Briefs

By Enid Burns, The ClickZ Network, Apr 10, 2008

A network of e-commerce sites and product manufacturers intends to target ads across the Web using predictive modeling based on consumers' past purchase behavior. For advertisers, it may be an attractive offering, but for consumers it may raise privacy concerns.

Executives from aCerno, the network, said they spent two years building the network designed to share data across retailers on a single cookie to provide continuous modeling across all the sites.

"We gather all of [an e-commerce site's] users and behaviors, all anonymously, to then target all of those users across all of the Web to drive them back to all of the member sites to create more transactions," said Bennet Zucker, VP of sales and market at aCerno.

Last fall the network opened to advertisers and agencies, when aCerno began using anonymous data gathered in user cookies to serve targeted ads across publisher sites and ad networks. It's a change from the behavioral marketing model where users are targeted based on recent search behavior. ACerno instead categorizes segments based on predictive modeling and matches advertisers to an audience segment.

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