Timed with the F8 Developer Conference, Los Angeles-based start-up CitizenNet has announced a new desktop marketing platform for companies to target new customer segments through Facebook advertising. Backed by Ashton Kutcher and top Silicon Valley investor Ron Conway, CitizenNet has created a new predictive behavioral targeting tool that puts the role of media buyer in the hands of not only large brands and companies, but small businesses as well. CitizenNet to date has been working with large brands and agencies, but with significant advances in automation, has now opened the platform to everyone, bringing Fortune 500 level marketing to any business.
Unlike traditional advertising technology based on cookie data, the CitizenNet platform uses social analysis to predict large groups of new audience segments that are likely to be interested in an offer. Because Facebook is a social platform, CitizenNet’s technology utilizes features such as trend analysis, sentiment and language processing – techniques that rarely play a part in traditional web advertising – to predict new audience segments. An artificial intelligence algorithm, utilizing over a billion ad impressions and over twenty social and language features, is able to predict the click-through-rate (CTR) of an ad with a margin of just 0.01%.
CitizenNet’s predictor is a key component of the company’s “Desktop Marketing” philosophy. Since most businesses cannot afford sophisticated market research, or don’t have the budget to run lots of different ad combinations, CitizenNet’s software picks only the most likely candidates ahead of time. By automating most of the research, planning, and budgeting, CitizenNet can also easily plug-in other self-serve tools. The company’s first such plug-in integration partner is Eventbrite, where an Eventbrite user can instantly run a Facebook advertising campaign for their event just by typing in their Eventbrite web address.
CitizenNet was founded in 2009 by Dan Benyamin and Mike McGinley, and includes Vince Busam and Dr. Arshavir Blackwell in their development team. Mr. Benyamin previously founded PhatNoise, one of the first hard drive music devices for cars, which was sold to Harman International. Mr. Busam was previously at Google and founder of Scour.net, one of the first peer-to-peer file sharing websites. Dr. Blackwell was previously a senior researcher at Fox Audience Network, which was responsible for advertising technology across Fox’s online properties.
http://www.citizennet.com.
