This might be a bit hard to grasp if you’re not an online advertising guru, so bear with me. eXelate is a company founded in 2006. which just received $4 million in first-round financing from Carmel Ventures.
That was the easy part. Understanding what they actually do can be tricky, especially if you don’t speak marketingese which is pretty much the only language services like these use in their PR materials. eXelate is setting up eXelate Targeting eXchange, a marketplace that tells you what kind of users are likely to visit what site. So, if you need to deploy a baseball-related ad, they’ll tell you which sites in their network are visited by baseball fans.
Thus, the ads aren’t contextual, like on Google AdSense, but behavioral. The user’s browsing habits and interests determine which ad will be shown, not the content of the site itself. This way - or so they say - ads work better, and ad networks get more money.
Another product that eXelate is launching is called Delayed Ads, which are basically shown to the user later, when they visit a site that’s affiliated with your ad network.
It’s quite an interesting beast, this behavioral ad business, but eXelate has some big obstacles to overcome, the biggest being the fact that big sites like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have enough behavioral data to know stuff about you before you do and can use this data to display ads with extreme precision if they choose to do so. However, companies like Google have been known to buy companies like eXelate, and although billions have already been spent on online advertising by the Big Three, perhaps a new approach can still inject new life into the online ad business.
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