Each month, we feature a partner to share some insights on a given area in digital marketing. We previously interviewed Habib Kairuz and Geoff Judge from the VC World.

This month, Angus Glover Wilson, Chief Privacy Officer at TagMan is sharing his thoughts on privacy.

It’s no secret that the EU is ahead of the US when it comes to the enactment of e-privacy legislation, but that doesn’t mean US companies shouldn’t take heed to what’s happening in the EU.  Not only is e-privacy legislation in the US imminent, but US companies that do business overseas or sell products or services online to customers overseas, must also adhere to EU e-privacy laws.  In addition, US e-privacy laws are likely to be similar to the laws in the EU in order to help simplify international business practices.

If your business hasn’t already taken steps to get e-privacy ready, then you’re behind in the game.  Here are four tips to help make your company well prepared for e-privacy legislation:

• Conduct a cookie audit.  It is essential to know what tags you’re running and why.  You’ll need to know this so you’re prepared to act, and will understand the impact of removing any tag.

• Make sure you document every measure you take while preparing for e-privacy legislation in order to build your case for compliance.

• Be clear and elegant in how you communicate and engage with customers regarding e-privacy directives, and their privacy options.

• Test your on-site approaches using A/B comparisons to see what works best.

The good news is there are systems available that can help simplify and maximize efficiency regarding this process.  A full-suite enterprise tag management system (TMS) can fully audit and easily add and edit tags without you having to touch the code on your site, and can also help you better manage tags, which can be done asynchronously so tags don’t slow down your page. TagMan’s TMS solution actually has e-privacy capabilities baked in so you can manage the opt-out of any tag via our system.

The aim is to make e-privacy implementation for businesses as seamless as possible and the good news for Chango clients is we are fully integrated with their search retargeting tag. We have tested, approved and implemented this and many other more complex tags into our system.

Lets be clear, global uncertainty around e-privacy prevails, but e-privacy legislation is inevitable.  Will your business be ready?  Better yet, will your business be able to claim that you’re ahead of the game and stand out from competitors when it comes to e-privacy compliance?

Read the rest of the article on Search Engine Land

Press Release: Chango Continues Industry Integration by Adding 5 Tag Partners to Custom Platform

Our industry relies on cookies / pixels / tags (* delete as you see fit) and yet they remain the burden of every marketer and media owner.

For a company like Chango we are actually fortunate in that search retargeting really only requires a single pixel that can be placed on the confirmation page, whereas something like site retargeting typically requires one on every page. And with that confirmation pixel we track back the keyword / individual that triggered that conversion allowing us to optimize more granularly.

We started like many by ensuring we were compatible with DoubleClick so our pixel could be piggybacked into their Floodlight tag, and that helped a great deal. Most agencies and clients seem to use Dart these days and so most client situations were solved. Of course along then came some major clients using Atlas, whose tag container requires a thorough and lengthy approval process, and so we ticked that box and moved forward.

But as time marched on, more and more clients started to turn to tag container companies for a number of reasons. Primarily it seems they wanted efficiency. Too many times we see situations where marketing and IT sit in different departments, and seem to have a vehement hatred for each other! One client is allowed 3 tags on the site and if they want to add another partner they have to remove one first. Why? Arbitrary reasons – I know because I tracked down IT and asked them! Another has to fill in a work order form that is 3 pages long, which will then be responded to with an internal quote (!) and a timeline that is never less than 12 weeks. Really? Funny, I though this was 2012 and marketing was important to companies, but what do I know

Some tag partners also provide protection from pixels slowing down the site. They monitor them through their systems and if they see performance dip then they remove the tag. In peak times that could save a retailer for instance a fortune in lost sales from down time.

Further protection seems to come from server to server integration because the tag management system is the only technology to touch the site and closes its browser connection before passing information off to the vendors. Clients tell us there are pros and cons to both methods of course.

Seeing how these tag companies operate has been interesting. Most have a partner program that requires the Chango pixel to be tested, approved and then integrated. A client can then login to their interface and just tick a box to deploy the code.

