A word from the sponsor
At first I was a little worried that Vanderhook might not take too kindly to my questions. After all, I was basically calling to find out why Specific Media wouldn't leave me alone. But Vanderhook didn't take it personally, even though I clearly had.
Almost immediately Vanderhook said he knew where the ad came from.
"We're using Netflix as backfill," Vanderhook explains, pointing out that the mail-order movie house is one of the biggest buyers of advertising on the web. "We can figure out what you're interested in [but the problem is] that we don't always have the advertiser to match to your segment."
According to Vanderhook, we're in the midst of a sea change in online advertising. Where ad networks once fought tooth and nail to aggregate publishers and collect the billions of pieces of data floating out there, they are now shifting their focus to attracting big name advertisers.
For Vanderhook, who says Specific Media clocks more than 100 billion BT transactions in the average 30-day period, the challenge is marshalling an array of advertisers to meet any niche. It's a little like being a fisherman who brings in a little bit of everything, and Specific Media, like all other ad networks, needs relationships with all kinds of advertisers just as badly as it needs information about me and my friends.
But from a consumer perspective, the muddy ad network waters leave a lot to be desired.
Where I thought I was being targeted (poorly), Vanderhook claims I'm actually the recipient of a digital barrage. But it's actually a lot worse than it sounds.
Welcome to the nightmare
Like a lot of web users, I only visit a handful of sites on a regular basis. The digital media I consume consists of one part big portals (Yahoo is still the closest thing the web has to a town commons), one part search engine (I'll give you a hint, it starts with the letter "G") and two parts social networks (I vacillate between Facebook and MySpace). Beyond that, reaching me is a journey into a thousand little places. I won't mention the sites I visit because they really aren't all that noteworthy. They're small- and medium-sized publishers, and the only way to efficiently message to me in those places is to use ad networks.
But it turns out that I'm not really the recipient of hyper-targeted messaging customized just for me. I'm in control insofar as my online actions instruct the computers at companies like Specific Media that I would be interested in discount Dodgers tickets, the new Adam Corolla movie and ready-to-eat organic tofu. But according to Vanderhook, I'll always get the same Netflix message as long as there's a shortage of big name advertisers. And for now, that means that I see the same ad every single time I visit one of my top 10 websites, which means I effectively live in a world with only one ad. Talk about a boring, mind-numbing existence.
Another view
While Vanderhook insists the problem is a shortage of advertisers, not everyone familiar with the problem would agree.
Speaking anonymously, one veteran of a BT provider that was gobbled up by a major portal told me he agreed with Vanderhook that my tormentor likely wasn't a case of poorly executed targeting. But both men disagreed on the reasons.
While Vanderhook disagrees, this BT source and others in the industry point to a natural tension that exists between advertisers and ad networks. That tension means that some advertisers prefer to keep ad networks in the dark to drive down price. Although the extent to which advertisers and ad networks hide the ball from each other is unknown, the effects -- from a consumer perspective -- are apparent.
At the end of the day, an ad network is a meeting place for publishers, advertisers and users. But not all ad networks are created equally.