Will data be loved by everyone? Considering the online advertising market the answer certainly won’t be yes.

Especially premium advertising networks and premium content publishers have always tried to put as little as possible focus on data and measurability and rather promising more or less immeasurable branding effects.

This has worked for a while now. Online advertising over the last 15 years has mostly been sold like traditional offline advertising: Through their context and their advertising media. The website was treated much in the same way as a billboard or a magazine. But online advertising can be a lot more, when we embrace data. Online advertising can be personalized.

Think of retargeting that has been starting to take off in Europe lately. Before retargeting, online display advertising through a lack of decent targeting mechanisms only worked for advertisers with real broad audiences. Retargeting has now created a situation in that display advertising will work for almost every advertiser that so far thought his product was so niche that it only work in SEM.

And remember that this is just the first step. Facebook will launch a competitor to Google Adsense that will be based on Facebooks huge profile database instead of context. Imagine the possibilities of really targeted display advertising!

Data driven display advertising will change the whole ecosystem. It will hurt the existing players. Premium ad networks as well as premium content publishers. Still today advertisers need cooking magazines online and offline to reach middle aged women that like to cook and pay premium prices for them. But what if they can reach these audiences a lot cheaper and a lot more exactly on all websites they are using without paying the price for a premium content surrounding?

Certainly: There will always be premium branding advertising on the Internet and that’s good for all of us. To me the question is rather, how big their niche is going to be.

About the author
Thomas Promny is a German Internet entrepreneur focused on businesses in Online Marketing and e-commerce.

Among the companies co-founded by him are TRG The Reach Group, one of the leading Online Marketing and SEO consulting companies in Germany and RevenueMax, a display traffic monetization network.

Keen to find our more? Check out Thomas’ talk at NEXT11: