ClickZ: Tacoda Forms Behavioral Ad Network, Challenges Paid Search Players

Tacoda Systems is developing a contextual advertising network system in hopes of competing with search-turned-contextual-ad giants Google and Overture. The new AudienceMatch system will have at least four large existing Tacoda clients providing inventory, with more planned. Tacoda clients include the likes of USA Today and Weather.com. The system is slated to launch in a few months with a similar cost-per-performance model as already seen with Overture and Google systems. The big difference between this effort and existing ones seems to be that, while the existing ones categorize web pages for targeting, this new effort will categorize the users themselves.

The soft announcement of the ongoing effort may have been inspired by the recent announcement by AQuantive that they will be launching a similar product sooner. (See today's other story on the topic…)

The effort to take non-search media and match it with user profiles smacks of early Engage efforts to do the same. That technology was largely abandoned due to a variety of factors, including a market hungry for gross impressions with little time for efficiency measures, a technology that didn't work as well as hoped, and privacy concerns about profiling users via the cookie - a relatively new concept to the public at the time.