Peter,
Let's suppose such company does exist. Let's suppose she has some customers (that are offered the service as a beta test before going to the market).
How would this company prove it provides "real measurable value". Would it be just by asking customers how they feel about it? or asking them how much they would like to pay to keep the service as it is? Or would it be through the price other company would pay to buy aggregate, or targeted, information? Or should this company go on the stock market to get a valuation? Or do you have an other lead in mind, a metric, or something?
Sylvain
BTW, next issue of "journal of marketing research" provides a paper explaining why retargeting is sometimes less valuable than generic brand message:
When Does Retargeting Work? Information Specificity in Online Advertising
Anja Lambrecht and Catherine TuckerFirms can now offer personalized recommendations to consumers who return to their website, using consumers' previousbrowsing history on that
website. In addition, online advertising has greatly improved in its use
of external browsing data to target Internet ads. Dynamic retargeting
integrates these two advances by using information from the browsing
history on the firm's website to improve advertising content on external
websites. When surfing the Internet, consumers who previously viewed
products on the firm's website are shown ads with images of those same
products. To examine whether this is more effective than simply showing
generic brand ads, the authors use data from a field experiment
conducted by an online travel firm. Surprisingly, the data suggest that
dynamic retargeted ads are, on average, less effective than their
generic equivalents. However, when consumers exhibit browsing behavior
that suggests their product preferences have evolved (e.g., visiting
review websites), dynamic retargeted ads no longer underperform. One
explanation for this finding is that when consumers begin a product
search, their preferences are initially construed at a high level. As a
result, they respond best to higher-level product information. Only when
they have narrowly construed preferences do they respond positively to
ads that display detailed product information. This finding suggests
that in evaluating how best to reach consumers through ads, managers
should be aware of the multistage nature of consumers' decision
processes and vary advertising content along these stages.