Marketing Biz: B2B Ad Targeting, Elasticsearch & ID Card Checkout

This week in marketing was short on drama and long on the future. We saw innovative search applications, new ad targeting capabilities and identity advances.

This is … Marketing Biz.

Elasticsearch Closes $24M Series B Round and Exceeds Two Million Downloads Milestone

Elasticsearch is on a mission to organize data and make it easily accessible. We deliver the world’s the most advanced open source search and analytics engine available and make real-time data exploration available to anyone.

I admit, I didn’t know that much about Elasticsearch. I’d heard of them and understood their value proposition but didn’t quite realize that they had clients like Foursquare and SoundCloud. (Insert Neo reaction here.) I can see a number of other applications, particularly in eCommerce to fill in unmet intent and demand.

Demandbase now offers B2B ad-targeting based on the software companies use

For example, if the maker of a CRM software wants to target the users of its largest competitor, Demandbase can identify individual employees of those companies online according to their corporate IP address – rather than through cookies – and then deliver targeted advertising.

Today, the five-year-old company rolled out a new ad customization feature called Company-Targeted Advertising that allows marketers to serve uniquely relevant ads to each target customer based on attributes beyond their employer. For example, an ad may dynamically read “A CRM system for the financial services industry,” when encountered by a member of that industry, and then later change to “A CRM system for the insurance industry” when next served.

This is like LinkedIn company targeting on steroids and makes it highly efficient to reach previously hard-to-find prospects with the right offer.

Twitter Hires Its First Research Chief From Google

Twitter has poached Google’s advertising research lead for the Americas to be its first-ever global head of research.

This is an important move in my view. Google is still very interested in capturing brand marketing dollars moving online and that’s exactly the market Twitter is poised to grab starting this year.

Announcing the Twitter Ads API

What this means is that as marketers, you’ll soon have the ability to work with our initial set of Ads API partners to manage Twitter Ad campaigns — and integrate them into your existing cross-channel advertising strategies. Equally important, users will continue to see the most relevant Promoted Tweets from advertisers. With the Ads API, marketers now have more tools in their arsenal to help them deliver the right message, to the right audience, on the desktop and on mobile devices — all at scale.

That pretty much says it all right? Twitter is pushing hard and fast this year after rebuilding itself in 2012. The question is whether other sites will follow suit and develop Ads APIs. Marketers should be hoping so.

Yahoo’s latest attempt to reinvent the portal is too little and too late

New CEO Marissa Mayer launched a redesigned version of the Yahoo homepage on Wednesday, but the site’s new features seem like a lukewarm rehash of the company’s old portal strategy and imitations of what Facebook offers.

I’ve been seeing this new design for about a month. I guess I was part of a test group. It’s an improvement but it does seem a strange place to invest and not particularly innovative. Perhaps Marissa feels like sizzle is still necessary to keep things afloat until she turns the infrastructure around. In short, is this just buying time until her local, mobile strategy takes hold.

Jumio Brings Identity Verification To Mobile Apps – Just Hold Up Your ID To The Camera

To do so, all the customer has to do is hold up their identification to the mobile device’s camera. Netverify then uses computer-vision to then “see” what the ID card or document says. The technology is meant to be integrated directly into the sign-up flow or checkout process, where it can serve the dual purpose of confirming identity and auto-filling forms.

The part of this that is most interesting is the idea that identity could be integrated into checkout processes and forms. Marketers should be very interested in anything that reduces the friction in these areas, which would certainly increase the top of the funnel and improve conversion rates.

Palantir Acquires Team Behind YC Voice Email Startup Voicegem

Private companies and governments transmit enormous amounts of audio but don’t do much to make sense of it. Palantir’s purpose is to “radically change how groups analyze information,” so it has to know how to crunch voice data. We’re awaiting comment from the Voicegem and Palantir teams, but we bet the startup’s team will be helping Palantir turn audio into insight.

There’s a good chance that many of the interfaces we use in the future will be voice activated. I’m sure you’ve all seen the new Google Glass video, right? Even now, imagine if you could really mine the information in all those conference calls? It’s a bit creepy but quite powerful too.

And Then …

Announcing our Acquisition of Idealizer and the Launch of BlueGlass in Switzerland

Demand Media Announces Plan to Explore Separating Its Business into Two Public Companies

enVu Names New Executive Vice President of Sales

Branding Brand teams up with Nomi to expand mcommerce reach

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.

About The Author

AJ Kohn

AJ Kohn is Owner of Blind Five Year Old, a San Francisco Internet Marketing firm specializing in search. An experienced marketing executive with a successful track record spanning 20 years, AJ combines a deep understanding of search marketing with a passion for product strategy and iterative product development, fusing design and user experience with quantitative analysis.