You Are What You Want to Buy

Leveraging consumer desire in the moments before purchase has been the great promise for online advertising from the moment the medium debuted. Thanks to reams of data collected by cookies, ad exchanges, demand-side platforms, and real-time buying of digital ad inventory, targeting those moments has become ever more precise. That data is also giving us an ability to see what else consumers want to buy. With the help of firms like Blue Kai, which do this sort of targeting for advertisers, we can begin to trace mental road maps of shoppers in the wild.