Guardian News & Media (GNM) - a leading news provider which publishes the Guardian and Observer newspapers, as well as the guardian.co.uk and guardiannews.com websites - has chosen Cognitive Match, provider of Dynamic Optimization solutions to boost its onsite commercial potential. As a result of this move, GNM's millions of monthly visitors will become more familiar with GNM's relevant commercial offerings on the site, including services such as Soulmates dating, holiday offers and the Masterclasses that are available. 

Cognitive Match provides an innovative technology solution that is able to predict and then target content that is most likely to inspire the individual user to action. This news comes after a successful four month trial.

Chris Lawson, Marketing Director for the Guardian explains “As one of the biggest newspaper sites, with over 60 million uniques browsers per month, we are always looking for ways to better monetise and engage with our audience. Cognitive Match offers a great technological solution to provide our users a more targeted, relevant and sophisticated portfolio of commercial promotions.”

Alex Kelleher from Cognitive Match said “The Guardian are a forward thinking online news provider, and it is fantastic to partner with them after doing an initial trial. They have clear goals about what they want to achieve and know how to get the best out of our SiteMatch technology. You only have to look at what the Guardian has done with new media from Podcasts to Facebook app, to know that they are industry leaders” 

Contact

Jake Higgins
jake.higgins@cognitivematch.com 

The formal definition of the ‘filter bubble’ provided by Pariser is a ‘personal ecosystem of information that’s been catered by these algorithms’. He warns that the filter bubble will have detrimental effects as it ‘closes us off to new ideas, subjects, and important information...creates the impression that our narrow self-interest is all that exists’. 

What comes out of the critical discourse surrounding this this book is that Pariser has over-estimated the extent to which any user currently experiences a filter bubble (see Jacob Wesiberg’s non-scientific experiment in Slate Magazine).  However, it would be naïve to think that Google (and others) do not hold the intention of increasing the amount of personalization in their services. This would have been fortified in the wake of its newest incarnation, the infant terrible of the social networking world, Google+. 

You can sympathise with Pariser’s fear that the internet will no longer be an open tool to serendipitously encounter new knowledge; to have a popular voice making a noise about this will do something to inhibit that fear being realised.  

However, his treatment of the internet as a single phenomenon tends to conflate different aspects of the web. Should ads be jumbled in with a social media newsfeed? You find that users respond positively when they meet advertising that is relevant to them. The word ‘relevant’ is defined as “having a bearing on or connection with the matter at hand”. The detrimental effects of the ‘filter bubble’ are defined as being able to ‘‘close us off to new ideas, subjects and important information’. 

The concept itself, of a digital ‘filter bubble’, is no doubt one that will eventually enter the general parlance of the tech community. However Pariser limits himself, by having a general problem with algorithms curating the web. He doesn’t allow himself to see that in some places, creating a more relevant user experience is a positive step for the development of the internet, and here the role of algorithms is essential. 

]]> http://www.cognitivematch.com/node/132 Thu, 24 Nov 2011 16:06:27 +0000 Jake Tech At Cognitive Match we are dedicated to helping forward thinking members of the digital industry connect with others.

If you are a talented programmer, we want to set you a challenge.

Send your submission to challenge@cognitivematch.com alongside your CV.

Successful submissions will receive a certificate in their category, and will be contacted for an interview when a position is available at Cognitive Match.  Successful candidates will be invited to join an exclusive LinkedIn group for those who have completed a challenge in order for you to publish your success.   

Download the challenges below:

Algorithm Guru
Collections Ninja
High Throughput Champion  

We have offices in Palo Alto, New York and London but will be looking to reach out to all the successful candidates across the world.

If you have any questions, feel free to get in touch.

At many companies, summer interns sit around and make tea. From my first day at Cognitive Match, I was treated like one of the team.

My first project was to look at how we divide up the UK into distinct geographical regions. To target content, the Cognitive Match system uses many factors, including the visitors’ geo-location. The observed behaviour of people from a given region tells the machine what content works for these visitors to continually improve the system. Naturally, it is essential that two people grouped into the same geographical bucket are sufficiently ‘similar’ and that the actions of one give credible inference about the future behaviour of the other.

