MLB is also planning online ad exchanges in which brands can bid in real time to show ads to a specialty audience — say affluent female car buyers — on sites they own such as the New York Yankees team page. According to a Thursday press release:

“Advertisers now can identify affluent audiences based on a range of demographic, behavioral and purchasing attributes and target them across all MLB properties.” The ad initiative reflects MLB’s role as the most tech-savvy sports league; to learn more, come see MLB Advanced Media CEO Bob Bowman join us at paidContent Live on April 17.

The release was put out by BlueKai, a company that collects and analyzes data from consumers as they move across different websites. In a phone interview, BlueKai Director of Business Development, Gina Kim, said the company is providing MLB with a data platform but that the league will not use it sell customer information to other publishers.

MLB’s plans to create more granular advertising segments also reflect a broader trend across major websites. Facebook, for instance, announced this week that it’s now using third party data companies to offer super-specific audience segments like “children’s cereals” or “full-size sedan buyers.”

The BlueKai executive said the data deal for now just covers desktop browsers and not mobile devices.

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This, anyways, is the promise of BlueKai, a company that helps publishers and brands collect information and marketing insights about their audiences. BlueKai’s primary customers have always been advertisers but now it’s turning more attention to publishers, offering tools that help them create reader profiles and develop data-driven ad sale strategies.

“The world before for publishers was ‘I have these great audiences, I have these places’ please buy them’,” said BlueKai CEO Omar Tawakol in a recent phone interview. Now, though, ad buyers want publishers to supply information that lets them reach very specific groups of people — soccer dads, not soccer moms for instance. Publishers can offer this information by mining their audience data (including registration info and log-in location) and combining it with data BlueKai has about those users’ web-surfing activities. Such tools can also help publishers track when the same customer is coming to the site through a desktop, tablet or cell phone device.

The data tools are fine in theory but are they a practical investment for publishers who could spend the money on writers or developers instead? According to one executive, some publishers might not have a choice.

Vikram Somaya, a former VP of Operations and Audience at Reuters, says that audience data has become “table stakes” for premium publishers if they want to be considered for major ad purchases by national brands. In practice, this means that a company like Ford might only consider buying online ads for a given campaign if the publisher can provide a target audience of car buyers.

“Anyone who hasn’t picked an [audience data] product, is behind… it’s not an option to ignore anymore,” said Somaya in a phone interview. He acknowledged though that, for now, BlueKai-type tools may only be practical for big publishers that are in Comscore’s list of top 500 web sites. (Somaya, who is now a VP at the Weather Company, used to work at BlueKai but said his opinion is impartial).

A publisher’s size, however, may not be the only consideration about whether it should invest in audience data. The nature of its readers is a consideration too. The more general a publisher’s audience, the greater its need for data. As the FT reported last week (reg. req’d), Time Inc has just launched a major new ad strategy based on mining customer information so as to offer better-placed ads.

On the other hand, audience data is less critical for more specialized publications. As an executive for a major New York based publication, who did not want to be named, explained by email:

While we are a BlueKai customer, our experience is that most advertisers do not require audience segmentation data as part of their buy. It certainly sometimes comes up, but it’s the relatively rare exception, not the rule. My guess is that it’s probably more important for publishers with a more mass audience. Our audience is relatively targeted (and valuable) already and so segmentation isn’t needed to get the audience advertisers are seeking.

What this means in practice is that niche publishers can likely forgo fancy data tools for now.

(Image by Dusit via Shutterstock)

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Last week, the bipartisan Kerry-McCain bill proposed legislation on a Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights that would put the Federal Trade Commission in charge of policing the online collection, sharing and use of personal information. Because the legislation is watered down relative to prior proposals, the Kerry-McCain bill will face the least industry resistance and is more likely to be passed this year. That has far-reaching implications for the online media business, as I detail over at GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

The proposed bill is relatively business-friendly, so much so that it’s drawing criticism from privacy rights activists. Although advertising industry groups are predictably resistant to any kind of regulation, their initial reactions to Kerry-McCain seem more muted than concerns they had prior to the bill’s introduction. Big tech companies like Facebook, Microsoft, eBay, Hewlett-Packard and Intel, for example, have already expressed support for the bill.

