It’s a silly name but a sound concept: Segment the registered users of your site by industry, company, title, education, seniority and role within the company. For good measure, throw in some traditional demographic items like location and gender. ZoomInfo calls this bizographics, or business demographics. The new ad offering was just announced to the press, and at the ad:tech New York internet marketing conference.
In his most recent blog entry, senior ZoomInfo VP Russell Glass gives the following example of how bizographics can precisely focus an online ad’s viewers: “[a company offering an elite credit card] would have the ability to place advertising in front of users that fall within the “senior executive” bizographic, and focus messages based on this targeting — i.e, ‘CEOs now hear this.'”
Frankly, I don’t see that as being the best example of the power of this new ad platform, because the same ad buy could be made on sites specifically visited by senior executives. But I certainly see the potential. For much of my career I’ve yearned for a way to reach, say, “service industry executives with HR responsibilities.” If ZoomInfo’s system can allow for that type of pinpoint marketing, I see bizographics succeeding in spite of its unfortunate name.
Update 11/06/07: ad:tech is the stage for another, and similar, announcement. Facebook certainly has its share of user information to mine for ad value. Today one of CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s big announcements was the launch of an ad platform called Social Ads. This targets ads based on member profile data and “spreads” these ad virally. It appears to be a B-to-C version of Bizographics. One that naturally has far greater reach. Scratch both of those statements. A clarifying article on 11/07/07 talked about what makes Facebook’s offering unique from other ad platforms. It doesn’t necessarily make for far-reaching ads. But their impact could be much greater, due to a word-of-mouth effect.