Online marketers tend to be fond of the conceit that advanced thinking about targeting emerged "ex nihilo" with new media, leaving behind the dark ages of advertising in the BI (Before Interactive) era. In reality, as Acxiom chief marketing and strategy officer Rich Howe explains, "old school" direct mail marketing has much to add to the online behavioral targeting mix.

The thing about a "personal profile" is that it generally isn't very personal. In most behavioral targeting systems, the user never sees or touches her own data and rarely has control over when and where it might be applied across a network. The newly launched service for publishers and consumers, matchmine (www.matchmine.com) tries to make personal preferences and behavioral data both personal and portable by planting it within a desktop application that users bring with them to apply to member sites.

In migrating from a traditional mass market "shotgun" approach to more targeted solutions, advertisers have developed ever more granular and sophisticated ways of segmenting consumers, both demographically and behaviorally. What they've yet to do, as Matt Sanchez, CEO of VideoEgg explain, is rethink on a deeper level their model of what a "consumer" of information and entertainment is. To remain relevant in a user-generated media world, brands need to move beyond their current comfort zone of targeting unique but still passive consumers, to engaging active "prosumers."

How many behavioral segments can most publishers really service with any reasonable scale? That is the question Advertising.com subsidiary ADTECH US tries to answer with its upcoming release of behavioral targeting capabilities for ad service partners. Nils Winkler, managing director, senior vice president of sales, U.S., estimates that if a PC is active online, the odds are it has an ADTECH cookie on board that the company can leverage for BT profiling. Still, as he tells us this week, most publishers he services simply do not have the traffic scale or the sales infrastructure to support the kind of granular …

Though it still has its naysayers, mobile advertising so far this year has succeeded both in radically expanding its scalability and, as the recent acquisition of Third Screen Media by Time Warner AOL shows, galvanizing the serious interest of the biggest players in the online space. As a critical mass of consumers, content and ad inventory move onto the mobile Web, the next, still daunting challenge, as Brian Stoller, vice president of marketing at Third Screen discusses, is evolving effective mobile-friendly modes of enhanced targeting.

Marketers continue to seek ways of scraping and mining the most common interactive behavior of them all -- talk. Discussions about products should be some of the most valuable activity for both marketers and consumers, but conversation is difficult to surface in an organized way. RelevantMind tries to tap the collaborative nature of purchase decisions by connecting products and services with the online conversations occurring around them. CEO Aaron Mann tells us how the newly launched site plans to reign in conversations both for consumers and brands.

A generation ago, demographic targeting revolutionized marketing with the realization that consumers were not a mass market monolith but rather a rich array of different segments or niches. More recently online behavioral targeting shook up the marketing paradigm by teaching marketers consumers within a demographic were not a monolith either, but individualized by their behavior. Chirag Patel, CEO of MeMedia, makes the case that what we now need to learn is that media behavior is not a monolith either. The next iteration of the behavioral revolution, Patel believes, must encompass the multiple range of behaviors individuals actually exhibit across media …

Sometimes we take a detour from the usual cast of characters in the behavioral ad targeting realm and talk with academics about broader issues of online behavior that marketers (all of us) need to understand and appreciate better as we engage the digital realm. Deception has become an entire sub-field of computer science, and Lina Zhou, associate professor, Department of Information Systems, University of Maryland Baltimore County, is among the most prolific researchers in the field. We asked her to help us understand both the kinds of identity misdirection marketers might expect to see in these worlds, as well as …

Advertisers have come a long way since the tantalizing vision of "one to one" marketing was put before us way back in 1993, at the pre-dawn of the Internet era, by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers. Web tracking and measurement tools provide an infrastructure to take the kind of total customization Peppers and Rogers envisioned to a radically new level. Bringing that vision to fruition requires a deeper partnership between technologists and marketers, and a new synergy between analytics and creativity, as Alistair Goodman, vice president of strategic marketing at Exponential Interactive, explains.