Delivering personalisation
Effectively Phorm’s technology is an online recommendation engine that automatically brings you personalised content and personalised advertising based on user’s interests. To understand how it does this – with the minimum amount of data – it's important to know that the system works in two parts.
1. Anonymous interest matching
Our technology works by matching user interests to predefined or automatically generated categories or “channels”. Advertisers can only create predefined channels that are subject to review and approval by Phorm.
Essentially the system’s instructions, these channels comprise lists of keywords and URLs as well as how often and how recently users have exhibited an interest; sensitive topics excluded of course.
The matching process works by producing a summary of the top 10 keywords that appear on the web page being visited by the browser represented by the random number. The system is configured to exclude from this summary any data that is potentially personal in nature. This summary is then compared to the predefined channels and/or used to create a content channel. Only the fact that a match has been made is recorded. The raw data - that is the top 10 keywords - used to make the match is deleted in real time - by the time the page loads. So only the channel match, the random number to distinguish the user’s browser from all the others and a time stamp are retained.
Once a user’s interests are understood using the process described above, our technology using a minimal amount of anonymous data - presents content and advertising relevant to the user.
2. Delivering personalised content and advertising
2.1 Content content
To bring users personalised content, Phorm's technology automatically scours public RSS feeds from around the web looking for new relevant content that matches their interests. This could be anything - videos, articles, product offers, music downloads, etc. The content is then displayed either within an in-page widget on a participating website or within a personalised homepage.
Websites can choose to incorporate the widget directly into their pages or schedule it to serve as lower tier advertising inventory using Phorm’s ad serving technology. They can also decide whether the widget shows content from just within their site that is relevant to the user or open it up to content from all over the web.
2.2 Advertising
Advertisers and Agencies upload their display ad campaigns into Phorm's interest-based advertising platform, the Open Internet Exchange (OIX), and then link each campaign to predefined channels. Created by the advertiser and reviewed by Phorm, these channels contain interest based trigger lists including:
• Keywords: search terms and page keywords such as “Paris” and “Hotels Paris” – personal data and sensitive topics excluded of course
• URLs such as “cityguidesl.com” and “parisinfod.com”.
As users ‘match’ channels, the relevant ad campaigns are served to users on websites participating in the OIX.
Two step process:
1. Anonymous interest matching
2. Delivering personalised content and advertising
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