LiveIntent – Aligning Consumer and Advertiser Intentions

One of the things that we discuss a lot here at LiveIntent is, appropriately, intent. Consumer intent. Advertiser intent. Publisher intent. Even our intent! The real-time web is all about intentions and our goal is to digest and learn from these intentions. Our theory is that the more alignment of intent that we can create, the higher the utility that we provide. I know, it all sounds a little pie-in-the-sky, but I'll bring it down to earth with some familiar examples.

Let's start with display advertising. Display does a particularly bad job of aligning the intentions of the consumer, the advertiser and the publisher. A consumer visits a website with the intention of reading the content on that site. But the advertiser's intent is to take that user away from the site! Low alignment of intentions. And thus, display ads receive disproportionately low click rates.

Email marketing is a step up from display but the intentions are still far from aligned. Users check their email to correspond with friends, coworkers, etc, not to receive advertisements. Every now and then, the user receives emails--such as newsletters--that they've signed up for; here the intentions are more highly aligned. The consumer wants to read about a topic and the advertiser wants to provide more info on it--but let's face it, we all know how rare this is

Search advertising, on the other hand, gets it right. When they search, the consumer is expressing an intent... and the advertiser's intent is to distribute a product that meets that intent. And consequently, well managed search advertisements can receive very high click rates.

So what does this all have to do with social media? That's what we're here to figure out. We believe that advertising works best for everybody involved--the user, the advertiser, the publisher, and yes, us too!--when the everybody's intentions are aligned. Technological innovation has long been fueled by advertising dollars and if social media is going to continue it's explosive growth, it too will require a sustainable advertising model. At LiveIntent, we hope that we can create this model by providing meaningful, targeted, intent-aligned connections on social media. So next time you're on a website, look for the LiveIntent Follow Us button and send us feedback. Did we make the connections you were looking for?