Advertising Engine

We are living in a society revolving around consumption. Driven by some kind of psychological urge, people always crave to have at least as much, or preferably more, material goods than their neighbors, family and friends. Possessions are used to portray a certain standing or social position flamboyantly displayed to prove the we have done well in life. Whether behind the scenes people have to lend money from a bank to finance their unnecessary luxuries, does not really matter. It is all about the image.

Advertisers of course quickly understood this human behavior and make as we speak frequent and constant use of it. From the moment we get out of our beds until the moment we go to sleep we are bombarded with advertisements on the radio, billboards at the side of the streets, at shopping malls and in the evening on television. Companies are constantly trying to push as much ads as possible in our direction, with the hope that one of them just might lie within our interests. It closely resembles a brute-force attack, trying to convince and persuade us to pursue a purchase.

This approach has obviously led to the current situation where people have an aversion towards advertisements whatsoever, and go to fetch a beer from the fridge whenever a TV program is interrupted to show just another batch of advertisements. As a consequence, this has brought the advertisers' interest in the TV as publicity platform to an all-time low. In turn, the broadcasters themselves are having a hard time missing out on all those easily earned ad incomes, which are normally reused to invest in higher quality program schedules. In other words, the advertisement world as we know it faces some hard times and is in search for new and enhanced business models.

One of such new business models could be that of personalized advertisements. Instead of bombarding the user with hundreds of general ads, each person could also receive a small number of ads which exactly pinpoint the products a particular user craves for. This is exactly what the Stoneroos Advertising engine tries to achieve. Hence, less is more. By carefully monitoring the user's behavior, interests, favorites and actions on a given system dealing with well-described content items, this engine is able to create a user model. Such a user model thus represents a consolidated representation of the user. Based on this user model and in combination with the metadata describing the ads, the advertising engine can select those ads fitting the user best. While advertisers often work with advertising stereotypes (like e.g. cosmopolitans, post-modernists, etc.), the Stoneroos advertising engine is specifically tailored to deal with stereotypes and to classify users appropriately.

Given well-targeted ads generated by our advertising engine, we believe that advertisers are once again willing to invest more money. After all, the right products are presented to the people most likely to buy them, and this is what it is all about: "Buy buy buy!".