Unlike most companies involved in behavioral targeting today, Revenue Science started out as an analytics company. After developing a dynamic pixel with proprietary algorithms enabling the placement of cookies and the ability to index site users’ preferences, Revenue Science decided to enter into the media landscape four years ago. Jeff Hirsch, who was recently promoted to President of Behavioral Targeting at Revenue Science, spoke with AdMarkTech.

“Revenue science is about finding people and finding audiences. As one of the earliest companies, specializing in targeted advertising, we build highly sophisticated technology that allows us to index billions of behaviors and make them searchable in a real time basis.” Taking the early Yahoo network as an example, “When a publisher applied to be a part of the Yahoo search engine a person would go in and look at the site and put that site into a specific category. They would make a decision about the site and where it fits. Google came along and indexed all the alerts out there and then when people did a search, then they would make a decision about what they were looking for and what fit, and display those results. I would make an analogy to how we index data on people’s behavior and make it searchable at any time using Boolean logic, so they can construct multi-layered, sophisticated, segments on audiences that meet the advertiser’s needs.”

Initially partnering with around 75 of the largest publishers around the world, Revenue Science enabled those publishers to sell behavioral targeting using their own sales force, their own data and their own inventory.

“Over the last year and a half we have also launched our own behavioral targeting network, where we are able to utilize the technology platform we built, our ability to capture and index behavior and then take those to market, to brand network advertisers in the US. We have a sales force that specializes in working with advertisers to determine who their audiences are, helping utilize our tools to construct segments to reach those people and then finding those people across the Internet to deliver relevant messages.”

Currently reaching over 100 million unique US Internet surfers, Revenue Science is continuing to nurture and develop partnership deals with publishers across the world.

But what does the future have in store for Revenue Science?

“We’re doing mobile testing in a partnership deal in Japan. Behavioral targeting is about serving relevant ads to people, regardless of place. We’re trying to eliminate ‘the place’ equation from advertising and mobile certainly falls into that. IPTV falls into that too. Being able to reach any user with relevant ads on any digital device is the future.”