Now what is meant by ‘similar’ is entirely subjective. When asked what characterises the people in your area, you may give a very different answer to your neighbour. Further, the make-up of a region varies rapidly over short distances, so any attempt to partition the UK based simply on demography would require us to be very certain where visitors to our websites are. In the UK, due to the internet backbone infrastructure, it’s sometimes not possible to locate people that precisely.

Instead, I took anonymous historic data from a major newspaper client of ours for page views of articles of different genres, looking for correlations between particular categories and parts of the UK. The aim was to generate a geographical partition that would not be reliant on subjective assumptions. Also, it would be consistent with our errors in locating IP addresses. If we found a similarity between addresses we believe to be Cambridge and those we believe to be Oxford, for instance, it would justify grouping those people together, even if in reality they do not live precisely in these two cities.

Looking at the data, there was clear variation across the country, but interestingly most of the unusual behaviour was restricted to a small number of towns. That is, interest in say world news, would be relatively similar across most of the UK, but in a number of isolated areas it might be much greater.

This made it difficult to form a partition of the entire country, and standard clustering techniques did not give effective results. Instead, I was able to write a program to pick out small groups of towns that were outliers for the same categories of articles. This generated buckets corresponding to the parts of the UK with particularly distinctive behaviour. These are the areas where there is real scope for the recommender to use geographical location to effectively tailor content. This could be supplemented with a more arbitrary partition of the rest of the country (ITV regions) where less regional variation is to be expected.

Interesting results were seen in university towns. It is quite believable that university towns should exhibit behaviour more similar to one another than to towns close by, so to see this grouping come out was quite reassuring. Other buckets were less predictable, highlighting the limitations of a purely demographic approach.

With this project and with others, I was given a lot of freedom to be explorative, and take things in any direction I liked. Each team member at Cognitive Match had a clear skill they brought to the business, and what was so exciting about working there was that people were individually responsible for furthering their area of the company – though a scientific and a statistical lead approach.

David Walsh (Summer Intern)

Alex’s perspective on this topic will be highly informative since Cognitive Match uses innovative technology to provide users with unobtrusive, personalised experiences, all without the need to collect personal data.

Lori Fena (Founder of TRUSTe) will moderate a panel of industry leaders that include Scott Meyer (CEO, Evidon), Mila Sukhareva (CEO & Founder meetOne) & Eric Wheeler (CEO, 33Across).

If you're in Monaco and would like to connect with Alex, do get in touch via info@cognitivematch.com or +44 (0) 203 205 0004

Alex Kelleher, CEO and Founder of Cognitive Match said, “Marketers are now successfully targeting the right audience profile with their display ad campaigns, but they still don’t know what elements within the creative are eliciting response from individual users. The collaboration between Adnetik and Cognitive Match means that advertisers can now target the right audience with the right creative at the right time. Every stage of the campaign lifecycle is now optimized.” 

Advertisers who work with Adnetik can now easily turn on dynamic creative for their display ad campaigns.

Download the full press release here

The partnership between Cognitive Match and eXelate allows global advertisers and agencies to package eXelate's powerful audience data to generate ad creative and messaging optimized for online audience segments. The result is a truly customized advertising experience for online consumers.  "We make our clients' advertising and web content relevant to their customers," said Alex Kelleher, CEO and founder, Cognitive Match. "By integrating eXelate's targeting data with Cognitive Match's Dynamic Creative Targeting™ technology, we're enabling our clients to tailor a critical aspect of a consumer's browsing session: the message and creative within each digital ad. The additional audience insight provided by eXelate will fuel increased engagement, conversion and ROI for our clients."

Cognitive Match is integrating eXelate's targeting data on both of its solutions – Dynamic Creative Targeting for Ads and Dynamic Creative Targeting for Sites. With Dynamic Creative Targeting for Ads, eXelate targeting data is used to uncover best matching targets while Cognitive Match's technology decides in real-time which version of the ad will maximize click-through and conversion, and then serves the best fitting ad creative. Dynamic Creative Targeting for Sites enables significantly increasing onsite conversions by matching targeted users via eXelate data with relevant content.

