Akamai is entering the behavioral targeting business, though the ...

said Tuesday. Acerno, founded in 2004, sold for $95 million cash. Some leading Internet retailers contribute anonymous data to aid Acerno’s “predictive models” of what consumers will buy online, Acerno said. The acquisition complements Akamai’s new Advertising Decisions Solutions, in development for two years, which pairs real-time anonymous Web browsing behavior with anonymous online purchasing data from advertisers’ sites, Akamai said. As other companies in behavioral targeting have done amid scrutiny by Capitol Hill, the FTC and consumer advocates, Akamai emphasized targeting’s consumer benefits. “Consumers, often faced with irrelevant online advertising clutter, will enjoy greater advertising relevance and continued growth in the amount of content that is available for free because it is supported by advertising,” it said. Akamai and Acerno belong to the Network Advertising Initiative, the self-regulatory body and clearinghouse for opt-out requests to members, they said. Their services “rely solely on anonymous and non-personally identifiable end user information,” the companies said. Akamai expects to close the acquisition “later this quarter,” the company said. Akamai started building the “underlying functionality” of behavioral targeting in response to demand from existing online advertising customers, said Liz Greene, product manager for the new business. The company doesn’t want to be an “ad network per se,” she said, since it already provides services to a “majority” of ad networks. Akamai will bring together the “subsets” of the targeting market to offer a service that “scales really well” so advertisers can make a large buy across several platforms, Greene said. Aaron Ahola, chief privacy officer, said Akamai’s new business is at the “opposite end” of the deep-packet inspection used by NebuAd to target ads for ISP customers. “It’s not like we're out there choosing ourselves what type of traffic patterns or Internet usage to monitor,” the behavior that landed NebuAd in a harsh Hill spotlight, Ahola said. The cookie-based tracking will operate under the opt- out system at the NAI, which Akamai joined this summer after the targeting platform concluded testing, he added. Recent congressional scrutiny of targeting didn’t influence the service launch’s timing, though Akamai waited until it had an agreement with Acerno for a formal launch of the new business, Ahola said. He now will “actively monitor” congressional activity on privacy and online ads, Ahola said. “We are anxious to see how Congress interprets a lot of the hearings and information gathering” that happened in the summer and fall.