Ed Smith, the chief commercial officer of News Digital Media, recenly announced the launch of two new advertising targeting initiatives, Audience and Contextual Targeting, created to help advertisers connect better with their target audience.

Audience Targeting

News Digital Media’s Audience Targeting initiative is a tool developed upon the industry practice of behavioural targeting, therefore identifying particular segments of the population according to their browsing history.

Audience Targeting does not identify individuals meaning users are anonymous to advertisers.

Smith said:

“At News Digital Media, we brought in consumer segmentation professionals to help us define more focussed segments, making a much more powerful proposition for advertisers.

“The News Digital Media Network is a hive of rich content. We can tell a lot about our people by what they view. Audience Targeting helps aggregate that uniquely rich content into meaningful profiles about users so that more relevant and timely advertising can be delivered to them.

“We now offer more categorically friendly and in-depth advertiser segments for targeting than our competitors. These segments include ‘health conscious’, ‘parents’, ‘small businesses’ and the ‘media savvy’.”

News Digital Media is also providing advertisers the ability to create their own in-depth segments based on the needs of their clients.

“News Digital Media is committed to offering advertisers choice and flexibility. If a product doesn’t match any of our segments, we will work with the client to create a specific segment that caters to their needs” Mr Smith said.

Contextual Targeting

News Digital Media’s Contextual Targeting initiative enables advertisers to deliver their message directly to users whilst they are browsing relevant content.

By drawing on the ‘meta data’ of a page, such as the article headline, an advertiser can considerably enhance their message’s efficacy by delivering it into an environment that is contextually relevant.

Mr Smith said that contextual advertising was a more immediate approach to behavioural targeting.

“Contextual advertising provides an immediacy that Audience Targeting can’t. For example, without having to involve particular segments, a company looking to advertise a hybrid car on our network can automatically have their ads displayed alongside news articles about climate change and the environment.

“The advertiser message is significantly enhanced through the context in which it is seen.”

With the mechanisms for Contextual Targeting, advertisers can exclude undesirable or possibly damaging content with the use of ‘but not’ clauses. This means that their advertisements are unlikely to appear along side news stories with a negative slant on the particular product or service.