• Call For Questions
    At our first MediaPost event devoted to behavioral marketing back in July, I recall Brian Quinn of Dow Jones Online quipping about how odd it was to have a conference on BT. "It is like having a conference on 'run-of-site,'" he said. How true. Behavioral targeting is not a discrete platform like search, email, or video so much as a targeting technique or a way of buying media that can apply to all of those formats. And yet, interest in BT is mushrooming. Our July event was incredibly popular, with people almost hanging from the balcony of the Yale Club.
  • Rediscovering Simplicity
    Plumbing the depths of user history information, connecting a myriad of dots in search of an ever-more comprehensive profile behavioral targeting, may be becoming too clever for its own good, Meir Zohar, CEO of behavioral data exchange eXelate explains below. Rather than reveling in hyper-dimensional geometric complexity, the smarter, as well as more privacy-friendly marketing move, he suggests, is to stick with the simple basic premise that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.
  • The Phony Funnel
    The fact is that for all of the intense research surrounding car purchasing, we never really know where in the "purchase funnel" a consumer is when they hit a car site. They may be just as receptive to sealing the deal on that new Ford Focus when consulting an online recipe. And with auto car inventory in such tight supply, advertisers and ad networks are looking for new places to grab in-market consumers. The vertical ad network Jumpstart is rolling out its BehaviorPATH product that tags and segments the 8 million unique users that come to its collection of auto …
  • Beyond Click-stream: Unraveling The Core
    The operating, usually unconscious, assumption of most behavioral targeting programs is that "you are what you click." Attempting to understand consumer's behavior strictly by their history, however, as Branton Kenton-Dau, director of VortexDNA, explains, is not only poor psychology but unproductive marketing.
  • Can Behavioral Sell Toothpaste?
    Michael Winter, media director, Agency.com, is among the most experienced practitioners of behavioral targeting tools in the planning world. Six years ago he ran a BT campaign for Adobe at Reuters' site, and he continued to explore the evolving platform as vice president-media director for Beyond Interactive. As BT moves beyond the usual high consideration product categories like travel and auto, we caught up with Winter recently to discuss its relevance to consumer packaged goods (CPG). We wanted to find out, can BT sell pet food and toothpaste?
  • Bringing BT To Main Street: Reality Check
    Like many other groups of insiders, those of us immersed in online advertising 24/7 tend to live in a professional bubble. Within this particular bubble, "everybody" knows about the inner recesses and nuances of behavioral targeting. Fetchback CEO Chad Little explains why, despite all the dutiful lip service paid to the notion of the long tail, behavioral concepts have a long way to go before they become truly relevant to the middle market.
  • Egg on Its Facebook
    "We simply did a bad job," admitted Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg this week about the mishandling of Beacon, a tool that broadcasts to your social network your purchases (or "endorsements") from partner sites on the Web. To end this week of policy shifts, apologies and finger-wagging, we asked two analysts to weigh in on the lessons learned for behavioral targeting from Facebook's own bad behavior.
  • BT's Next Iterations
    It's easy to remember -- but hard to believe -- how esoteric such now-ubiquitous notions as retargeting, behavioral segmentation and profiling seemed only 12 to 24 months ago. Alistair Goodman, vice-president of strategic marketing at Exponential, outlines a number of key emerging lines of innovation, with radical implications for behavioral and other forms of targeting.
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