Digital Media

Tristan O'Carroll, mediaweek.co.uk, 20 January 2009, 3:00pm

Specific Media unveils Smartcast ad targeting tool

LONDON - Specific Media, the online ad network, is launching a new targeted online advertising tool, which it claims allows advertisers to reach more users.

Reaching out: Specific Media claims its Smartcast ad targeting tool enables advertisers to reach more users

Available to advertisers across the UK with immediate effect, Smartcast combines Specific Media’s behavioural targeting technology and consumer insight data to allow advertisers to take over its network. It focuses on targeting customers who have previously demonstrated an interest in the brand or product offering, rather than all online users.

By using Smartcast, Specific Media said advertisers needed to buy fewer impressions to reach their target audience, as every ad served is delivered to a user that has already been identified as being interested in the product.

Colin Petrie-Norris, managing director of Specific Media International, said: "In the current economic climate, advertising investment is coming under increasingly close scrutiny and it becomes a business imperative to cut down on wasted advertising spend."

Specific Media serves ads over a publisher network of 450 UK websites, but collates data on consumers’ online behaviour from millions of websites globally to create non-identifiable unique user patterning, based on web browsing behaviour.

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All Comments

robin caller - 28 January 2009

Specific Media - claim to collect data on 450 UK websites, but "millions" of others globally. I would like to know if all the websites selling their adspace to Specific carry clear privacy policies which explain what Specific is doing. These users are not opting into this massive profiling program, which Specific seem to be bragging about.

If Specific is dropping behaviour tracking cookies on users, without their express permission, are they not in blatent defiance of the UK Goverment's position - which calls for all behavioural technology to be "opt-in" rather than "snooped in".

I would welcome an answer from the good people at Specific.