Neil Movold's List: Intent / Interest Graph

One of the most exciting and disruptive things going on right now in digital media is the rise of new businesses harvesting intent and making it available for advertisers outside the confines of Google.  Companies are building demand capture systems for advertisers that sit in other parts of the web ecosystem outside the Search appliance. These are truly new and vast marketplaces that can more directly connect consumers to relevant messaging.

Intellectually we know that Google neither creates nor fulfills intent. Google sits as a switchboard operator routing it and collecting a service fee to route it more directly and with more volume to your business. Google makes roughly $20B a year in Search advertising (2010) because technology has not advanced enough to remove the need for a switchboard. That will change.

The usage of “intent” is a powerful conceptual idea, and while it still appears to be more of a buzzword than something people really know how to leverage, we’re coming closer to seeing it have a real impact on marketing and advertising. The real applications of the web’s intent engines for marketing and advertising are still to come. Matching intent engines to advertising and ecommerce is a big opportunity, and I believe that’s one reason why we’ve seen millions flow into the ecommerce space. It’s never been possible to leverage intent in this way, at this scale, across so many different products and services, worldwide. And that’s why “intent” is something we’re going to hear a lot more about.

Brands have been fighting the re-engagement battle with online shoppers for years. One solution, Intent Media, helps to monetize the more than 90% of website visitors who leave without making a purchase. They do this by identifying actions and then targeting relevant content to these users.

"Intent Marketing" – matching offers (and a little later in history, ads) to the specific intent expressed by a consumer – probably dates back to the first merchant who noticed a customer eyeing a product and stepped in to help her decide. "Yes, those are lovely figs. But perhaps you might be interested in these? They just came in on this morning's caravan..."

"Contemporary Intent Marketing" - showing an ad to a site visitor that corresponds to demonstrated intent – is most manifest in the form of search engine marketing. But as it spreads beyond sites like Google, it's probably worth taking a moment to define what intent marketing is. And what it isn't.

Good to see Techcrunch write this weekend about data and its potential impact on ecommerce.

But not only did they miss the point about personalization, they missed the biggest opportunity in the space.

The biggest opportunity isn’t from retail sites building better personalization engines or mining social data, but in the social clipping and curation sites (i.e. intent engines) leveraging their curation and inspiration features to build ecommerce and affiliate platforms to power their built-in business models. And if you’re wondering, the really valuable data isn’t third-party social data, but first-party intent data.

We’re less than 2-months into alpha testing with developers, but already we’re discovering some surprising ways to use Primal:

Personalization and customization have long been a sought after achievement on the web. Especially in the news business. If only a website could deliver only the stories you wanted to see.

We have already seen iterations of this — we had RSS readers, some websites had “my” pages (think: My Yahoo!, My NYTimes, My LATimes). These allowed readers to set up only the sections they wanted to read. The only glitch was that the readers still had to do all the work.

We live in a world that loves convenience and seems to have less and less time (for everything). We multi-task like fiends — jumping from Twitter to news sites to Facebook to our own websites. And then we repeat the cycle all over again. We’re sampling stories from everywhere. On any given site, we have little time (or patience) to look at things we don’t wish to see.

"Virtually everywhere one looks we are in the midst of a transition for how we organize and manage information, indeed even relationships. Social networks and online communities are changing how we live and interact. NoSQL and graph databases — married to their near cousin Big Data — are changing how we organize and store information and data. Semantic technologies, backed by their ontologies and RDF data model, are showing the way for how we can connect and interoperate disparate information in ways only dreamed about a decade ago. And all of this, of course, is being built upon the infrastructure of the Internet and the Web, a global, distributed network of devices and information that is undoubtedly one of the most important technological developments in human history.

There is a shared structure across all of these developments — the graph. Graphs are proving to be the new universal paradigm for how we organize and manage information. Graphs have an inherently expandable nature, and one which can also capture any existing structure. So, as we see all of the networks, connections, relationships and links — both physical and informational — grow around us, it is useful to step back a bit and contemplate the universal graph structure at the core of these developments.

Understanding that we now live in the Age of the Graph means we can begin studying and using the concept of the graph itself to better analyze and manage our interconnected world. Whether we are trying to understand the physical networks of supply chains and infrastructure or the information relationships within ontologies or knowledge graphs, the various concepts underlying graphs and graph theory, themselves expressed through a rich vocabulary of terms, provide the keys for unlocking still further treasures hidden in the structure of graphs."

"Thanks to its recent forays into curated content, particularly around topics like the Olympics, it’s become obvious that Twitter wants to be more than just a utility for distributing links: it wants to target users based on the “interest graph” that it has constructed around them based on their activity. Prismatic founder Bradford Cross says that’s what he wants to do as well, and he thinks his startup is actually in a better position to do it than Twitter. On Tuesday, the service launched what appears to be a direct attack on the larger network by giving users the ability to follow each other on Prismatic, but Cross says this isn’t an attempt to become a social network — he just needs more data to fine-tune the service’s recommendations, and turn it into the ultimate serendipity engine."

"The fact that you follow Snoop Lion on Twitter and "like" Starbucks on Facebook means something. It's important to a lot of people. You like nonagenarian actress Betty White, and I like hipster musician La Roux; you like Method soap, and I like PUBLIC Bikes. That's worth a few cents to brands such as NBC, Arista Records, Tide, and Specialized.

Why is that? Because knowing what you love helps us know what you might like. The fact that you might like a certain thing is called relevance. And for brands that want to find people who could possibly like what they've got, relevance is king.

Basically that means advertisers want to know what you like. And the fastest, simplest, most transparent way to know what you like is through the interest graph."

"“We want to help the world make sense of data and we think graphs are the best way of doing that.”"

"We live in a world where over a decade of attempted human curation of a semantic web has bared very little fruit; it is quite clear to everyone at this point that this is a job only machines can handle. But yet we are still asking the wrong questions and building the wrong datasets."