• Targeting Feeds
    Advertising money has long been guided by the adage of going to where the eyeballs are. More recently, of course, that imperative has been refined to mean, target where the right eyeballs for your product or brand are. In pursuit of that premise, advertisers have directed substantial amounts of targeted messages to nearly every online venue available. Yet till now, as Bill Flitter, CEO of Pheedo, explains, advertisers have under-utilized, if not entirely overlooked, a channel rich in both eyeballs and targeting potential.
  • Demystifying Escape
    Several years ago, when Universal Studios was feeling a bit depressed over its struggle to draw attendees to its Orlando parks, the company sought professional help. Dr. Mark Ingwer, president of Insight Research Associates, uses a hybrid technique to understand consumer attitudes and behaviors in relation to a brand, what he calls psychoethnography. The approach combines psychological interviews with behavioral research, in this case actually following families in Disney World and Universal Studios parks to understand the different experiences in each. As Ingwer demonstrates, behavioral research often can provide marketers with information about what consumers do -- but not a …
  • Predictive BT
    Online marketers often like to think of themselves of themselves as pioneers of a radically new world with its own laws, untethered to the ways and limits of the old world they left behind. In many ways this attitude is justified. But, as Bennett Zucker, vice president of marketing at aCerno, explains, when it comes to segmenting consumers by predictive behaviors, online has much to learn from the legacy of the past, particularly the paths blazed decades ago by direct mail catalog marketers.
  • Talking Back To The FTC
    The people (well, about 60 of you) have spoken. When the Federal Trade Commission issued its proposed principles for self-regulation in the behavioral targeting industry late last year, it invited comment from individuals and companies. The deadline for submissions was extended once during the winter, and now most of the comments appear to be posted at the FTC site. Here, we wanted to call out a selection of comments and insights from the 61 submissions to give readers a flavor of where various stakeholders are coming into the debate.
  • Making Video Personal
    Online marketers have made Herculean efforts to better understand the distinct and unique needs and preferences of ever more tightly specified customer segments. In theory the goal has been not only to micro-target media but to personalize messages. Until recently, online video advertisers, however tightly focused their audience, have, by default, been stuck with delivering a one-size-fits-all creative message. Danny Gruber, CEO of Qmecom, discusses how the personalization revolution and one to one marketing methodology can be brought to bear in the video realm.
  • Charles Schwab Should Sponsor 'Caddyshack' and 'Catwoman'
    We are years away from addressable forms of TV delivery, but until then there still are ways that cable and network programmers can employ some version of behavioral targeting to their medium. For instance, AMC now can attach the viewership to specific movie titles in its libraries to a wide range of product preferences and shopping habits. In much the same way online BT can root out fascinating unforeseen affinities between certain content audiences and products, Charlene Weisler-Schwarzkopf, senior vice president of research at Rainbow Media (Cablevision's unit that includes AMC) can see that viewers of the comedy "Caddyshack" may …
  • Targeting Beyond Transactional Behaviors
    Serious brands, most marketers well know, cannot be built, nurtured or sustained by transactions alone. Yet most behavioral targeting platforms remain entrenched in a purely transactional model of customer behavior rooted in direct response. Moving to a truly brand based model of BT, David Rosen, senior vice president of Loyalty Lab, explains, means identifying, encompassing and integrating a wide array of non-transactional behaviors.
  • Do Consumers Know Their BT?
    With the term "behavioral targeting" only now popping into the public lexicon, it seems fair to ask whether consumers, around which privacy and tracking controversies swirl, even know what the words mean. And so the new survey of users' knowledge and attitudes towards BT by consumer privacy group TRUSTe and TNS is one of the first benchmarks we have on general attitudes about this specific kind of tracking. We asked Colin O'Malley, vice president of strategic partnerships and programs, TRUSTe, to drill into some of the surprising results.
  • Letting Consumers Do The Targeting
    It took the human race millennia to realize the earth wasn't the center of the universe. In its own small way, advertising has until recently been mired in an intellectual fallacy of its own -- namely, the idea that advertisers and their creative message were the center of advertising. Belatedly the industry is thinking its way outside that particular box and acknowledging that it's the consumer processing the ad who is, or should be, the center of the advertising universe. David Sidman, CEO of Linkstorm, explains how that insight might be integrated into the creation of ad units themselves.
To read more articles use the ARCHIVE function on this page.