Lookery.com

Now that details are emerging about SocialAds, it’s time for me to speak up about the similarities and differences. The first thing to remember is that we designed the system to be a clone of Facebook’s ad network — but one that serves every other profile site out there. Lee’s flattery of us aside, it was Facebook’s idea first, we’re just mindreaders.

Dave and I sat down in August and pondered WWZD (What Will Zuckerberg Do?). We came up with Lookery for the Web, which is going to be functional almost simultaneously with Facebook SocialAds. We are also using a scaled third-party cookie system, operating on Amazon in our case, to distribute social network profile information for remote ad targeting.

However, there are key differences between SocialAds and our system:

Demographic-only targeting — There’s a lot of talk about using Interest Information to figure out Buying Intent. We’re too risk conservative to try that sort of thing. In the 5+ years that behavioral advertising has been on the scene, no one has created a large revenue stream from that sort of data. We don’t think anything has changed in that regard. Interest Info aka Behavioral Data is uneconomic for marketers to buy at scale, but they buy demographics all the time. We’re using only Age, Gender, and Location for targeting (See “Privacy” too.).

Privacy — We have no personally identifiable information (PII) anywhere in our system. I did a number of media buyer interviews and found out that the Chinese Wall between ad targeting and PII at younger companies makes big marketers nervous from a liability and brand image perspective. Facebook’s done a great job operationally to date, but now the standard is going up with Social Ads. If via maliciousness or error the privacy boundary is pierced over there, then life will get tough fast.

Third-party profiles — We’re here to make money for anyone that wants to work with us. We don’t think that Facebook will offer to pay smaller social networks, dating sites, ISPs, e-commerce companies, etc. for profile information. We will — making them money is the only way we thrive.

Data sales — We’re selling demographic targeting information to other ad networks — we have no need to replicate their sales teams or infrastructure. Microsoft deal aside, we don’t expect Facebook to follow suit.

We’re going for Simple, Inclusive, Fast, and Generous. We’d love to include you and pay you.