Taking a step beyond traditional audience targeting, the data integration will provide a seamless interaction between audience data, creative and content, thereby creating a better experience for consumers, publishers and advertisers. As members of leading privacy organizations such as the NAI, TrustE and IAB as well as being part of the Evidon Open Data Partnership, eXelate remains on the leading edge of respecting consumer privacy demands while delivering unique, high performance data. 

"Data driven technology is powering a more effective era in consumer marketing," said Mark S. Zagorski, CEO, eXelate. "We are seeing a growing number of large interactive marketers increasing their online ad spend based on the results they achieve by combining our rich, proprietary audience data with smart technologies that can leverage the full depth of the eXelate data set. Our partnership with Cognitive Match helps drive ROI to new levels by giving marketers the tools to make ads and ad content more relevant. eXelate data combined with Cognitive Match's ability to deliver relevant advertising will deliver a premium ad experience for consumers."

Download the full press release with contact information here

Find out who are the hot players are and place your vote for Cognitive Match here

You can choose who wins the ‘Future 50 People’s Choice Award.’ Cognitive Match would be honoured to get your backing by voting for us right now!  

Download the full press release here.

The funding announcement coincides with recent moves from London to New York for CEO Alex Kelleher and SVP Global Sales, Mike Harris.  The relocation of these senior executives confirms the company’s commitment to success in North America.  Furthermore, it announced earlier this month the hire of Dave Burgess as their new CTO. Burgess is based in Palo Alto, California and previously held the position of Chief Architect of Yahoo!’s Advertising Solutions.

Mitch Pender, Investment Partner at Antrak Capital says: “Cognitive Match has world-leading ad targeting and creative optimization technology and we look forward to being part of the push for growth in the US.”

Alex Kelleher, CEO & Founder, of Cognitive Match said “It’s great to have Antrak on board as investors.  Culturally they are great fit for us and certainly bring a lot to the table in terms of very relevant operational experience and deep contacts in North America.”

“We’re very excited to have Antrak onboard and look forward to accelerating our attack on the market from New York.“ says Haakon Overli, Managing Partner at Dawn Capital.

Download the full press release here.

About Cognitive Match

Founded in 2009, Cognitive Match's award-winning display ads and onsite predictive targeting solution has helped companies like Financial Times, AOL, Net-A-Porter, Steve Madden and JustGiving maximize visitor engagement, conversion and revenue from their digital marketing activities.    

About Antrak Capital

Established in 2007, Antrak Capital is a privately backed, London based venture capital firm focused on investing in and working with development stage businesses.  The firm's investment interest is technology with a particular emphasis in digital media, mobile, internet & enterprise SaaS.

About Dawn Capital

Dawn Capital are institutional investors and experienced business builders with a collective investment experience spanning decades and have been involved in several high profile rapid growth technology businesses, such as Autonomy, Virgin Media, Advertising.com, and Self Trade and latterly Mimecast and Wonga.com.  Dawn Capital backs outstanding TMT companies seeking expansion capital of up to £5M.
 

Download our full Press Release here (PDF)
 

Download the full Press Release here

The Europas, or European Startup Awards, were held 17th November in London. It was the culmination of a month of online voting by the European tech startup industry for the finalists, where some 33,126 votes were cast across 23 categories, eight judges deliberated over the results and over 350 people paid to join the cream of Europe’s startups, VCs and entrepreneurs. “It’s a great honour to be chosen for this award from a short list of great companies”, says CEO Alex Kelleher, who picked up the award in person. “Our team has been working very hard for this all year so it’s great to get the recognition.”

Companies using Cognitive Match are able to realize more revenue and higher conversion rates online by targeting and optimizing both on-site content and off-site display ads.

Download our full Press Release here (PDF)

Photo left : Mike Butcher, TechCrunch Editor / Alex Kelleher, Cognitive Match CEO / Alex Hoye, Latitude Group CEO / Photo credit Rougefrog

The topic of the breakout session’s focus is of particular interest to industry participants at the moment due to the current debate highlighting the use of user data sets throughout the internet.

