The challenges of tracking, tagging and targeting mobile users is legendary. As Ed Moore, Product Marketing Strategist for Openwave, explains, the technical differences between standard Web-based browsing and mobile access to data are substantial. Openwave has been a longtime supplier of infrastructure solutions to major carriers, which gives the company a unique ISP-level view of all the usage patterns on a network.

Variety may be the spice of life, but in marketing -- as in the real world -- habit often limits options and possibilities far more than needed. To truly optimize the advantages of all the rich, diverse targeting data generated by customers online, marketers should expand their options by integrating targeted content with continuous real-time multi-variable testing, Mark Wachen, managing director of Optimost at Interwoven, explains.

Clothing sizes for women are notoriously, maddeningly arbitrary. Two years ago, myShape.com launched its personalized shopping service for women that matches clothing to very specific shapes and sizes. Several months ago, the site added to the personalized shopping service a recommendation engines from Baynote that layers into the member's view items that other viewers of specific products also considered. We spoke with myShape's Mercedes De Luca, customer experience and chief information officer, about layering recommendations with personalization -- and the kinds of novel services that might evolve from this combination.

In everyday life we're all intuitively aware that the interpreting what people's behavioral cues mean depends a lot on our understanding of who they are. This lesson, Keith Richman, CEO of Break Media, explains, should be taken to heart by brands hoping to target the most avid and active consumers of online video, males 18 to 34.

In many ways, online behavioral targeting merely formalizes techniques that direct marketers have used for ages. Motivated by the high costs of mailings, catalogers learned long ago how to track customer ordering habits and adjust their mailings accordingly. While email marketers enjoy low distribution costs, a poor understanding of customer interactions can lead to costly opt-outs and missed sales opportunities says Steve Webster, CEO of email services provider iPost. He tells us today how tried and true catalog marketing principles are applied to email in the company's new AutoTarget 2.0 release.

Behavioral targeting in the banner display ad arena has, so far in its still-young life, been driven primarily by a direct response imperative to use search and browsing data to locate where potential shoppers are in the sales funnel. Highly appropriate as this may be in direct response, the challenge of more brand-oriented video is to extend the emotional range of behavioral targeting to learn to target passions, Steve Mitgang, CEO of Veoh, explains.

This week, the Behavioral Targeting Standards Consortium (BTSC), announced an Advisory Board of nine BT experts to help guide the group's mission to establish industry-wide principles and standards for behavioral targeting. Jeff Hirsch is CEO of Revenue Science, the group's founding member and driving force. We took the opportunity to catch up with Hirsch and discuss both the role of the BTSC and the role of BT in the evolving world of ad networks.

The core value proposition of behavioral targeting is to personalize advertising impressions in an unprecedented way by focusing on "users rather than pages." In practice, however, Dominic Bennett, vice president of engineering at Turn.com, explains what's been missing is a pricing model flexible enough to link specific behaviors and behavioral segments to specific goals and strategies.

Until recently, applying behavioral targeting against video advertising suffered the obvious problem: scale. Even as metrics companies report upwards of 11 billion monthly video streams, only a fraction of that impressive number represents credible inventory for most advertisers. Last month, video ad network YuMe decided that a potential reach of 130 million uniques across more than 400 publishers offered enough coverage to start offering behavioral targeting. According to co-founder and President Jayant Kadambi, advertisers are asking to align campaigns against professional-grade content. But will such plans scale?

For decades database direct marketers have seen "lists" as their primary currency and source of wealth. Ryan Deutsch, director of strategic services at StrongMail, explains that while lists are a necessary resource, email marketers need to understand that their true wealth resides in segments.