

Huddler came to Crowd Science seeking new options for its ad sales team to offer advertisers. Traditionally focused on site-by-site sponsorships, CITRUS allowed them to uncover more of the valuable niche audience segments their advertisers wanted across their entire network. “There is no doubt that Crowd Science helped enable and differentiate our proposal and allowed us to win some big brand campaigns,” says Adam Ferren, Director of Sales and Revenue Operations. “We recently received a second RFP from a new sporting goods advertiser, and it’s because of Crowd Science that we were able to add a quality account like that to our client list.”

“Until now, publishers have had challenges in truly measuring and harnessing the unique attributes of their entire audience,” says Crowd Science CEO Corey Leibow. “We are thrilled with the results our customers are seeing with CITRUS, and the positive response we are receiving in the market.”

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Then just in time for Mother’s Day, we released our latest JustAsk! study chock full of fun mom statistics. Some of the findings were surprising, and some where what you’d expect. For example, 4 in 5 moms share photos, video, music and links online, which seems like pretty normal online behavior. But we also found that about half of moms are friends with their kids on Facebook, which is definitely counterintuitive to general wisdom. After all, didn’t teenagers let out a collective groan when parents first started invading Facebook?

Check out the infographic below to find out more fun mom statistics. If you like it, please share on Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest and feel free to copy for your own blog.

Is your mom on Facebook? Are you friends with her? Tell us in the comments.

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Now Folio Magazine has published a piece that also looks at how Everyday Health uses Crowd Science audience measurement. Carolina Petrini, the VP of Market Research at EH, was interviewed about how the Crowd Science combination of surveys and web analytics help their team go beyond ad response measurements to get a deep understanding of their audience. Ms. Petrini said:

“We use [Crowd Science] to gain consumer insights, ad effectiveness and audience profiling. We also use it to gather information about our users, become smarter about how to develop products and to offer info/ insight/campaign performance metrics to our clients.”

Visit the Crowd Science website to learn more about the CITRUS platform helps published with their audience measurement and ad targeting needs.

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In an increasingly complex digital world, moms are finding creative ways to stay connected with those they care most about: their kids. They have an inherent desire that drives them to share, connect and adopt new technology with their children.

Join Crowd Science for a free 30 minute webinar delving into how moms go online to connect with their kids. We also take a look at the parenting styles of the modern mom. Some of the interesting findings we will explore include the following:

• 50% of moms ‘friend’ their kids on Facebook
• A small fraction of moms feel that they are ‘helicopter’ parents
• 1 in 10 moms are against vaccination

Crowd Science helps premium publishers with their audience targeting and segmentation, we continue to uncover alluring and thought-provoking research that our customers are looking for. We’ve taken the study of moms a few layers deeper by helping our customers uncover detailed and predictive psychographics about the mommy visitors on their sites.

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Download Online Mom Infographic

When it comes to parenting styles, most parents consider themselves pretty easy going. But the latest JustAsk! mom survey research from Crowd Science (http://crowdscience.com), an audience segmentation and targeting company, surveyed moms and found 17% admit that their parenting style is “extremely hands-on, having full control.” But the vast majority of moms surveyed don’t believe they overdo it, with 83% feeling neutral or disagreeing that this is their parenting style.

The Facebook Factor: Staying in touch with—and on top of—their children, regardless of parenting style, has become easier as the study found half of moms are ‘friends’ with their kids on Facebook.

“It’s no surprise in the age of social media, that 79% of moms share content like videos, photos and links with friends and family online, but the fact that they use digital channels to stay connected with their kids is very telling,” says Sandra Marshall, VP of Research at Crowd Science. “Moms today are no different than in the past. They just want to stay connected with the people that matter to them most: their kids.”

Download Modern Mom Infographic

Despite the increasing ubiquity of smartphones and tablets and the growing consumption of online video, just one in ten moms consider themselves “Early Adopters”, acknowledging they don’t tend to buy gadgets and devices when they first hit store shelves.

