Dive Brief:

• Ad personalization technology company Jivox is integrating its system with Facebook to reach target markets on the social network and its photo-sharing app Instagram. The technology helps to identify micro-audiences on the social platform using machine-learning and contextual data like weather, temperature, time of day, day of week, language and other demographics, in order to serve more relevant and personalized ads, according to a statement by Jivox.
• REI, the retail cooperative with $2.56 billion in sales last year and one of Jivox's clients, tested social media engagement for ski class ads. The test included contextual data also used for REI's display campaigns, such as weather, location, interest and gender to target consumers on Facebook who might be interested in ski classes. Early results showed REI’s personalized ads performed 4x better than a benchmark measured by Salesforce.
• Jivox's technology reconfigures ads to deliver individually tailored content based on contextual data aiming to resonate with consumers.

Dive Insight:

Facebook likely knows more about its customers than most other companies, given that the social network traffics in personal data, messages, pictures, geographic check-ins and app usage of 2 billion people. And yet, Jivox claims its technology can get even more personal by using contextual data to determine what kind of marketing message would resonate most strongly with a target audience.

Jivox is betting that its machine-learning technology will boost viewability on Facebook and Instagram ads, as research suggests mobile users are more receptive to ads that are personalized and relevant to their interests.

For marketers, context can help them reach qualified users and improve the efficiency of their efforts. However, sometimes personalizing ads can come at the expense of scale, hurting marketers' efforts to get in front of a wide enough group of potential new customers to drive a positive impact on sales. Last year, P&G said it would scale back on targeted Facebook for exactly this reason. 

The Jivox-Facebook partnership is the latest example of how the social media giant is looking to enhance its targeting offerings for marketers. Earlier this week, Facebook announced the ability to personalize ads based on household, so that everyone in a family could see the same brand messages, according to Marketing Land. Advertisers can compile a household audience to target by using a custom audience list, which includes people's email addresses, phone numbers, ad-specific device identifiers or Facebook IDs, or by using Facebook's standard ad-targeting options like age, gender, location and interests.