Notes from IDM B2B Marketing Conference - London (April 8th)

Yesterday I attended the 5th annual B2B Marketing Conference organised by the Institute of Direct Marketing.

To be honest, much of the day was a little disappointing. However as always there were a couple of interesting elements outside of the opportunity to network with peers. For myself the highlight was a presentation from Rob Watt at Avenue A / Razorfish who opened my eyes  a little more to the use of cookies in marketing campaigns. His fundamental question was "would you consider paying a £300 cost per thousand (CPM) for display media?" Of course not, I hear you say. But he then went on to expand upon how, if you could use cookies and other digital techniques to target your customers and prospects, and ONLY your customers and prospects, then all of a sudden this starts to become a really good deal.

We all appreciate that cookies can be used to track return visits to our websites in order to pick up additional behavioural information from repeat visitors without having to present additional annoying registration forms.

But consider the following: our prospects are blending their work and home online personas. Increasingly people will look at Facebook and SkyNews and the website for their favourite football club during the day, and similarly will look at their work-related sites during evenings and weekends. The two spaces are not as distinct and separate as was the case just a few years ago. And Rob's contention was that to place "work-related" advertising (provided it's relevant, of course) in front of this person within Facebook or the Liverpool website, would not be considered inappropriate.

So here's the thought. If I capture a "pool" of cookies for my prospect from my digital activities (web, RSS, podcast, widgets etc) and then pass this cookie pool over to one of the adserving networks, I can ask for my display ad to be served whenever the adserving network detects the presence of that specific cookie, irrespective of the specific media. So in other words, the adverts are triggered by cookie presence rather than by media selection. I hadn't come across this concept before, and it seemed to me to be very powerful.

And furthermore, once you have a critical mass of prospects being targeted in this way, you would be able to do some propensity modeling to infer what web titles your target market is spending time in, and hence use this to refine your overall media planning.

Sounds to me like a really interesting approach. Anyone got any experience of doing this?

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