• Why Are You Following Me?
    Educating consumers about what behavioral targeting is and is not up to, deep within the cookies of their browser, seems to be a bit like alternative energy development. Pretty much everyone says the industry should be doing more about it, and yet it is hard to see where and with whom it starts. Most online materials related to BT are pitched to one end of the value chain, marketers. It's not clear to me that most of the companies in this space are even comfortable talking directly to consumers, let alone taking the time to develop an accessible language to …
  • Time For An Inbound Targeting Strategy
    Though the phrase predates the modern Internet, "one-to-one communication" remains the best way to describe the end point most marketers would cite as the goal of their online strategies. Though they may celebrate the end, most fail, however, to take advantage of, indeed seldom even recognize, the most salient opportunity to fulfill this goal: the inbound communications initiated by customers themselves.
  • Moving Metal: BT And The Auto Crisis
    As the auto industry stalls and sputters out of its worst year in memory, how will the crisis affect online ad planning strategies? Not only has the auto segment been among the biggest online spenders in recent years, it has also been among the most sophisticated in tracking and targeting buyer habits and online behaviors. Rarely has the in-market "auto intender" been more prized. We asked Joe Kyriakoza, vice president of national advertising solutions at vertical ad network Jumpstart Automotive Media, to pop the hood on the current auto ad market for us.
  • Targeting For Value
    As investors are forced to shift from trading to value investing in their stocks, so advertisers must seek ways of shifting from quantity to quality. This shift can manifest itself in numerous ways, including more intensely scrutinizing the blind spots in current display spending strategy and tactics, especially areas where behaviorally based targeting has been under-utilized, or entirely ignored up till now. One major area of "low-hanging fruit" till now almost entirely ignored is lead generation, according to Keith Johnson, vice-president of product management at i-BehaviorOne, a database firm.
  • Hallelujah! I Am Being Followed
    Just because I am paranoid doesn't mean someone isn't following me. But just try to prove it. One of the perennial issues with behavioral targeting is that it is virtually invisible both to users and to clients.
  • Delivering The Message
    The more aggressively marketers "bid for relevancy" by leveraging ever more pinpoint modalities of micro-targeting, be it via behavioral and other flavors, the more imperative it becomes to actively deliver on the promise of relevancy, with truly personalized messaging. Yet, as Calvin Lui, President and CEO of Tumri, explains, it's precisely in the serving of creative that advertising has fallen short, dashing much of the potential of enhanced targeting.
  • Q1 Gut Check: Is BT Ready for Tough Times?
    All media and ad platforms ended 2008 trying to make the best case for their efficiency and worthiness in an age of tightening budgets. No one knows yet where the budgets ultimately will shrink and move, but there have been no shortage of theories. Among behavioral practitioners, targeting and efficiency have been the constant cry. In hard times, marketers can't squander a penny, and behavioral segmentation reduces the waste. Doesn't it? Or so goes the theory. As 2009 ad budgets start to flow, we asked some of our favorite contacts for a quick spot check on how behavioral and data-driven …
  • Rapid-Response Targeting
    A few years ago online marketers began to realize en masse that much of the money they were reinvesting in getting consumers to click through to their Web sites was being wasted due to a lack of post-click optimization strategy. Though many marketers have addressed that gap by optimizing their "outbound communications," few have addressed or even acknowledged another blind spot: lack of responsiveness to inbound email communications from the customers they've already "converted," as Sabrina Parsons, CEO of Palo Alto Software, explains.
  • Learning From Sony BMG's Million-Dollar Mistake
    In a settlement last month with the Federal Trade Commission, Sony BMG Music agreed to pay $1 million in fines for collecting data from children under 13 at music fan sites without the permission of their parents. According to privacy and digital media lawyers Andrew Lustigman, principal, The Lustigman Firm, and Jonathan Ezor, Lustigman counsel and law professor at the Touro Law Center, Sony BMG's violations were clear and instructive. We asked both men to reflect on the implications of this settlement for all publishers.
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