The real promise of online advertising is that it holds the potential combination of television-like reach with the ability to very precisely target audiences. But passage of the Kerry-McCain bill — or even something similar — could shift some power in online media and force changes in the way online ad networks and other targeters work with content sites. Here are two of the effects the bill could have on the online world:

• Online content sites: Some traditional publishers might be perfectly happy without web-wide behavioral targeting. They could tout the value of their online/offline audience and promote contextual targeting and sponsorships. The bill lets publishers follow and target a user within their own site, which would benefit portals like Yahoo and AOL with their huge audiences and broad variety of content.
• Online advertising ecosystem: The bill’s restrictive approach to behavioral targeting favors search advertising over display ad formats. The data sharing guidelines could force data miners (Experian, Audience Science, BlueKai) and ad networks (DoubleClick, ValueClick, 24/7 Real Media) to secure more formal contractual relationships with content sites that have registered users. And the legislation seems to leave room for third parties to take user info and create anonymized groups of targetable customer “types” based on demographics and behavior.

For other potential effects on the rest of the online ad ecosystem and social media targeting, as well as a more in-depth look at what does — and does not — focus on, read my weekly update at GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

Image courtesy of: flicker user tristanf

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Lionsgate Board Rejects Icahn’s Revised Takeover Bid; the studio’s board of directors voted unanimously to reject activist investor Carl Icahn’s hostile takeover bid for control of the company, and urged its shareholders to follow suit. (Digital Media Wire)

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Big Cable Joins the Broadband Stimulus Fray; Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications and the NCTA are putting their weight behind a coalition seeking more than $52 million to drive high-speed Internet adoption. (Light Reading)

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To that end, you can find out exactly what cookies BlueKai — which says it’s the largest U.S. behavioral data provider, and just raised a third round of $21 million while kicking off its third year of existence — has on you. Head over to BlueKai’s registry and you can see, item by item, recent categories you’ve been slotted into based on your browsing history.

Here’s what Bluekai says it knows about me:

* A bunch about my travel preferences from recent trips I’ve researched (including the proverbial one to Hawaii), including what day I wanted to depart on, how far in advance of the trip it was, and my departure and arrival points. Also something more vague — that I’m “looking for sunshine.” (It’s like they’re peering into my soul!)

* Some information about my job that’s not terrifically accurate — I’m in information technology (true) and hospitality (false), I’m at a company with 100+ employees (false).

* My gender, age range and geographic area.

Though the categorical information is perhaps a bit jargony — aka “In-market > Travel > Air travel > By destination > Domestic destinations” — I can go through and remove any one aspect that I think is incorrect or invasive.

The idea here, said BlueKai CEO Omar Tawakol in a telephone interview, is to show consumers what’s known about them so they don’t get freaked out and opt out of behavioral ads entirely. It’s also meant to fend off the threat of consumer privacy legislation that could potentially cut off the whole industry. A pure opt-out system, along the lines of the Do Not Call Registry, could be a huge blow to the emerging behavioral marketing industry, which was worth $1 billion last year.

“The ultimate solution is to raise the bar high enough that we do it for ourselves instead of waiting for legislation,” Tawakol said. “The industry deserves what it gets if the bar’s too low.”

BlueKai’s is just one early attempt to get on consumer’s good sides — though I can’t imagine that many people will actually go in and adjust their data for just a single cookie-tracking company. The IAB and a group called the Network Advertising Initiative are trying to create broader industry standards.

Because BlueKai doesn’t actually target ads itself, just buy and sell data about users, it depends on its customers doing a better job of exposing what they’re doing. Here’s Tawakol’s proposal:
“In my mind morality always precedes legality. Here’s where I will be happy. If every page that collects data has a simple link in English that tells you what data it has and what it knows about you. And if every ad says this ad was targeted anonymously, click here and we’ll show you what we used.”

Image via Flickr user Editor B.

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BlueKai operates an exchange for behavioral data about online shoppers’ intent to buy retail products, cars and travel. So if you as a web user went to a travel comparison site to search for a trip to Hawaii you might somewhere down the line on a completely different site see targeted ads for beach vacations — and that original travel comparison site would get a share of revenue associated with you.

The company has moved in recent months to translate its data to analytics, and said it is “rapidly deploying new APIs and real time systems” to better integrate with partners. It also commits to deleting user data and cookies after six months and helped create a Firefox tool that helps users opt out of behavioral tracking, including its own.

Having launched only 18 months ago, BlueKai competes with eXelate. Another similar company, Lookery, shut down last year.

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