• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, March 18, 2010

At least that’s what I was thinking after hearing Yahoo’s Dave Zinman remind the OMMA Global luncheon crowd about the earliest stage of the behavioral targeting industry.

Zinman said the first behavioral targeting firm, Enage, launched on Oct. 12, 1999, and it failed not because of technology, or privacy or any of the other bogies you might think of. It failed because the marketplace simply did not recognize its value back then.

“The flaw was that nobody wanted to pay a premium for it,� Zinman recalled.