In part that explains why such partners are important to Chango – they remove the headache for us of getting tags placed and allow us to get campaigns launched quicker. That in itself is enough motivation, but several of these partnerships run much deeper than a nice certificate, and you will often find us doing joint events and hosting client events and drinks. It’s a close community fuelled by a common drive, and good food and wine J

As a company Chango appears like a kickass media company on the front end, but hiding in the background is the most granular and powerful data management / media buying platform in the world. Our clients renew at over 90% because of the performance this platform drives but also because we go out of our way to deliver the concept of WOW. So we will continue to draw lines across the media tech landscape, connecting the dots with companies like tech partners and our recently announced brand safety deals.

In our industry WOW is rare – if you want to experience it then get in touch and ask questions or send us an RFP to sales@chango.com and one of our geekily passionate team will help you out.

#WOW.

User Agent Classification Problem

When your software platform is processing 200,000 transactions per second, the little things start to matter. Our real-time bidding platform needs to identify the browsers we are interested in servicing by using the user agent (UA) string to identify the browser platform.

This is accomplished by parsing a publicly available database, browscap.ini, which contains description of browser capabilities by UA; however, the problem is that the user agents are expressed with wildcard patterns.

First Iteration

Querying browscap.ini makes it possible to build a list of patterns for user agents that we are interested in. The obvious approach is to take this list of patterns and scan through it one by one until the user agent we are examining has matched one or more times (or none). Parsing through thousands of lines of wildcard patterns during a bid request simply does not scale. Since most of these patterns are very generic, you’d have to save all the matches and then pick the best fit.

This is when we turned to Ragel, a system for generating Finite State Machines (FSM). The patterns are converted to Ragel definitions and then those “regular expressions” are compiled down to C code.

It is possible to generate a state machine for each regular expression, or group multiple expressions into a single machine. Reduced state machines means more efficiency – the more expressions in single machine, the fewer machines to check; however, if there are too many expressions in a single machine, the representation of the FSM in memory can explode exponentially and consume all memory (remember, wildcards are expensive).

We began to experiment to see how many expressions can be grouped together and compiled down to C by Ragel without causing the machine to crash from memory exhaustion through painful trial & error.

Each wildcard increases the number of states produced by the machine geometrically. That is, many wildcards in a single machine is a cause of Ragel memory consumption, so the lazy solution to improving the distribution was randomly shuffling the expressions. This approach, while effective, caused crashes when by bad luck in the distribution, but the resulting compiled machine was fast enough.

The First Iteration, Part 2

A few bad runs crashed the machine too many times, so it was desirable to make the performance of the runs deterministic. Our first approach was to apply a complexity measure to the regular expressions and distribute them evenly among groups. This was accomplished by placing the expressions onto a priority queue, then pull them off and combine them before replacing them until the queue contains the target number of groups.

Once you have found the right group size, Ragel will run more or less deterministically and minor changes to the browcap.ini file won’t really affect the run too much.

The Second Iteration

When the business requirements around browser targeting changed, it became easier to specify a whitelist of user agents than a blacklist; however, the number of wildcards in whitelisted user agent strings increased, therefore the complexity measure was no longer sufficient. Ragel now consumed memory to the point of crashing the system, even with much smaller group sizes than had been possible to compile with the blacklist.

We explored grouping user agents lexicographically, so that Ragel could produce smaller machines with many shared states. This would have given gains with the blacklist as well, but the random & complexity grouping solutions got the job done well enough at the time. Prefix grouping still uses the same complexity measure, but expressions are merged together into a single machine to achieve a target average group size while maintaining the ordering of expressions.

The resulting machines were much smaller and faster than before (although group sizes that were once achievable with the blacklist using the random ordering were still out of reach).

The Next Iteration

Thanks to the lexicographical ordering introduced by the previous improvements, it was now possible to take advantage of the static prefixes that were present in most of the regular expressions describing user agents — that is, the prefix of a UA regular expression would be every character in the string up until the first wildcard character.

One can measure how many expressions are differentiated by the character in that position by grouping the prefixes by first character. If this is a significant fraction, it is worth splitting the expressions into multiple groups based on this character. Prefix analysis can proceed recursively on the next character for each differentiated group. One may then produce an initial classifier that analyzes a provided UA by determining which prefixes it can possibly match and only checking a subset of the compiled Ragel state machines.

This technique had some surprising results: for the blacklist, the optimized code took 90% of the original time and for the whitelist, the optimized code took 33% of the original time, in spite of the blacklist optimized code only considering 1/4 of the number of possible machines on average; by comparison, the whitelist optimized code on average still considers potentially 1/2 of the number of possible machines (most user agents match an expression in the whitelist, most user agents do not match an expression in the blacklist).

