Rupert Staines is Managing Director Europe at RadiumOne Inc. Here he discusses the emergence of the Dynamic Audience Platform, and why turning awareness into purchase intent could now be a reality for marketers.

According to a recent study from Magna Global, Goldman Sachs and eMarketer, global online ad spend is set to grow from $79 billion in 2011 to $155 billion in 2016. Social advertising alone is set to rocket 780% from $5.5 billion to $43.1 billion in the same timeframe. One of the main reasons for this increase in spending is the evolution of the digital marketplace, where advertisers are constantly looking for new ways to shine and differentiate themselves in this ever-emerging and congested market. However, are they getting it right?

Until recently ad networks powered the growth of online advertising, but this model has become archaic and they are therefore struggling to target relevant audiences at the right scale and in a timely fashion. Some confine themselves to using social networks and target transactional behaviour which yield narrower and less relevant results. For example, once someone has bought a pair of football boots, it’s highly unlikely they are going to purchase another pair straight away.

The internet has evolved, it is no longer just a place to research information, it’s now a social environment, a place where people are engaged in conversation. The upshot is advertisers have to evolve their marketing communications within digital. Consider the fact that each day consumers share two billion items on Facebook and over 16 billion items on the Open Web on their desktop and mobile devices. This sharing phenomenon opens the door for advertisers to capitalise on this huge opportunity. However, it’s essential for the right strategy to be put in place to unlock its obvious potential.

The good news is that there are disruptive opportunities in the market to help advertisers enhance their existing practices. Advertisers should be approaching the web as one large and open social auditorium, rather than a search destination, and increasingly look to target audiences based on their implicit interests and shared connections online.

What’s needed is a new approach to data; assembling a greater amount of meaningful data, leading to more meaningful results. The good news is, that with the Dynamic Audience Platform (DAP), turning awareness into purchase intent is a reality. Not only does the DAP monitor shared activity, but it helps clients generate their own real-time data through intelligent social tools, and then turn this data into new business.

The beauty of the sharing phenomenon is that a “share” can be anything from a shortened URL, a post from a sharing widget, a picture, a tweet, a video, a status update – basically anything that can be communicated across the open web, and naturally there are plenty of free tools out there that can capture this information.

For example, social sharing widgets not only help users share content more easily online, but some can open up access to useful data to both the advertiser and publisher about the content being shared. These widgets offer true insight into real-time user behaviour by looking anonymously at activity across the whole Open Web, not just within the parameters of a social network, where a user is very much known. Importantly, they open up and empower publishers to control their audience, drive greater virality and attract new advertiser budgets that were once unattainable.

URL shorteners are not only highly useful to consumers for making links more convenient to share among friends, but can be used by brands and advertisers to access data behind shared links, to trace the source of the content and build target audiences of engaged consumers.

Finally, there are the social publishing platforms, one of the biggest social crazes in recent times. They make creating, filtering and sharing pictures, videos, audio notes and content across multiple social networks easy – all from a single app and single touch of a button. They are not only great consumer tools for keeping connected and sharing information, but they can generate an implicit interest graph, which can be used to more effectively target your potential customers across desktop, tablet and mobile devices.

The insights gathered from all this first-party data can then be amplified with the application of ShareGraph technology. It enables advertisers to reach more relevant audiences, up to seven times more effectively, by targeting their closest online connections. This helps yield better performance and insight from online advertising campaigns.

Crucially, the really clever bit about the DAP is that this entire process happens in real-time. Plenty of companies claim they can do real-time advertising, but this rarely happens because the data is third-party (see the football boots analogy). We’re in a conversation economy. The DAP offers a whole new approach to advertisers, bringing the right ad to the right audience at exactly the right time.

As the online advertising industry is constantly evolving, do you want to be part of its disruption or be the one that’s disrupted?