Virtual IP Zones for Privacy-Safe Audience Targeting
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Solution Overview
Problem
The online advertising industry faces challenges with reach, data integrity, and privacy due to the volatility of cookies and the lack of qualified audiences, leading to inefficient targeting and potential privacy concerns.
Innovation Solution
A system using offline predictive modeling to segment consumers by ISP, demographics, and business attributes, creating virtual IP zones that map to online IP address ranges without tracking or storing personally identifiable information, allowing for targeted advertising without cookies.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If cookies are used for audience targeting and tracking, then advertising reach and targeting capability are improved, but data integrity and privacy are compromised due to cookie volatility and lack of qualified audiences
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces IP address ranges as an intermediary mechanism between advertisers and users. Instead of directly tracking individual users via cookies, the system uses IP zones as a mediator that aggregates user information at a non-identifiable level, thereby maintaining advertising reach while improving data integrity and privacy
Solution Approach 2:
The system creates a copy of audience segmentation data at the IP zone level rather than using actual user identifiers. This allows advertisers to target specific audience segments without accessing or storing personally identifiable information, resolving the contradiction between reach and data integrity
2Productivity
If cookies are centralized and brokered to increase reach, then advertising scale is improved, but privacy concerns increase and data becomes volatile
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts personally identifiable information from the cookie-based tracking system and replaces it with aggregated IP address range data. This extraction removes the privacy-harmful elements while preserving the scalability benefits of centralized ad serving
Solution Approach 2:
The system changes the parameter of user identification from individual cookie identifiers to aggregated IP zone identifiers. This parameter change maintains the ability to scale advertising while eliminating privacy concerns associated with individual user tracking
3Measurement precision
If behavioral targeting with cookies is used, then audience segmentation capability is improved, but the system becomes complex and cookies are easily blocked or deleted
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the user base at the IP zone level rather than tracking individual users. This segmentation approach maintains audience segmentation precision while simplifying the system by eliminating the need for complex cookie management, storage, and synchronization across multiple devices and browsers
Data Source
AI summary
A system, method and computer-readable medium provides steps of merging one or more sources of IP addresses to create a merged database comprising a plurality of IP zones, user typing each of the plurality of IP zones, enhancing each of the plurality of IP zones, receiving an input address and selecting one or more of the plurality of IP zones having a predetermined statistical relationship to the input address.