Another Company with Giant Internet Footprint enters Behavioral Targeting

Akamai, a content delivery network with relationships with publishers, ad networks and advertisers across the internet, is getting in to behavioral targeting with the purchase of acerno. Akamai bought acerno for $95 million. Acerno uses shopping cart data to predict what the consumer is interested in buying next. Acerno network reaches nearly 100% of online shoppers in US.

The combined solution will use browsing data available from Akamai with the shopping data available from Acerno to deliver behaviorally targeted ads to the consumers. Like most of the other behavioral ad networks this system claims to be anonymous.

What makes Akamai Behavioral Targeting Different from others?

According to Mike Afergan, Akamai's CTO and senior vice president of Advertising Decision Solutions, the solution is ideal for larger campaigns since it doesn't require pixels, JavaScript, or beacons, which are time-consuming. "[Customers] are able to roll out bigger campaigns in a much quicker way. Conceptually that's the right way to think about what we do" he said.
I am sure Akamai will face the privacy concerns unless it is proactive and make it a truly opt-in system, as I proposed in my 5 Step Process to ease Privacy Concerns.

Due to stiff competition in behavioral targeting network space, recently few of the behavioral targeting networks have closed their doors. Akamai sure does have a better reach than a lot of Behavioral Targeting networks out there. Akamai’s new venture might further cause some other Behavioral Targeting networks to go under as well, provided it can ease the privacy concerns.

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