Continuing his shake up of display advertising, Chris Autry explores the interplay between core and non-core content and the use of technology to close the gap between the two.

Online display advertising is generally considered 'non-core' content, as it is not the primary content that a consumer is expecting to receive on a selected site. This is particularly true of banner advertising. The current thinking in banner advertising is to make banners, or non-core content, as relevant to the 'core' content as possible with the hope that there will be enough interest to generate some form of interaction with the user.

We can define core content as any content or functionality that forms the focus or purpose of a site or application. Core content is the 'why am I here and what am I going to do?' part of any interactive experience. Most sites are designed to allow a certain amount of lateral movement away from core content, to offer a richer site experience.

The deviation away from core content can be broad, such as on a video sharing site where viewing video is the main function, but where there is also on offer an endless variety of video from unlimited numbers of suppliers on any topic matter. Here the functionality, or what can be done is finite, while content (what is presented and consumed) is almost infinite.

Financial services' sites, on the other hand, offer only narrow deviation away from core content as functionality is finite and accessibility to content type is also finite. In other words, consumers come to a banking site to perform financial transactions and that will be the extent of both functionality and content offered. A range of technologies has been developed to make non-core content, in this case banner advertising, relevant to core content. There are two ways to achieve this, on a contextual level and on a behavioural level, or some combination thereof.

Contextual based technologies can be as sophisticated as site-readers that will automatically choose ads in real time based on scanned site content, or can be as simple as media buyers 'manually' placing ads for GPS devices on motoring sites. Behavioural targeting relies on tracking consumer usage over time to create and store profiles, enabling a user to be presented with advertising deemed personally relevant regardless of the site content. This behavioural tracking can be done within individual sites, across networks of sites or most recently at the ISP level where a holistic view of the consumer can be generated for all activity over set periods of time.

But few consumers would opt-in to having their online behaviour tracked, as most wish to keep their online activities private.

Imagine then, if user behaviour was tracked not on an individual basis but on a group level, according to geography, triangulated demography and over set periods of time. Useful group profiles could be created and used in conjunction with sophisticated contextual targeting to serve up optimal non-core content to the user.

Once the placement of 'non-core' content (advertising) in relation to the 'core' content (site functionality and content) is optimised, a shift in focus to unit level functionality and content can occur. It is this very idea that brings us to the most revolutionary model of the use of technology to exploit non-core content in relation to core content. In other words, building 'non-core' content directly into the 'core' content itself.

A simple illustration of non-core content built into core content is a video trailer, advertising a specific film, in which the user rolls over the video activating an application screen directly from within the video. They can then buy tickets to the film, download a low resolution version of the film, add a review, find other titles of interest, etc, all within the video unit itself. This is a true 'consumer-pull' model of online display advertising in which the advertiser has the user's permission to introduce non-core content directly within core content.

Why? Because the non-core content is relevant, supplementing and enhancing the core content.

Even if this video trailer was then distributed across 300 different websites, all information, user activity, reviews, downloads, anything to do with this video could be collated at one single source. Any activity relating to this unit could be tracked, recorded and most importantly acted upon, auto adjusting in real-time, in response to consumer action. If all forms of advertising become applications that support core content, defragmentation in the online advertising space occurs naturally. Instead of the usual fragmented non-core content sprinkled randomly around core-content, non-core content becomes a useful and meaningful support for core content

So, the key to defragmentation in online advertising is simple. Core content that is clearly supported by non-core content creates cohesive and successful marketing strategies, allowing for a true consumer-pull online display model.

Chris Autry is CEO of Tailgate Technologies.