Music lovers are able to buy individual songs without buying the whole album. Investors are able to buy individual stocks without buying a mutual fund or ETF. Search marketers are able to bid on individual search terms without buying pre-packaged bundles of terms.
Until recently, however, display marketers have been mostly confined to targeting audience segments, without the ability to identify and bid on the individual components within those audience segments. This is now changing with the advent in display advertising of targeting with unstructured data.
A Perfect Pair: Unstructured Data & Real Time Bidding
Targeting with unstructured data enables advertisers to bid, report, and optimize display campaigns using the underlying data that is too often aggregated and blended together into larger audience segments.
The practice of targeting against lager, opaque audience segments is a relic of the pre-RTB (Real Time Bidding) era, when the available technology and limited access to inventory made it difficult to use the more granular data.
RTB has changed the landscape of display advertising, unlocking access to vast pools of inventory while simultaneously allowing unique bidding on each individual ad impression.