First party advertisement serving

• US 20060282327A1
• Filed: 06/09/2006
• Published: 12/14/2006
• Est. Priority Date: 06/09/2005
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Trueffect, Inc.
• Original Assignee: Trueffect, Inc.
• Inventors: Neal, Greg, Casteel, Glynne, Hill, Ron, Droste, Bruce
• Granted Patent: US 7,904,520 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 705/14.530
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 21/6263 during internet communication, e.g. revealing personal data from cookies
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/02 Marketing; Price estimation or determination; Fundraising
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/0255 based on user history
• CPC Class Codes: G06Q 30/0277 Online advertisement
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/222 Secondary servers, e.g. proxy server, cable television Head-end provisioning of proxy services in data packet switching networks H04L67/56
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/23424 involving splicing one content stream with another content stream, e.g. for inserting or substituting an advertisement
• CPC Class Codes: H04N 21/812 involving advertisement data advertising per se G06Q30/02

Abstract

Adservers with the ability to access advertiser cookies and vice versa when both are serving from the advertiser'"'"'s domain are provided, thereby avoiding the overhead and delay in backend cookie synchronization efforts. Further, advertising cookie data can be gathered regardless of whether a user is browsing a publisher'"'"'s web site with an advertisement served by an adserver, or browsing the advertiser'"'"'s web site, because the cookies were previously set when the user visited the advertiser'"'"'s web site in the context of a first-party cookie. Even if the user has configured his or her browser to limit the setting of third-party cookies, the cookies can still be read by the adserver. By making cookie and advertising data immediately available in real time to both the advertiser and the adserver, the solution also provides for instantaneous and accurate targeting of web advertising to allow an educated ad selection process by either party.

Claims

1. A method of serving an advertisement to a client system, the method comprising:

receiving an advertisement serving request from a publisher web page directed to a sub-domain of an advertiser and redirected via a domain name service (DNS) server of the advertiser; and

receiving a cookie from the client system associated with a parent domain of the advertiser.

2. The method of claim 1 further comprising selecting an advertisement from a plurality of candidate advertisements based at least upon the cookie.

3. The method of claim 2 further comprising serving the advertisement to the client system.

4. The method of claim 2 wherein the advertisement comprises an advertisement of the advertiser.

5. The method of claim 2 wherein the advertisement comprises an advertisement of a second advertiser different from the advertiser.

6. The method of claim 1 wherein the receiving operation further comprises redirecting the advertisement serving request via a name server (NS) record in the DNS server that points to a DNS server of an adserver.

7. The method of claim 1 wherein the receiving operation further comprises redirecting the advertisement serving request via pointing a host name to an address via an address record of the DNS server.

8. The method of claim 7 wherein the address comprises an Internet Protocol address.

9. The method of claim 1 further comprising resolving the sub-domain of the advertiser to an address of a server of an adserver.

10. The method of claim 7 wherein the address comprises an Internet Protocol address.

11. The method of claim 1 further comprising an adserver server associated with the sub-domain of the advertiser.

12. The method of claim 11 wherein the adserver server is co-located with the DNS server within an infrastructure of the advertiser.

13. The method of claim 11 wherein the adserver server is co-located on a network with the DNS server of the advertiser.

14. A computer-readable medium having computer-executable instructions for performing a computer process that implements the operations recited in claim 1.

15. A computing system comprising:

a domain name service (DNS) server associated with a parent domain of an advertiser adapted to receive an advertisement serving request from a publisher web page and redirect the advertisement serving request; and

a sub-domain server associated with a sub-domain of the parent domain adapted to receive the redirected advertisement serving request via the DNS server and receive a cookie from a client system accessing the publisher web page.

16. The system of claim 15 wherein the sub-domain server is further adapted to select an advertisement from a plurality of candidate advertisements based at least upon the cookie.

17. The system of claim 16 wherein the sub-domain server is further adapted to serve the advertisement to the client system.

18. The system of claim 15 wherein the DNS server comprises a name server (NS) record pointing to a DNS server of an adserver.

19. The system of claim 15 wherein the DNS server comprises an address record pointing a host name to an address of the sub-domain server.

20. The system of claim 19 wherein the address comprises an Internet Protocol address.

21. The system of claim 15 further comprising a sub-domain DNS server adapted to resolve the sub-domain of the advertiser to an address of the sub-domain server.

22. The system of claim 21 wherein the address comprises an Internet Protocol address.

23. The system of claim 15 wherein the sub-domain server is co-located with the DNS server within an infrastructure of the advertiser.

24. The system of claim 15 wherein the sub-domain server is co-located on a network with the DNS server.

25. A method for serving advertisements, the method comprising:

establishing a virgin domain;

configuring a computer system to act as an origin server within the virgin domain;

setting the origin server to serve web content without using cookies; and

serving advertisements from within the virgin domain.

26. The method of claim 25, further comprising detecting cookies from a browser through the virgin domain and taking a corrective action to restore the status of the virgin domain.

27. The method of claim 25 further comprising detecting cookies from a browser through the virgin domain and establishing a replacement virgin domain.