• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 21, 2014

Marin Software wants to make it as easy and transparent to purchase display and video advertising as it is for search engine marketing. In a recent conversation with "Search Marketing Daily," Marin Software CEO David Yovanno explains how developing audiences, along with shopping ads, have emerged as two of the biggest recent trends. Behavioral targeting continues to transform search.

Marin's acquisition of Perfect Audience in June has helped the company build audience segments for search engine marketing. Yovanno believes that integrating similar buying and targeting methods between search, display, and online video would benefit the industry overall. The theory was developed from changes made in Google's and Bing's search platforms, which now consider many more behavioral signals that allow marketers to change bid prices in real-time based on specific attributes similar to display advertising.

Most display advertising gets sold as a 30- or 90-day insertion order commitment, but there is a portion of display that marketers should manage more like search, per Yovanno. "It's the persistent spend, because you have a high expression of intent when the visitors comes to the Web site," he said. "We're trying to find the areas of display and social that marketers can manage similarly because they perform and act more like search."

Yovanno, a former executive at Conversant and Gigya, believes this will create a more predictable software-as-a-service revenue model that the market really has not seen. He wants to bring the same analytical and transparent approach search marketers know to online display advertising, and points to AdRoll and MediaMath as two companies that "somewhat" continue to move in this direction.