The true optimization is probably one of frequency: the initial classifier specifies that the most specific possible Ragel FSMs are checked first because so many user agents start with an identical “Mozilla 5.0″ string, these machines are brought to the fore (along with some other specific differentiators later on in the UA string).

Now, far fewer machines are considered than before (the UA code exits as soon as one machine matches). There is room for further optimization by ordering machines by sampled user agent frequency, but that’s for another post!

If working on these types of problems and other interesting scalability challenges is the kind of thing you’re interested in, then be sure to check out our careers page.

Chango is a successful, rapidly growing venture backed start-up, headquartered in Toronto, Canada, with growing offices in New York and San Francisco. Chango is changing the way advertisers buy display media, allowing advertisers to speak directly to consumers based on their recent searches on Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, among others.

This is an opportunity to join one of the most innovative companies of 2011 (AdTech IA, Deloitte CTW). We are growing rapidly to meet the needs of our impressive client base, including major, well known retailers and internationally recognized agencies in the US and Canada.

Responsibilities

Office Administration and Facilities Management

• Procure and facilitate/manage relationships with 3rd party service providers including building management (signage, office security/access cards, lighting, office comfort, etc.), stationary/supplies (Staples, courier, etc.), maintenance (handyman, locksmith, cleaners,
• Ensure office equipment and supplies are ordered, stocked, and maintained as required for optimal running of our offices (telephones, desks/chairs, computers/monitors, printers, projectors, stationary, kitchen supplies)

Reception, General Support and Assistance

• Ensures that guests/visitors to the office are promptly greeted and directed to the appropriate individual or meeting
• Receive, send and route email, documents, packages, supplies, etc.
• Ensures that common areas (kitchen, meeting rooms, supply room, etc.) are tidy and appropriately stocked
• Assists HR Consultant with employee onboarding/orientation as required, including vacation tracking
• Photocopies, files and manages documents as necessary
• Proactively looks for ways to increase efficiency and makes recommendations for implementation

Executive Support

• Provide support to the executives of Chango and Mantella Venture Partners by assisting them with travel coordination/booking, expense reimbursements and other claims forms
• Creates, tracks and expedites documentation of a confidential nature (stock options, board correspondence, PowerPoint presentations, etc.) ensuring documents are complete, signed, and forwarded as required
• Orders/arranges for food/beverages for meetings as required
• Plans and coordinate office events and parties as required
• Performs other administrative/support functions as required

Skills/Experience/Qualifications

• You have superior client service skills – you enjoy seeing the impact of your efforts on a daily basis
• Your communication skills are strong: oral, presentation and especially interpersonal
• You take pride in a job well done and actually enjoy juggling multiple priorities
• You are exceptionally commuter literate
• Thrive in a fast paced entrepreneurial environment – prefer working in small, high achieving collaborative teams
• You have the tact and maturity to handle sensitive and confidential material with aplomb
• You likely have a diploma/degree in business administration, communication(s), arts, or other relevant post-secondary education

Why Chango?
• Our marketing leading technology and client accolades
• A truly collaborative team environment
• Competitive salary, benefits and equity
• Conveniently located in the Toronto entertainment district, steps from King St. West and Spading Avenue

Apply
• We thank all candidates for their interest; however only those selected for an interview will be contacted
• No agencies, please

We are one of Canada’s most innovative startups and the pioneer of a new ad technology called Search Retargeting.

You will be responsible for defining how people interact with Chango’s analytics and campaign management system. We’re looking for designers passionate about product and user interaction design – not just how things look. Our product designers are key members of the team and sit with engineers that are building the product. We care about how every detail and interaction feels, and you need to as well.

Responsibilities:
– Design visual elements, flows and compelling user interactions
– Translate complex ideas into elegant, intuitive designs

Qualifications:
– Proven ability to create and execute visual and interaction design concepts
– Excellent sense of typography, layout, and general design principles
– Exceptional attention to detail, particularly relating to usability
– Passionate about interface and experience design
– Ability to write clean and semantic HTML/CSS

Bonus points:
– Experience with JavaScript and JSON
– CSS3 and HTML5 Magic
– Experience in personal interaction design projects
– Mobile design experience

When applying, make sure to send a link to your portfolio.

What is your role at Chango?

I am the Director of Sales for Chango’s Western Region team, based in San Francisco.

