Have you ever wondered why certain advertisements appear on certain websites? For example why car hire ads appear as you’re surfing the net having just booked a plane ticket?
The answer is technology of the kind entrepreneur Rafe Roberts has introduced to the Perth market.
Mr Roberts’ new business, Profit Cloud, is focused on what’s called ‘programmatic online advertising’.
The process starts with online advertising giants such as Google, MSN and Microsoft collecting data on individuals browsing the internet; data such as geographical location, age, sex, family status, as well as websites being browsed and online purchases made.
They then offer the chance for businesses to advertise directly to their target market.
That’s where Profit Cloud comes in. The technology platform on which Profit Cloud is based involves an automated auction for online advertising space, which occurs within 20 milliseconds.
The result is Profit Cloud clients are able to win advertising space directly related to their product, provided the Profit Cloud process wins the auction.
“We can target people by the peanut butter brand they like, or someone who’s just bought a plane ticket to Perth in the last 30 days,” Mr Roberts told Business News.
“It’s really quite powerful because you can target (people) both by what they’re searching but by their behaviour or past purchases as well.
“If you, for example, have had children and Huggies wanted to show ads just to people who had children, we could do that rather than people who don’t have children seeing the ads, which would be a waste of advertising spend.”
Mr Roberts said the strategy and technology had grown to be worth $13 billion in the US last year, but was yet to truly take off in Australia.
The Profit Cloud platform is able to reach people in 241 countries and across 42 languages.
