A campaign profile specifies products and/or content items associated with a campaign. A target group selection engine applies an affinity attribute model to user information of a user. The affinity attribute model is used to determine the user's affinity towards (a) product attributes of the products associated with the campaign and/or (b) content attributes of the content items associated with the campaign. The affinity attribute model may be generated using machine learning. A user interface accepts target user tuning parameters that specify weights to be applied to the affinity attributes determined by the affinity attribute model. Based at least on applying the weights to the affinity attributes, an inclusion score and/or exclusion score for the user is determined. The user is included in a target group, for engaging with the campaign, based on the inclusion score and/or exclusion score.

An information provision device includes an obtainer, a collector, an extractor, and a presentation controller. The obtainer obtains profit information about a profit gained by a user by performing a measure of reducing a quantity of resource purchased from a provider. The collector collects product information including information about a price of a product and advertisement information of the product. The extractor extracts advertisement information of a product whose product information satisfies a predetermined relationship with the profit information from among the product information collected by the collector, as specific information. The presentation controller causes a presentation device to present the specific information extracted by the extractor.

A system for building sets of user devices communicatively connected to a communications network, having a common or related topical interest in items available via communications over the network by the user devices with an item server. The user devices, respectively, have respective network identifiers and each exhibits related topical activity of particular articles in a subnetwork of the communications network, for example, in a social communications network. A server communicatively connected to the subnetwork detects communicative interactions over the subnetwork of the user devices with the particular articles. The system includes a collector communicatively connected to the communications network for obtaining a group of articles from the server, an identifier communicatively connected to the collector, the identifier determines the particular articles as a subset of the group of articles, a query device communicatively connected to the identifier and the communications network, the query device communicates over the communications network with the subnetwork obtaining the respective network identifiers of the user devices, respectively, interactive with the particular articles through communications over the communications network, a generator communicatively connected to the query device, the generator derives a tag corresponding to the particular articles, and a reporter is communicatively connected to the generator for delivering the respective network identifiers of the user devices, respectively, interactive with the particular articles and the tag. A topical collection of articles serves as a proxy to communications devices having particular interests for use in targeted advertising.

A system and method are disclosed permitting the reservation of a publically accessible stationary location, such as a parking spot along a public highway, a parking lot, or a parking ramp. In some aspects, selection of mobile unit types, media messages to be presented, and/or the times that the stationary location is to be occupied by a reserving mobile unit is permitted. The system may also determine a value assigned to the locations or other of the above-mentioned characteristics. The mobile unit makes a determination of its geographic location and transmits the geographic location, and also sends an acknowledgement that the mobile unit occupies the selected location. The mobile unit may be a self-powered vehicle, towable vehicle, portable station, ground vehicle, nautical vehicle, and airborne vehicle.

Systems herein relate to acquiring shopper insights from home product use and influencing shoppers to make additional future purchases of products. Further, the invention relates to electronically communicating with the shopper at the second moment of truth to provide the shopper with one or more influential messages including, but not limited to product information, e-coupons, discounts, surveys, ingredients, ingredient suggestions, recipe suggestions, entertaining, consumer reports, shopping list suggestions, wish list suggestions, and inventory list suggestions.

Optimal strategies for providing offers to a plurality of customers are generated. A plurality of categorical attributes (for example, gender and residential status) and ordinal attributes (for example, risk score and credit line utilization) can be determined. Values of one of more categorical attributes can be changed as per a transition probability table. Some probabilities can be varied to determine a first tradeoff, based on which a first updated strategy can be generate Further, noise can be added to one or more ordinal attributes. Standard deviation of a noise distribution associated with the noise can be varied so as to determine a second tradeoff, based on which a second updated strategy can be generated. The second updated strategy can be an update of the first updated strategy. Offers can be provided to the plurality of customers in accordance with the second updated strategy.

A social networking system may provide user metrics for unknown dimensions to an external system using received hash codes from user devices performing actions on the external system. Embodiments of the invention receive hash codes generated by external systems that are embedded in redirect Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) that are executed by user devices. The social networking system may match the received hash codes to identifying information about users, e.g., user identifiers. The user profile information may be reported to external systems based on hash codes in an aggregated format without disclosing identifying information about users. In one embodiment, a hash code may include identifying information of an administrator of an external system to enable the administrator to merge information about users of the social networking system with other unknown dimensions of information about the users that is known by the external system.

A computer readable medium is disclosed containing a computer program useful for performing a method for sending advertising data, the computer program comprising instructions to send a video data stream comprising advertising data from an IPTV server to a first end user device, instructions to receive at the IPTV server selection data from the first end user device selecting the advertising data and a second end user device and instructions to send from the IPTV server a data associated with the advertising data to the second end user device. A system is disclosed for performing the method. A data structure is disclosed for use by the system and method.

A system, method, apparatus and processor readable media are described for real-time prediction of an advertising audience volume through analysis of historical audience data, and tuning of the predicted audience volume. Embodiments enable a user to specify a query for audience volume prediction. Such a query may be a Boolean combination of various audience categories. A time range may be determined that indicates the amount of historical data that is to be analyzed to make the audience volume prediction in real time. Employing the user-specified query, an audience volume prediction may be provided for a future time period, based on an analysis of retrieved historical audience data for the time range. Embodiments may also enable a user to tune the predicted audience volume through modification of the query through one or more iterations.

Subject innovations are directed towards a platform architecture, system, and special purpose software and hardware that employs a machine learning approach using transactional behavioral events and data about customers to allow a telecommunications marketer to express a set of configurable business rules and constraints, and within a dynamic optimization approach, derive solutions or marketing approaches to optimize delayed key performance indicators. In one embodiment, this is obtained using marketing experiments that seek to learn and influence long term behaviors of customers.