Hypertargeting refers to the ability to deliver advertising content to specific interest-based segments in a network.
MySpace coined the term in November 2007 with the launch of their SelfServe advertising solution (later called myAds), described on their site as "enabling online marketers to tap into self-expressed user information to target campaigns like never before."
Hypertargeting is also the ability on social network sites to target ads based on very specific criteria. This is an important step towards precision performance marketing.
The first MySpace HyperTarget release offered advertisers the ability to direct their ads to 10 categories self-identified by users in their profiles, including music, sports, and movies. In July 2007 the targeting options expanded to 100 subcategories. Rather than simply targeting movie lovers, for example, advertisers could send ads based on the preferred genres like horror, romance, or comedy. By January 2010, MySpace HyperTarget involved 5 algorithms across 1,000 segments.
According to an article by Harry Gold in online publisher ClickZ, the general field of hypertageting draws information from 3 sources:
*Registration — basic data gathered when users register for site access (e.g. age, sex, location);
*Profile — detailed content completed by active users (e.g. favorite movies, activities, brands);
*
Behavioral
Behavior (American English) or behaviour (British English) is the range of actions and mannerisms made by individuals, organisms, systems or artificial entities in some environment. These systems can include other systems or organisms as well ...
history — data gathered from online activities like sites visited, purchases made, groups joined, etc.
Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...
, a popular social network, offers an ad targeting service through their Social Ads platform. Ads can be hypertargeted to users based on keywords from their profiles, pages they're fans of, events they responded to, or applications used. Some of these examples involve the use of
behavioral targeting
Targeted advertising is a form of advertising, including online advertising, that is directed towards an audience with certain traits, based on the product or person the advertiser is promoting. These traits can either be demographic with a focus ...
.
By 2009, hypertargeting became an accepted industry term. In 2010, the International
Consumer Electronics Show
CES (; formerly an initialism for Consumer Electronics Show) is an annual trade show organized by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA). Held in January at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Winchester, Nevada, United States, the event typi ...
(CES), the world's largest consumer technology tradeshow, dedicated three sessions to the topic:
*Advertising Analytics and Social Media, Search, Video Search and HyperTargeting
*Hypertargeting: Ad Networks, Ad Serving and Ad Targeting
*HyperTargeting and HyperSelecting: Advertising, Search, Content and Aggregation
[HyperTargeting and HyperSelecting: Advertising, Search, Content and Aggregation - http://www.cesweb.org/sessions/search/sessionDetails.asp?sessionid=3503 {{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100612232755/http://cesweb.org/sessions/search/sessionDetails.asp?sessionid=3503 , date=2010-06-12 ]
Notes and references
Online advertising