Engage Technologies, Aptex Software Team Up

Engage Technologies and Aptex Software formed a strategic partnership to blend their complementary technologies.

The move will offer customers with large, multidomain Web sites a comprehensive profile network of anonymous Internet user data.

These anonymous behavior-based profiles can be used in sophisticated interactive marketing and advertising campaigns, the companies said. Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Web users who access a site enabled with technology from Aptex and Engage will receive personalized content, product and service offers and advertising while remaining anonymous, the companies said.

Because behavioral profiling allows the visitor to remain anonymous, the results are expected to be more dramatic than for other personalization technologies that require registration and explicit user feedback, the companies said.

“As a result of our agreement with Aptex, we will be able to provide additional value to subscribers of the world’s largest database of anonymous Internet user profiles containing the most comprehensive and accurate information available for use in one-to-one interactive marketing efforts,” said Paul Schaut, president and chief executive officer of Engage Technologies.

“Aptex’s user profile vectors will be used to enrich Engage’s behavior-based interest profiles for Web sites that use Aptex’s SelectCast ad targeting solution.”

According to Michael Thiemann, Aptex president and chief executive officer, “We expect these richer profiles to provide even greater lift and improved predictive capabilities for our clients.”

Engage licensed Aptex Software’s SelectCast and Convectis technology to provide additional profiling capabilities to its recently announced Engage.Knowledge database.

Engage will integrate SelectCast technology into Engage.Knowledge by appending Aptex’s adaptive profile vectors to Engage’s profiles to create predictive behaviors for each user, based on profile information gathered across “Engage-Enabled” Web sites.

Aptex will also become a value-added reseller of the Engage Suite of one-to-one marketing tools.

Aptex said it endorses Engage’s privacy initiatives including support of the P3P and OPS standards, as well as sponsorship of TRUSTe, and is also working with these privacy organizations to guarantee compliance with and support of privacy standards.