Regardless of technology and parenting style, most moms are happy. More than half agreed with the statement “I am a generally happy person,” while 17% admitted to feeling stressed, with “much more stress than I can handle.”

Research was based on a sample size of 167 moms and was conducted across the Crowd Science network between March 14th and April 9th, 2012.

Results from the mom survey will be reviewed in a free webinar hosted by Crowd Science on Wednesday, May 16th at 10:00 am Pacific/1:00 pm Eastern. To register visit: http://crowdscience.com/momwebinar

JustAsk! is a Crowd Science opinion research initiative delivering timely, topical insights about consumer attitudes. Research is ongoing, conducted via survey technology and uses random sampling across a network of 10,000 websites.

For more information about this study, or to request a copy of the research, email press@crowdscience.com.

Geoff explains how many websites are missing out on a opportunity to “learn more about their stakeholders.” He goes on to explain how Everyday Health uses Crowd Science survey technology to discern audience data trends, which in turn helped them woo more pharmaceutical advertisers.

Measuring Depression in Site Visitors

The first case study examined how depression symptoms varied across days of the week. The survey asked about when people feel depression symptoms. One was a self-report of which days of the week people think they feel depressed. The other was how they were feeling right.

As often happens in social science studies, people’s prediction of their own behavior was quite different than the actual results. People reported that they feel worst on Mondays, Tuesday and Wednesdays. However, when asked about how they feel at the present, people were on average more depressed on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.

These results allowed Everyday Health to target visitors with depression more accurately with informative content and newsletters, as well as allow advertisers to more accuracy target their ads.

Women’s Influence in Erectile Dysfunction Treatment

The second case study looked at audience for erectile dysfunction (ED) drug advertisements. The traditional thinking is that these ads should be directed at men with ED, and the Everyday Health audience is mostly female. So Everyday Health worked with Crowd Science to learn more about the role women play in their partner’s sexual health.

It turns out that women are extremely influential when it comes treating ED. 68% of women were concerned about the symptoms. 65% had researched the condition online and 60% shared that information with the sufferer. Even more important to advertisers, 60% of women encouraged the sufferer to discuss symptoms with a physician and 18% actually consulted with a doctor directly.

On a side note, I think these results were also an early indicator of what drug companies know now: wives are key when it comes to ED treatment. When the first ED drug came out, the commercials were had healthy-looking 50+ silver-haired men earnestly speaking to the camera (with the occasional Nascar reference thrown in of course.) Now, these ads tend to show couples at home or in romantic situation, and both the husband and wife speak to the camera.

These case studies show the power of audience data. No longer relegated to simple demographics like gender and age, publisher’s data can help created targeted audience segments that can challenge traditional stereotypes about audiences and provide concrete evidence that sales teams can use to draw in new advertisers.

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While Dave made several excellent points about the state of the agency trading desks, two really resonated with me.

Analytics

His first point about agency trading desks was “analytics is the key value driver today.”  Historically, advertisers and their agencies have had to buy media according to the content (subject) or context (tone or spirit) of the subject matter they felt their target audiences would likely consume.  So in order to target athletic men aged 18 to 34, an advertiser would have to run ads adjacent to content that this segment might find compelling.

Today’s ad targeting technologies, combined with a publisher’s own first party data, make it possible for advertisers to deliver their messages directly to the right target audience regardless of the content.  So now that athletic 30-year-old man can be delivered an appealing sporting product ad while reading an unrelated article about children’s health.  We are now able to micro-target and personalize ad messages like never before, and both advertisers and publishers must become more savvy leveraging these powerful targeting tools.

Integration

Morgan’s second point, “systems integration is the future,” speaks to the tremendous complexity that currently exists in the digital advertising marketplace.  The creative technical and business minds in our industry constantly evolving and generating new online advertising solutions.  This has led to the creation of entire companies built upon little more than a feature.  Integration of these multiple solutions into a smoothly working, unified ad technology is key to the flow of digital advertising dollars.