The importance of the privacy debate to industry participants and the general public was echoed by the involvement of high profile members of the advertising industry and advocates of user rights including Vincent Ducrey (Special Adviser for New Technologies, Ministry of Education, France), Joelle Firijters (CEO & Co-Founder, Improve Digital), Alain Lévy (CEO Weborama), Randy Nicolau (CEO & Co-Founder, Demdex), Amiad Solomon (Founder & President, Peer39) and John Clippinger (Berkman Center for the Internet & Society, Harvard University), the moderator of the session.

Media Forum breakouts are informal and highly interactive sessions where industry leaders are able to discuss and debate key issues amongst influential members of the industry.

Cognitive Match is concerned about user privacy and is very aware of the problems of the current approach to targeting. As Alex explained before the Forum, “The industry must focus on protecting users’ rights at all times. We at Cognitive Match are using innovative technology to provide users with unobtrusive, personalised experiences that are highly valued without the need to track or collect personal data about users”.

On Friday 8 October, I will be joining IT professionals in a sponsored sleep-out on the streets of Cambridge in aid of Action for Children, as part of the funkily named Team Miscellany.

There are many reasons why children and young people can find themselves vulnerable and without a safe, secure place to live. Byte Night raises money to help Action for Children tackle the root causes of youth homelessness.

Each year, at least 75,000 children and young people experience homelessness. One in three attempt suicide and 1 in 7 young runaways are physically or sexually assaulted.With your support, not only can we help keep thousands of children and young people off the streets and away from the risk of physical and sexual assault, we’ll also help them build better lives with secure accommodation, education and training opportunities.

Byte Night raises money to help Action for Children tackle the root causes of youth homelessness. Visit http://www.bytenight.org.uk/ for more information on the difference Byte Night makes. I'd really appreciate your support via JustGiving and thank you for any donation you feel you can make.

Photo Credit: James Duncan Davidson / TED

Watch the full video interview here

“We’re really pleased to be invited to the iGaming Super Show after huge interest at the EGR Live event in London last year. Online gambling companies have always been at the forefront of innovation in online marketing and as such they are ideal clients for us.” says Glen.

Do contact us to book an appointment to meet our team in Prague.

Walmsley explains the Cognitive Match system, stating that ‘information such as location, the site from which the user linked or what they searched for and time of day are combined with known actions from previous site visits to present a version of the page that emphasises products the user has a higher propensity to buy.’

Read the full article here

Chad Raube, partner at Dawn and board member at Cognitive Match, commented: “Our continued support of Cognitive Match reflects the fact that the team has launched with several blue chip clients while proving the science behind the product is both scalable and dramatically improves the response rates, and ultimately profitability of online businesses.  We are even more confident that Cognitive Match is positioned to set the benchmark for delivering content relevance and behavioral insight in the online arena.”

CEO Alex Kelleher commented, “We are delighted with Dawn Capital’s continued support, both financially and in helping our business to grow.  This additional funding will enable us to enhance our sales and business development activities to more rapidly address the high levels of demand, that have exceeded even our own expectations.  At the same time, it ensures that we can continue to deliver increased profitability to existing Clients.  The internet is now all about data, and Cognitive Match delivers maximum value from that data to its Clients.”

Download the full press release (PDF)

BVCA has recognised Cognitive Match as one of Britain’s most exciting young companies and praised us for our invention and innovation in the area of online real-time optimisation. Read more

Glen Conybeare, Co-Founder & Commercial director at Cognitive Match will be delivering a 1 hour presentation on how realtime optimisation can significantly increase conversion of site visitors into depositing players as well as increasing cross-sell opportunities for existing players.

Cable companies are in fact ideally positioned to collect and process this data, as they provide the infrastructure for millions of customers to engage with digital media.  The benefits of relevance can of course be substantial to the end-user.  However, privacy concerns remain, which is why light data processing and a focus on context is a benefit.  In addition, this kind of data tends to be the most predictive, and is therefore the focus of Cognitive Match’s solutions. The Panel discussed this opportunity as a way of liberating ARPU for the cable industry, an industry that is currently being challenged by content-providers that are delivering business models "over the top" of the cable companies’ bandwidth infrastructure.