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Keeping with the Kanoodle/24/7 Real Media merger theme, BURST Media has announced a partnership with Tacoda for behavioral targeting purposes. The agreement sees BURST making use of Tacoda's Audience Management System to track its audience.

This agreement makes the second company that is trying to incorporate behavioral marketing with search engine style text ads. AMS will enable BURST to identify and track large segments of its 39.4 million audience that are particularly attractive to advertisers.

Currently, BURST serves its own ads to over 2,000 specialty web sites. Tacoda's AMS will enable BURST to develop targetable audience segments across its entire network based on more finite criteria such as which stories users read, what kind of ads they click on, and how often they return to similar kind of content.

BURST will also offer the behavioral targeting aspects of AMS in its AdDesktop, a licensed ad serving technology. Current customers of BURST's AdDesktop deliver over 100 million ads per month and each may choose to target ads behaviorally within their site.

"When you have a total audience the size of BURST's, the more you know about your users, the better you can serve them ads that they want to see. Better targeted ads means higher click-throughs and sales for our advertisers," says Jarvis Coffin co-founder of BURST and President and Chief Executive Officer. "While we can infer a great deal about our audiences because the sites we represent have highly specialized content, Tacoda will enable us to build audience segments based on demonstrable user interests. We can then target ads to users anywhere on our network."

Studies have shown that Tacoda's behavioral marketed ads generate a higher rate of inquiries, higher in-store traffic, and higher actual sales compared to ROS online advertising.

"This is exactly the kind of environment Tacoda's AMS was designed to work best in," says TACODA CEO Dave Morgan. "An audience-centric approach to ad sales is a complement to contextual sales and frees BURST to create new ad inventory outside of high demand sections that may often be sold out. We have several studies that show when visitors see ads in context then later are served a similar ad when they are in a different part of the site, the advertisers get a tremendous lift in response."

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