Techniques are described herein for managing transactions between data consumers and data providers using a blockchain. In some embodiments, a blockchain network receive smart contracts that govern access rights to data sets provided by blockchain members and smart contracts that execute blockchain transactions based on the usage of data sets. When a data set is provided to a blockchain member through the blockchain network, usage of the data set may be tracked. Responsive to detecting usage of the data set, one or more smart contracts may execute one or more blockchain transactions within the blockchain network.

A system and method for selecting portions of content, and media content sets to be delivered over a packet based network is provided. The selected portions of content (such as a web page) may be keywords such as a word or a group of words. The media content sets may include one or more of video content (that may include an audio portion), audio content, graphics, images, or other multimedia or single media content. The media content set may include advertising, informational, business, educational, governmental, institutional, customized (e.g., personalized) content and/or other content. According to an example embodiment, the present invention provides a heuristic model employing a piece-wise linear optimization function to select keywords and the media content sets for delivery by a media delivery provider.

A technique for determining the effectiveness of an offer includes analyzing views, clicks, acceptances and satisfactions of the offer. Transaction data is retrieved to determine whether criteria of the offer has been satisfied. As a result, a total cost per transaction may be determined for an advertisement campaign that incorporates the offer. Further, detailed queries may be issued to identify areas in which the offer needs improvement.

Consistent with embodiments of the present invention, a social media merchandising and advertising platform may be provided. The platform may enable any third party website, page, or entity referred to herein as an “advertiser” to post interactive content on a publisher's website. The interactive content may comprise, for example, a customizable badge. The platform may enable the advertiser to create, customize, and deploy the badge for display and access on the publisher's specified domain. Moreover, the platform may enable the advertiser to provide the publisher with various specifications and elements to be integrated into a customized badge and, in turn, provide the customized badge to a publisher. Either the publisher or advertiser, individually or collectively, may then post the advertiser's badge to a website.

Methods, systems, and apparatuses to match content providers and interested content users are described. Input indicating an accessing of a network location by a user is received along with the user's identifier. The identifier is obfuscated and transmitted to a content provider configured to provide content to the user at the network location. A re-direct identifier is transmitted to the user instructing the user to directly contact the content provider. When the user contacts the content provider, the user transmits a provider-specific identifier by which the content provider identifies the user and the obfuscated user identifier. The content provider updates a database of obfuscated user identifiers and provider-specific user identifiers based on the received identifiers. Thus, the content provider is enabled to identify interested users based on obfuscated and provider-specific user identifiers.

This paper presents a practical method for measuring the impact of multiple marketing events on sales, including marketing events that are not traditionally trackable. The technique infers which of several competing media events are likely to have caused a given conversion. The method is tested using hold-out sets, and also a live media experiment for determining whether the method can accurately predict television-generated web conversions.

A disclosed example to monitor access to media includes; a communication interface to send a uniform resource locator (URL) scrape instruction to a client computer in response to a first request from the client computer, the first request indicative of access to the media at the client computer; a processor in circuit with the communication interface; and memory including machine readable instructions that, when executed by the processor, cause the processor to: provide the URL scrape instruction to the communication interface when a URL of a host website of the media is not obtainable by the processor from the first request, the URL scrape instruction to cause the client computer to: (1) read the URL of the host website from an address bar of a web browser at the client computer, and (2) send the URL of the host website to a server; and store a logged impression of the media in association with the URL of the host website from the client computer.

A sales promotion system (10) includes an image information acquisition unit (11) that acquires input image information on an image taken of a presentation area where a product is presented to a customer, a tracking unit (12) that tracks an action of the customer regarding the product based on the input image information, and a promotion information output unit (13) that outputs promotion information related to the product corresponding to the tracked customer's action to the customer. This enables more effective promotions.

An audience measurement service may monitor broadcasts in a region, ingesting closed captioning data, metadata, displayed text or logos, performing facial recognition on people, and/or generating audio/video fingerprints of broadcast content to create a database of content and associated keywords, along with times at which the content was broadcast. The audience measurement service may receive user search queries from a search provider and detect “spiking” queries. The audience measurement service may determine whether the spiking queries are related, contextually and temporally, to an item of content identified in the database, and infer that users generating the queries likely viewed the item of content. In some implementations, the audience measurement service may also infer that the users likely viewed other items of content (e.g. advertisements) displayed during the prior or subsequent few minutes on the same broadcast channel as the query-triggering item.

The systems and methods may be used to recommend an item to a consumer. The methods may comprise determining, based on a collaborative filtering algorithm, a consumer relevance value associated with an item, and transmitting, based on the consumer relevance value, information associated with the item to a consumer. A collaborative filtering algorithm may receive as an input a transaction history associated with the consumer, a demographic of the consumer, a consumer profile, a type of transaction account, a transaction account associated with the consumer, a period of time that the consumer has held a transaction account, a size of wallet, and/or a share of wallet. The method may further comprise generating a ranked list of items based upon consumer relevance values, transmitting a ranked list of items to a consumer, and/or re-ranking a ranked list of items based upon a merchant goal.