Tom Burgess, CEO of Third Screen, the largest mobile ad network, explains why the menu of mobile behavioral and other targeting options is about to expand dramatically.

It seems years now that we have been talking about the day when search engines will finally fold behavioral profiling into their results and ad serving engines. But search marketers are already taking the first steps toward implementing BT on the back end.

Ad inventory for the automotive sector is getting harder and harder to come by, and so sites are drilling deeper to make everything they have more valuable. Venerable auto brands CarandDriver.com and RoadandTrack.com start deploying behavioral targeting solutions in the coming weeks, hoping to serve original equipment manufacturers who are hungry for ever more targeted inventory.

The promise of e-mail as an advertising medium has been to bring brands and consumers together more directly than ever before. Reality, unfortunately, has proven more complicated. One way of moving beyond any limitations is for direct marketers to adapt behavioral methodologies still mostly associated with their brethren in the online advertising world, says Elaine O' Gorman, vice president of strategy of Atlanta-based interactive marketing firm Silverpop.