IFRA Expo 2011, the meeting of the online and offline news publishers with vendors of online tools, media assetmanagement, apps and big printing machines. This year, it was Vienna‘s turn to host the expo.

At Vienna Messe, in 2 big halls, all the vendors gave demo, flyers, iPads and even iPhone 4Ss just to catch your attention. We did the same, by demonstrating the integration of the Social Profiling Widget to Escenic and its power over targeted online ads. We did this with the help of Vizrt (thank you guys).

And the reaction was the one we were looking for, a strong demand and cry need from the online publishing world

• to dive in social networks
• to gather more knowledge of how their users interact with content
• to impress them with the right content and smart advertising.

With freshly developed Escenic tag functionality, an even closer step towards content personalization is around the corner. The way user interact with news is reaching fast speeds, the time they allocate to news is decreasing since they are looking for the relevant content. With Social Profiling Widget the reach of the relevant content is boosted by putting the right content on the homepage and removing the articles that don’t fit the social profile of the visitor.

It is possible, since the information, preferences, social remarks are present on Facebook or LinkedIn. Big data management and identification of those bits that can create a better experience, can be easily done by the widget we developed together with React.com

Next to this, knowing your users interest and likes, as a publisher you can make better decision over what type of ads should be placed. In return, the ‘ad blindness’ of today’s users is decreased with meaningful banners. If an online publisher knows that the user is fond of tennis, why the publisher would place a IKEA kitchen ad? This is happening today at big costs for publishers.

Things are about to change, but before that check the pictures we took in Vienna.