Targeting is a funny thing (funny strange, not funny ha ha). Every Advertiser wants targeting. They want to know if people are left handed so they can pitch them left handed golf club ads. And if they are interested in golf, they figure they can pitch them a really expensive, left-handed set of golf clubs.

The issue with targeting on video (or for that matter anything) is that as you get more granularity on the audience, the smaller the inventory pool.  Audiences (18-24 yr. old males) become niches (18-24 yr. old males who like golf) and niches become micro-niches (18-24 yr. old males who like golf and were visiting golf club sites).

So, the general problem is that once you find the micro-niche for the advertiser, they’re happy and in turn they’ll run the campaign. Then everything is great, until the campaign completes and it under-delivers. Micro-niches have this nasty habit of reducing the available pool of people.  

So what’s the solution? Reach and scale. In behavioural targeting terms, it’s called overlap. If you have a large potential audience (we do - 134MM), the odds of finding people who have been shopping around for a car (proxied by people who have visited car websites or been watching car videos, etc.) in your network for that niche grow higher. And you’ll get more of them as a result, which means intent-based or behavioural targeting opportunities will be more relevant.

We recently announced the capability to do just this across our  network. We waited until we had grown to a point where we could provide a meaningful audience for advertisers. Because few things are more frustrating than being sold the ability to find left-handed males who are golfers and then finding out that the network has 3 people.  It’s hard to go back to the client and tell them that their targeted spend under-delivered badly.

YuMe’s behavioural targeting solution is pretty simple… we have reach and scale on a national level, offering advanced targeting and optimization capabilities that make video ads perform… that’s just it.

- Jayant Kadambi