The Crowd Science CITRUS segmentation and ad targeting platform takes a technology agnostic approach to audience targeting.  The system integrates seamlessly with solutions across the ecosystem, from agency trading desks to ad delivery systems.  By leveraging publishers’ unique first party data combined with audience behavior, attitudes, and the content their audiences are consuming, Crowd Science helps clients drive up their CPMs and sales, without the burden of costly and complex systems integration.

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eMarketer predicts that the online advertising market will reach $3.08 billion in Canadian dollars in 2012 (that’s $3.11 billion in exchange-deficient US dollars.) That’s an increase of 16.3% over last year, which saw C$2.64 billion in spending. While the rate of growth of the Canadian online advertising market size is slowing, it is predicted to reach C$4.51 billion in 2016. (By comparison, the US is expected to reach $39.5 billion in 2012, growing to $62.0 billion in 2016.)

Canadian online ad spending is also predicted to continue to grab a larger share of total media ad spending, following similar trends in the US where online ad spending is outpacing print. Online ad spending will be 23% of the total media ad spend, reaching 29.6% in 2016. Search is the biggest component of the online ad spend, growing at a rate of 11.2% compared to 8.6% for classifieds and 9.9% for display.

What do you think about the future of online advertising in Canada? Are you bullish about growth or do the eMarketer numbers seem inflated? Tell us in the comments.

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With Mother’s Day upon us, the onslaught of advertising campaigns, enticing promotions and ironically, mom-like nagging about the holiday is everywhere!

One reason for the high-pitch from the marketing-sphere is because advertisers are well aware of how critically important the mommy demographic is. Here are just some of the recent statistics to prove the point:

• Mommy brains are “built for shopping” with $2.1 trillion in spending power, says Forbes

• The Internet is an essential medium for busy moms, says a recent Arbitron/Edison Research study. And moms are the “Chief Purchasing Officer” in many households.

• 52% of moms get onto their smartphones within 5 minutes of waking up in the morning, and 28% wouldn’t give up those puppies even if they were paid to – according to a Life360 survey [infographic] of its online visitors.

• Changing habits are increasing the amount of time moms spend consuming media. Smartphones are important, but they still find time for non-Internet content like TV, radio even magazines, according to a MarketingCharts.com report.

• The same site found Moms make excellent social brand ambassadors; spending 34% more time than non-mothers recommending companies on social networking sites like Facebook and more recently, Pinterest.

All of this fascinating intelligence is proof of the high premium brands put on the heads of mommys. And the life cycle of the so-called “Mom Segment” is long and diverse, beginning at pregnancy, and frankly never ending!

There is a lot value for brands able to target advertising to moms using basic demos like age (18-44), and kids in the home (number of them under 18 years old). Using this type of data for ad targeting helps increase the performance of campaigns for all kinds of consumer goods from digital cameras to detergent to diapers. But anyone who knows a mom or two innately understands they are vastly more multi-faceted than a couple of simple demographics.

Ironically, despite Mom’s being widely understood by marketers as one of the hottest segments (along with the Latino and LGBT sets), there are only a small handful of standardized mom segments widely available in the online advertising space. Some of them, like “Soccer Moms”, are pretty old-school; while others, like “Moms” or even “new moms”, are quite generic.

At Crowd Science, we’ve taken the study of moms a few layers deeper by helping our customers uncover detailed and predictive psychographics about the mommy visitors on their sites. With this information, the premium publishers and networks that host millions of mom visitors to their sites each month can begin to build wonderfully robust and detailed profiles about the types of mothers that visit. This information is used to better attract the types of advertisers a mom would actually find relevant.

