Here are some questions I often receive about Magnetic. Please keep sending your comments and questions.

What is Magnetic?
Magnetic operates a marketplace for advertisers and publishers to apply search data to all online advertising. Advertisers and publishers can use search data as the key indicator of intent to re-target campaigns to the most relevant audience online.

Why is there a need for Magnetic?
Targeting advertisements to visitors of websites without direct knowledge user intent is difficult. Many targeting and data companies lack transparency in customer segmentation. To overcome these problems, we need to harness the power of search. Sponsored search ads are the highest converting ads on the internet, perhaps in the world. By using search as the key indicator intent, we provide better performance and transparency.

Who do you work with?
We are currently testing the marketplace with ad networks, publishers, and ad exchange buyers/DSPs who can effectively use the data to serve targeted ads.

Who do you compete with?
We compete with other data marketplaces like BlueKai and eXelate. We differentiate ourselves by working with search data.

How is your approach different from other re-targeting companies?
Magnetic helps advertisers use search data to re-target customers through all online advertising while they are in purchase mode. Advertisers can re-target customers who have searched for a set of keywords. This is very different from re-targeting companies that let you only target those who have searched and then visited your site. By using search data from the search engine itself, we allow advertisers to reach people that are in purchase mode for their product but have likely never visited their site.

Where do you get data from?
Magnetic compiles data from search engines and website partners that serve sponsored search ads.

Do these data providers include Google and Yahoo?
All of our data providers are search engines and websites that are serving sponsored search ads from major sponsored search marketplaces. Google are Yahoo are examples of major sponsored search marketplaces.

How would an advertiser use your marketplace?
We are able to run search re-targeted campaigns for advertisers via partnerships with the multiple ad networks, exchanges and DSPs we work with.

What ad formats can the data be applied to?
We can work with any ad technology that supports re-targeting, and this includes all common forms of advertising and all IAB standard ads including video, mobile, etc.

How will you protect consumer privacy?
Magnetic leads in user privacy standards by targeting keywords – not users. Magnetic implements the best practices in privacy: human-readable privacy policies, P3P compact privacy policies, W3C policy placement standards and user opt-out.

Why the new name?
We believe search re-targeting today is the most efficient way to find customers because of the large amount of display media, strong indication of intent in search data and other market dynamics. However, we wanted a name that represents us at our core. Magnetic describes the pulling force we provide our customers in finding their customers.

How are you different from Blue Kai?
Blue Kai compiles structured data from eCommerce sites, for example the one hundred travel destinations or one hundred automobile models. Magnetic compiles million of user-entered searches from search engines and website partners that serve sponsored search ads. Magnetics advance algorithms and interfaces extract maximum value out of search data.

How is Magnetic different from Google AdWords Re-targeting?
Google’s re-targeting product allows you to do site re-targeting. Google provides you with a pixel tag that you can put on your web site and then target ads at users who have visited your site. Magnetic allows you to re-target users who have searched for a keyword who most likely have not visited your site. This allows you to reach more users who are actively searching for your product type but have not yet visited your web site. All modern ad servers and ad exchanges support re-targeting tags just like the recently added Google AdWords tag. Magnetic integrates with all of these tags including Google AdWords Re-targeting tags to provide you the power of search re-targeting, something Google does not offer.

There has been so much discussion around privacy that I think it is beneficial to step back and revisit the goal here.  The goal:

Protect privacy

That part was easy, now what does this mean?

privacy: the quality or condition of being secluded from the presence or view of others

protect: to keep from being damaged, attacked, stolen, or injured

So we want to make sure not to expose users to the presence or view of others.  Makes sense, but I am not sure if all of the discussion around sensitive information, personally identifiable information (PII) and opt outs are addressing the goal here.  Removing sensitive or personally identifiable information does not provide privacy.  For example, if you’re house were made completely of glass but none of your neighbors knew your name would you have privacy.  Furthermore, giving users the option to opt out does not protect a user, rather it gives the user the option to protect themselves.

So does that mean we can’t target ads?  No, we can still target advertisements but we need to be careful in doing so to make certain we do not expose users to the presence or view of others.  One way to do this is to not use unique identifiers in cookies and not start targeting data.  Our search re-targeting system stores the keyword data right to the cookie so if you search for “car insurance” and I search for “car insurance” then our cookies look the same as each other’s and the other 50,000 people in purchase mode for car insurance.

This is very different than the original behavioral targeting companies that set a unique number on your computer and watch you go from site to site to site in a big brother like fashion.  These companies form profiles with over one thousand pieces of information per user per month.  In comparison to our search re-targeting system, we do keyword targeting, not user targeting.

Furthermore in order to protect privacy, one must proactively stop the user from having their privacy violated.  It is not good enough to post lengthy privacy policies and allow them to read those and opt-out.  So does that mean cookies should be opt in?  No, you can protect privacy without removing key functionality from the internet, third party cookies, which in turn would limit on-line commerce.  One way to do this is to implement P3P compact privacy policies.

A P3P compact privacy policy is a small set of characters sent from a web server along with every image, file, etc.  The characters have letters like NPI OPT D90, etc. to mean things like no PII, we have an opt-out, we store data for 90 days.  This allows modern web browsers to automatically reject or accept cookies based on high, medium or low privacy settings.  Our search re-targeting product has a P3P compact privacy policy so our cookie gets accepted on modern web browsers with medium settings because we have an opt out and no PII but it gets rejected automatically if the user were to change their settings to high.  This sort of automatic rejection protects the user.

In short: you can target ads while protecting privacy, but it requires work.

Magnetic(TM) (formerly Domdex) does search re-targeting. Search re-targeting is when we show advertisements to users after they search for particular terms. For example, a user searches for “cell phone” and then goes to another site where we show a cell phone ad.

We think this is interesting given that search ads are the highest converting ads on the internet, perhaps the world. In terms of where we sit relative to other forms of on-line advertising, we think of things in terms of where your potential customers can be found:

We recently changed the name of our company to Magnetic(TM). We had always planned to change the name of the company when we came out of stealth-mode. In order to come up with a new name, we turned to our mission statement. Our mission statement is: We honorably serve the community by helping our customers find their customers with superior efficiency.

We believe search re-targeting today is the most efficient way to find customers because of the large amount of display media, strong indication of intent in search data and other market dynamics. However, we wanted a name that represents us at our core. Magnetic describes the pulling force we provide our customers in finding their customers.

I am proud of what Magnetic has accomplished to date, but we are not perfect and we need your feedback on both our product and the way we think about the market. Thank you very much for taking the time to read my blog and I look forward to the dialogue.