How would you say Chango is different than other retargeting companies?

I made a decision in early January to join Chango, as this company is clearly on a rocket ship ride up!  There is clearly a market need for a company that is positioned not just at the leading edge of technological targeting for advertisers, but also a need for a company that leads with customer service.  Too many times in today’s ad-tech world, marketers have their concerns heard, and their needs acted upon – but then once the campaign launches, it is radio silence from the vendor.  Chango believes in a better way – to have multiple touch-points internally for the client; from the initial sale, to the trafficking to optimization to renewal, the client has several Chango team members assigned to various parts of the campaign.

What keeps you awake at night?

My dog’s snoring keeps me awake at night!

Why is Chango such an awesome place to work?

I hate to sound redundant, but I will start by saying that the people at Chango are truly one of the best reasons to work here.   On top of that, Chango believes in focus – and that focus starts with building a world-class product, differentiating ourselves from our competitors, and keeping that focus on building and enhancing the products that work for what the client needs.  Combine that with the amazing staff that makes up the company in Toronto, New York and San Francisco – and I’m surprised at why anyone would use any other Search Retargeting product.

What’s your favorite question on Quora?

I don’t really use Quora.  Lately, I have found myself addicted more to Draw Something. Hmmmm…maybe THAT’S what keeps me up at night!!

More about Jon

My top three hobbies are food, wine and travel – and not necessarily that order.   I found myself secretly excited when I had to order additional pages for my passport this year because I ran of out room for stamps.  When not chilling out with a bottle of wine with my partner, friends and dog, you can find me evangelizing the Chango story on American or United Airlines.

Five years ago, I found myself as an executive of an ad serving business in Europe, competing against the likes of Atlas and DoubleClick for mostly agency clients. The pitch was about delivery speed, reporting functionality, and how quickly one could traffic 30 placements with 20 creatives after a martini lunch.

Read the rest of the story on the imedia‘s web site.

This role reports to the Director of Marketing & Partnerships and is based in NYC.

Chango is a successful, rapidly growing venture-backed start-up, headquartered in Toronto, Canada, with growing offices in New York and San Francisco. Chango is changing the way advertisers buy display media, allowing advertisers to speak directly to consumers based on their recent searches on Google, Yahoo!, and Bing among others.

This is an opportunity to join one of the most innovative companies of 2011 (AdTech IA, Deloitte CTW). We are growing rapidly to meet the needs of our impressive client base, including major, well known retailers and internationally recognized agencies (iCrossing) in the US and Canada.

Responsibilities: 

• Lead content management strategy and production, working with senior management (CEO and CRO) and third parties as needed
• Assist with the implementation of a marketing tool
• Run Chango’s email marketing program, messaging, A/B testing and tracking
• Lead all social media campaigns (primarily LinkedIn and Twitter), including monitoring social sentiment and actively engage with bloggers and other interest parties
• Lead various segmentation and other research project to help improve our lead generation results
• Responsible for all lead generation metrics and weekly optimizations
• Create robust process to track qualified leads and report back on effectiveness of marketing campaigns
• Manage our SEM campaign and landing pages as needed
• Play an active role in refreshing chango.com to increase engagement metrics and leads
• Create various marketing collaterals, pitches and other communications as needed
• Own programming for industry trade shows and conferences in the U.S and U.K.

Qualifications & desired experience:

• You have a professionally relevant BA/BS degree
• You have  3-5 years marketing experience, ideally with an interactive/online/digital media/agency
• You have an advanced skill set with the Microsoft product suite, e.g. Excel, Word and PowerPoint
• You have superior organizational, time management and prioritization skills

You:

• Thrive in a fast paced entrepreneurial environment
• Exceptionally communication skills – presentation, written and oral
• Adept team player, able to assist and support multiple constituents
• Fast, keen learner who is able to work independently with minimal direction
• Extremely accountable and highly motivated to learn and progress

Why Chango?

• Our market leading position and client accolades
• The ability to be part of a fast growing marketing team
• A truly collaborative team environment
• Competitive salary, benefits and equity
• Conveniently located a few minutes away from Union Square, NYC

Apply:

• Apply in confidence to jobs@chango.com
• We thank all candidates for their interest, however only those selected for an interview will be contacted
• US work authorization
• No agencies, please

Retargeting and Remarketing – SMX Toronto, Chris Sukornyk