How does a FLoC lead to targeted interest based advertising?

[ngpatrick5]

trafficstars

I'm struggling to connect the FLoC idea with interest based advertising. Today an advertiser can target a group of users "Interested in international travel". Would a flock exist that contains users who are interested in international travel? How would these categories be chosen?

I'm likely misunderstanding, but a FLoC seems entirely different to how third party audiences are used today. Currently an advertisers target users who are interested in x (regardless of any other behavior), while a flock seems to target users who are similar to eachother?

Thank you!

[michaelkleber]

FLoC is for grouping together people whose browsing behavior seems "kinda similar". I wouldn't expect any one flock to be full of "users who are interested in international travel". But maybe if you took the tens of thousands of flocks and ranked them by interest in international travel, you'd find that a hundred of them stood out as highly enriched for the people you're trying to advertise to.

If you're already in a position to observe people demonstrating an interest in international travel and want to build an audience of those people to advertise to in the future, check out the TURTLEDOVE/SPARROW proposals instead.

[ngpatrick5]

I appreciate the quick reply! That makes sense - it sounds like flocks are similar to a persona in traditional marketing (ie our ideal customer/flock visits websites that imply they are male/mid 30s/high income/urban), rather than just users who are in-market for tech products.

But maybe if you took the tens of thousands of flocks and ranked them by interest in international travel, you'd find that a hundred of them stood out as highly enriched for the people you're trying to advertise to.

Is this something an advertiser would only be able to do, or could an adtech vendor run analysis like this and make the outcomes available to advertisers within the auction? (Similar to how adtech vendors today analyse cookie behavior to build audiences and make those available to advertisers) This is likely part of what FLoC+Gatekeeper is getting at.

I am writing a short article comparing flocks to current 3pd data segments and don't want to misrepresent anything.

[michaelkleber]

Both uses seem plausible: An individual advertiser could use flocks based on observations of activity on their own site, and a 3rd-party ad tech vendor could build models of how each flock tends to act based on data aggregated across many sites.

But again, I think the TURTLEDOVE and SPARROW proposals are important to any discussion of the activity "build audiences and make those available to advertisers".