The AdCenter people just posted a great blog post: http://adcenterblog.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!85E824269AB8C30D!187.entry I wasn't aware of the 'commercial intent' tools and some of the stats they share are pretty impressive. All PPCers should go check it out! So how was your 'Cyber Monday' yesterday? In the UK we don't seem to get half the effect and for me today was far better than yesterday.
Although not yet as popular as the Google stuff the things that the adcenter group (especially the tools at adlabs) are working on are flat out awesome. I've always been amazed at how little discussion those tools get - that data is kick ass.
It does raise a few question like how they come to the conclusion a search is 'of commercial intent' or whether the searcher is male or female and hwat age. Some of it is very targeted and potentially sensitive. I guess they datamine Hotmail etc. for profiling demographics. Whether or not a search is commercial can probably be deducted from click throughs to their shopping engines, conversions and seasonal data.
That is my assumption as well. While not perfect they do have massive amounts of "passport" data collected over the years from tens of millions (hundreds?) of users. We all know is not 100% accurate (really, I'm not a 72 year old female from Alaska ) but it's still a larger set of data than 99.9% of search marketers will ever have access to.