Localization Available To Large Zillow Advertisers

Zillow announces a new toolset available to large advertisers that will allow for the ability to pinpoint different consumer segments often referred to in the advertising worlds as psychographics. The new program is called HomeDirect and according to the press release it's a patent pending process, something that should make the VC's very happy.

National advertisers are clamoring for this type of product for their online initiatives to improve their ROI's. The service is broken down into 4 categories:

-- Home and Geographic Targeting: Advertisers can target their online ads to visitors of a specific home's page on Zillow, much like an offline direct mail campaign. Advertisers can specify addresses, streets or ZIP codes.

-- Zestimate Value Targeting: Knowing the Zestimate™ values of individual homes, advertisers can choose to show their ads to specific home-value bands, by individual home or by neighborhood.

-- Move Predictor: Because of Zillow's extensive data on homes for salhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gife and traffic activity around a home's page views, Zillow can predict whether a household may be moving. This allows advertisers such as cable providers, financial institutions or home improvement stores to reach homeowners before purchase decisions around the move are made.

-- Psychographic Clusters: Advertisers can specify for their creative to be shown to households composed of any of the 65 psychographic clusters defined by the U.S. Census data, such as suburban households with children or high-income urban singles.

Localization is sort of the holy grail these days for advertisers. As advertisers continually try to move beyond keywords and banners, you'll see more and more efforts like this. It should be very interesting to see how unique the patent filing is and if it has the promise to become a licensing bonanza for Zillow. When I have time I will jump over to the USPTO (patent and trade office) site and give it a once over. If you're familiar with the patent filing, please comment on it here.