AlmondNet

Each issue the editors of Visibility set out to help our readers weed through the plethora of existing and emerging vendors in the online advertising market.  We select the best in the business to help you meet your online marketing needs.

A Look at Behavioral Targeting

The behavioral targeting market has undergone many changes in the past ten years. AlmondNet was founded in 1998 when few marketers knew about the concept of behavioral targeting and even fewer were using it.  AlmondNet saw that most advertising inventory remained unsold or was sold for very low rates, and moreover, that sold ads were untargeted and typically of little value to the consumer they were delivered to or the advertiser delivering them. AlmondNet responded to market needs by developing a platform that facilitates a profile-based Internet advertising marketplace. The companypatented many solutions that have since come to fruition in the marketplace. 

AlmondNet has since, in response to market demand, evolved from its early beginnings into the Internet’s leading online data trader and marketplace, with over 40 categories of data, over 100 million US consumer touchpoints, and partnerships with a majority of the leading ad networks and media-owners, who use AlmondNet’s aggregated profile data to create and deliver targeted ad campaigns on behalf of their advertisers.  Key to AlmondNet’s success is a  focus and emphasis upon the verticalization of behavioral data.  This emphasis has allowed media owners and their marketer and agency clients to obtain both scale and granularity when targeting ad campaigns.

Behind the Scenes

Marketers in this space know that to get ahead, it’s important to not only have smart leaders, but proven innovators on their team.  AlmondNet’s CEO and founder Roy Shkedi has over 15 years of experience in inventing, developing and implementing interdisciplinary products as well as analyzing and investing in companies.  His direction has helped the company grow to become a leader in the behavioral space.  Since founding AlmondNet, Roy has been recognized as a pioneer in the behavioral targeting and profile based ad exchange sectors of the Internet advertising market.  Roy holds many granted Internet advertising patents and has received the most distinguished prize in the Israeli Intelligence community for an R&D project. 

AlmondNet is backed by a strong and tenured team at AlmondNet, whose keen sense of innovation mirrors Roy’s.  The team includes VP Michael Benedek, who joined the company in 2000 and now manages all business development, marketing, and customer success initiatives. There’s alsoVP, R&D Adi Pinhasi, who joined AlmondNet in 1999 and held the positions of Senior Developer and Team Manager before being promoted to VP R&D in June 2007.
 
AlmondNet on Privacy

The debates in online privacy further showcase AlmondNet as a leader.  The company has always taken a pro-active approach to privacy and was the first company to call for an industry-wide “opt-out within every behaviorally-targeted” banner.  Further, AlmondNet privacy policies were developed with the interests of the consumer in mind and specify that no personally-identifiable information is collected at any time.  AlmondNet uses non-persistent cookies that expire after 60 days and requires all data providers to undergo a privacy audit from AlmondNet’s privacy officer and insert an NAI opt-out link in their privacy policy.  AlmondNet is, furthermore, a member of three industry self-regulatory organizations (Network Advertising Initiative, Truste, and Internet Advertising Bureau) and encourages all companies to adopt a similar approach and commitment to consumer privacy protection. 

AlmondNet’s Future and Data’s Scale

As the behavioral targeting market continues to evolve, many key trends will emerge, chief among them the importance of aggregating and making available, scalable, ubiquitous data, on a very large scale. No online entity has sufficient data to enable the scalable delivery of commercially-relevant, targeted ads, wherever consumers go.  While behavioral targeting is taking off, the industry’s most significant challenge is data scale.  While the large portals recognize that consumers spend more time on the long tail and have begun to reposition themselves as ad networks and ad exchanges, none of them have addressed the reality that the most valuable consumer data in terms of both quality as well as quantity also originates on the long tail in vertical search engines and other vertical sites.  AlmondNet is capitalizing on the market’s inefficiencies and becoming the largest online data trader and enabler of behavioral targeting.