Akamai Behavioral Targeting

Akamai, the largest CDN with access to more information than you can imagine, announced a new service called Advertising Decision Solutions (ADS), a new division in the company that will work with its clients to apply behavioral-targeting layers to ad campaigns; it has also acquired Acerno, a company that has built itself on the notion of “predictive modeling” for $95 million.

Akamai has access to anonymous traffic from all over the world on all type of sites, and has access to track user paths and determine behavior. For example, they can know that a user has been looking at specific cars across multiple sites and suggest a targeted ad on a totally different publisher. The best of all, is that Akamai has access to this data without requiring any integration from publishers, no pixel images, no scripts, just raw data from their content networks.

In addition to their own data, Akamai buys Acerno, who’s specialty is its analytics software which uses anonymous consumer data to find out who’s buying what, who will most probably be interested in a certain product and - most importantly - why.

Combining user traffic, clickthroughs, views, and e-commerce analytical data, Akamai can build a model to serve extremely targeted ads and provide such service to publishers, ad networks and advertisers, and charge a share of the increased revenue or return that the service helps deliver.

Akamai made a point of stating how concerned the company is with protecting consumer privacy, stating that “all of Akamai’s Advertising Decision Solutions, as well as Acerno’s services, rely solely on anonymous and non-personally identifiable end user information”