As an example, the Crowd Science CITRUS platform has uncovered dozens of first-party Mom audience segments for customers with a level of detail beyond ‘the generic’ like:

• Single Moms
• Working Moms
• Moms Who Can’t Cook
• Moms on a Diet
• Pregnant Moms
• Stressed Out Moms
• Fitness Moms
• Twitter Moms
• Recipe Sharing Moms

Many more segments can be customized for our online publishing customers on the fly using their own data. This is done simply by aggregating different combinations of audience attributes from purchase intent to political preferences!

For some, this begs the question of privacy, but Crowd Science solutions work without understanding “who” each mom is by building patterns based on our polite and confidential online survey solution, and observed behavioral patterns. All of the insights we use create a balance between the providers of useful content (e.g. online publishers and mommy bloggers), the consumers of that content (e.g. your mom), and the advertisers who help publishers keep that useful content free!

Even after this year’s Mother’s Day has passed, Yo’ Mamma will still be a valuable constituent for the world’s marketers to target. As the advertising industry continues to evolve and innovate the way those marketers reach our dear mums, it will ideally also provide better, truly tailored and relevant offers to them.

Now go call your mom!

Stay tuned for more on the hot Mom Segment from Crowd Science in the next few weeks in honor of Mother’s Day – including some valuable findings direct from the Crowd Science JustAsk! network.

If you are a publisher, network or large-scale site interested in this type of segmentation give Crowd Science a call or email.

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What is In-Segment Incidence?

The best way to illustrate in-segment incidence is with the following graphic:

Each dot represents a delivered ad impression. Each orange dot represents an impression that has been delivered to the correct audience. Using the graph above, targeted ads reached 23% of the target audience. The incidence of how well a given target audience segment will be hit successfully will vary based on whether or not an ad campaign uses audience targeting.  Although it’s rare to have a 100% success rate, audience targeting can increase the incidence of an audience significantly.

With the variety of third and first party data sources available in the market today, there is little transparency as to the true success rate is of reaching a given audience. There is even less transparency into the expected success rate. For example, there have been rumors of some undisclosed tests where a segment from the third party data provider Blue Kai experienced an in-segment success rate of 11%. That means that for every 100 impressions, only 11 are reaching the intended audience.

In order to better understand in-segment incidence, there are a couple important concepts to explain.

Natural Incidence

Every audience exists in some natural concentration on a publisher’s website. Whether it is audience segments of wealthy females or tweeting dads, most publishers will have some natural incidence of these individuals on their sites. This natural level may be considered as the base, measured as an index of 100.

There is also an important distinction between the natural incidence on a particular site and the Internet norm. For the purposes of this discussion, we are interested in the incidence on the particular web property, not the web at large.

Targeting Incidence

The targeting incidence measures the incidence of a particular audience segment when audience targeting is applied. In an ideal world, audience targeting would provide an in-segment incidence of 100%. However, this is level of perfect targeting rarely happens. In most cases, a moderate increase in in-segment incidence is acceptable.

Targeting Lift

Lift is a measurement of performance in ad targeting that measures the increase in incidence of a desired audience segment. To get technical, targeting lift is the percent change of the targeting incidence over the natural audience incidence. Lift plays an important role in measuring targeting success as it provides a relative improvement.

In-Segment Incidence and Lift Example

Consider this scenario: A certain audience exists on the Internet at an natural incidence of 5%. If an online publisher, due to their content, has a natural incidence of 23% for this audience, it is X4.6 more effective in reaching the desired audience.

At first glance, this publisher can provide a very viable and valuable audience segment to advertisers using just run-of-site with absolutely no targeting. However, with the right audience targeting solution like the CITRUS platform, the targeted incidence can be as high as 72% in-segment, representing a 222% lift.

As I noted earlier, there is little transparency in the ad industry around what in-segment means and what acceptable incidence rates are. A core component of the Crowd Science CITRUS model is providing the publisher with the measurable insights on expected performance like incidence and lift, which in turn, translates into real value.

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