Engage Technologies said
its Engage Knowledge database grew from 12 million to 30 million
anonymous Web user profiles in just over two months.
“In almost tripling the number of visitor profiles in EngageKnowledge over a
two-month period, Engage is delivering today on the possibilities of one-to-
one online marketing and advertising,” said Paul
Schaut, Engage Technologies CEO. “In addition to the strong market acceptance of our solution, we’re
gaining some impressive support from
technical innovators along with the online analyst community.”
Engage said NBC Interactive will deploy the new Precision Profile-enabled
Accipiter AdManager 4.0 on its VideoSeeker on-demand Internet video
service.
“We expect to integrate Engage’s new ad management and data
mining tools with our proprietary registration process and video delivery,
adding value to both our advertisers and users,” said Todd Harris, director of creative development for NBC Interactive.
Other recent client additions include Virtual Billboard Networks;
The Password; @dVenture, a division of Venture Direct
Worldwide; and Planet Direct.
Engage Precision Profiles segment distinct user interests into categories
based on user behavior (click stream habits), allowing ads to be more
precisely targeted, the firm said.
It’s clearly catching on rapidly, and a recent Jupiter Communications report said that improved
targeting is what’s needed to make Internet advertising really take off.
But not everyone is thrilled. The New York Times recently ran a story
quoting some critics who concerned about threats to privacy. Engage does not
record the names, e-mail addresses or credit card numbers of the people it
gathers information from. Instead, it stated that it keeps track of users by placing a cookie
on the hard drive of Web surfers.
“Engage has done many good things to protect privacy, but my worry is they are
firing the starting gun in the race for the bottom,” Jason Catlett, president
of Junkbuster Corp., a privacy consulting firm, was quoted by the Times as
saying. “The worst actors will be left to use the most sophisticated
surveillance techniques as they please.”
Engage is a corporate sponsor of Net privacy organization TRUSTe, an active member of the World Wide Web Consortium and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), and has developed and submitted one of the few technical specifications for privacy standards on the Web.
Engage is a subsidiary of CMG Information Services Inc.