Summary: Database giant Acxiom has just confirmed VortexDNA’s value proposition by including attitudes and beliefs in their relevance technology. The predictive value of who you are and what you believe is significantly greater than that of context.

Those of you who follow this blog regularly know that the foundation of VortexDNA’s relevance technology is that an individual’s purpose and values can be used to predict relevance.

Going by a piece by Laurie Petersen at Online Media Daily today, we’re not the only ones who know this to be true:

DATABASE MARKETING GIANT ACXIOM TODAY officially launches its Relevance-X products designed to allow marketers to make online media buys…

“We’re really excited about this,” said Rich Howe, Acxiom’s chief marketing and strategy officer. “We’re bringing our knowledge and experience in direct marketing to the online channels to give clicks context–going far beyond basic information such as age, gender and household income to include the attitudes, beliefs and lifestyles of consumers that are much more predictive.” [emphasis mine]

According to the article, Acxiom has been seeing click-through rates double or triple in tests of the Relevance-X system: powerful numbers.

Even without the boost from tapping into consumer attitudes, behavioral targeting is far more effective than contextual targeting. Consider what this Research Brief from the Center for Media Research has to say:

…a study on consumer receptivity to online advertising… found that more online consumers are consistently more receptive to behaviorally targeted ads than to contextual advertising, outperforming contextual by as much as 22 percent in some categories.

Marla R. Schimke, vice president of marketing at Revenue Science, said “… (this report shows that) behavioral targeting is more effective than contextual advertising for advertisers, publishers, and for consumers… This study… reaffirms our belief that Internet users favor advertising relevant to them personally…” [emphasis mine]

When that brief says, “relevant to them personally,” they’re saying we know you like computers so we’ll show you ads about computers. The validation of VortexDNA’s technology has shown that it’s possible to go far, far deeper than that: link relevance can be accurately predicted based on who you are, what your purpose in life is, and what you value above all.

And VortexDNA technology can do this without ever tracking history.

This concept is not standalone, either; companies can use it to augment their current recommendation technology rather than replace it.

Imagine the power of a search engine that integrates VortexDNA technology with existing keyword relevance matching. Imagine how gratifying it would be for an ecommerce site improve their recommendations to you based on what you really care about.

Do you have an ecommerce site? A search engine? An ad platform? Do you just find this topic intriguing? Leave a comment below or email me privately (kaila @ vortexdna.com). Let’s begin a conversation.

This is a dramatic shift in how we look at relevance, and we’d love for you to participate with us.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 16th, 2007 at 7:58 pm and is filed under Predictive search, Relevance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.