I don't know if it is too late to ask this but what is the difference between database marketing, datamining, and ad servers? I know that database marketing is what allows ads and advertisers to personal ads and ad serves, through cookies, make a profile for the person. But to me they seem like the same thing. Is there something that I am missing?
Think of them as different parts of the process.
Database marketing is the general term defining a relatively recent form of new media marketingthat employs algorithms to sift through databases of personal info, transactions and other online behaviors to determine what types of ads best suit/target individual media users.
Ad servers are the computer systems that store the ads that will be used in the target marketing process. They store information about you, your browsing behavior and track where you go on the web so that they can select the appropriate ads when you visit a particular website. Different websites use different ad servers to make this happen. So ad servers are a part of database marketing. Importantly (and this is how they differ from other databases), they are the services that store the actual ads that appear on your screen, as well, which alternate between users and the websites you visit. So:when Dr. K visits Facebook and sees sidebar ads for cruises or cookbooks, those ads are put there by ad servers. However, you might go to Facebook and see sidebar ads for Universities and travel agencies - not cruises and cookbooks. It’s the ad servers that house - and then upload - these advertisements based on the info available they have about us.
How do ad servers sift through this info about us to determine what ads to upload at any given time on any given website? Through datamining. Datamining is the process of sifting through the data; the actual ‘mining’ of the database, which is done with algorithms, bots and other means. Think about datamining like gold mining or an archeological dig (the kind they used to have at the zoo where you sat in a sand pit and shook sand through a plastic sifter to find “artifacts”)…only datamining is done with algorithms.
