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Digital Advertising: An Information Scientist’s Perspective

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Book cover Advanced Topics in Information Retrieval

Part of the book series: The Information Retrieval Series ((INRE,volume 33))

Abstract

Digital online advertising is a form of promotion that uses the Internet and Web for the express purpose of delivering marketing messages to attract customers. Examples of online advertising include text ads that appear on search engine results pages, banner ads, in-text ads, or Rich Media ads that appear on regular web pages, portals, or applications. Over the past 15 years online advertising, a $65 billion industry worldwide in 2009, has been pivotal to the success of the Web. That being said, the field of advertising has been equally revolutionized by the Internet, Web, and more recently, by the emergence of the social web, and mobile devices. This success has arisen largely from the transformation of the advertising industry from a low-tech, human intensive, “Mad Men” way of doing work to highly optimized, quantitative, mathematical, computer- and data-centric processes that enable highly targeted, personalized, performance-based advertising. This chapter provides a clear and detailed overview of the technologies and business models that are transforming the field of online advertising primarily from statistical machine learning and information science perspectives.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “Mad men”, as an expression, was coined in the late 1950s and refers to the people working on Madison Avenue, New York City in the advertising industry. It is also the name of a US AMC TV series that was first broadcast in 2007.

  2. 2.

    Visited on February 15, 2011.

  3. 3.

    Editor’s note: Section 2.1 reports that the indexed Web is estimated to contain at least 16.3 billion pages on the same date, thus, there is no contradiction.

  4. 4.

    Section 2.4 uses “query processing throughput”.

  5. 5.

    SEMs are advertising agencies that manage the search ad campaigns of large companies.

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Correspondence to James G. Shanahan .

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Shanahan, J.G., Kurra, G. (2011). Digital Advertising: An Information Scientist’s Perspective. In: Melucci, M., Baeza-Yates, R. (eds) Advanced Topics in Information Retrieval. The Information Retrieval Series, vol 33. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20946-8_9

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