• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer, August 3, 2009

Like the most effective behaviorally targeted ads themselves, which often appear out of context, I was most impressed by the progress BT has made while hosting OMMA AdNets last week, two days before OMMA Behavioral. I was getting "déjà vu all over again" while listening to those panels on the new agency involvement in ad technology, the ongoing debate between publishers and ad networks, and the increasingly sophisticated uses of data layers to improve targeting.

In fact, the over-arching theme of AdNets seemed to be the shift towards a more "audience-centric" approach to media planning and ad targeting. Son of a gun! Which digital marketing discipline had been singing that tune since at least 2001?

And guess what other refrain occupied the day at the AdNets event? Data, data, data. The value and benefit of layering additional data points about a user onto a targeted campaign were reiterated throughout the day. And finally, privacy, a topic that has bedeviled BT for years, suddenly cropped up in just about every discussion about the future of ad network technology and business models.

As I sat there listening to these conversations evolve, it struck me that the internal discussions that many in the BT segment had been having for five or more years suddenly had proliferated and become the talking points of digital advertising generally. Is this a good thing or a bad thing for BT? On the one hand, it demonstrates how the field was always ahead of the curve in the way it envisioned the core promise of digital advertising. I recall former Tacoda chief Dave Morgan telling me many years ago that BT really embodied and realized the key differentiator digital marketing brought to the table: its real-time two-way path of interactivity allowed for user profiling and one-to-one targeting that no other medium possessed. Selling ads against pages, I recall him arguing, is just porting an old model to the new medium. Selling ads against audiences is where digital truly distinguishes itself, and where the big money waits. Curiously, two days after AdNets, some of the themes I expected to hear more of at the first show, branding and creative, were prominent at OMMA Behavioral. At OMMA BT, Doug Chavez, Del Monte Foods' senior manager, digital marketing, made a convincing case for brands leveraging BT as a way to surface hard-to-find audiences. "I can't buy boatloads of impressions," he told us. He needs to use the data-driven regimens of BT to locate the most valuable segments and focus his buys there. We're all bean-counters now, Chavez seemed to say in the follow-up panel of media buyers. All CMOs have to master analytics because that is the research that tells them who their customers are and where they can be found.

I was fascinated throughout OMMA BT by how much branding was being tied to a theme I think had only enjoyed lip service in previous shows: creative. Yahoo's SVP and GM of Display Advertising Dave Zinman's keynote on how online advertising grabs its next $25 billion in revenue reflected the brand-spanking-new Yahoo devotion to display. While Zinman didn't speak much about the role of BT itself, he did argue that display advertising had to assert its true branding value with creative executions that attract us to something more sophisticated than housewives jitterbugging over a low mortgage rate.

Others throughout the day more explicitly tied behavioral targeting to dynamically served creative. Members of our panel of travel ad experts, for instance, attested to the demonstrable power of serving ads with content directly related to the destinations a user was researching. By the end of the day I certainly had the impression that analytics and creative teams would have to be talking to one another earlier and with more mutual respect in the years to come.

In the afternoon keynote, Senior Director at Microsoft's Atlas Institute Young-Bean Song made a fascinating case for the branding power of BT higher up in the purchase funnel. He said that advertising to a behaviorally targeted prospect 12.5 days before a purchase actually maximizes the branding effect. This is when consumers start their preliminary research outside of direct search sites and can be located and addressed with behaviorally targeted display at an earlier stage, long before they start hitting the query box and have perhaps already made a brand choice.

On the privacy issue, I was also very much struck that the two vendors on our panel, FetchBack's Chad Little and BlueKai's Omar Tawakol, took a relatively sympathetic view of regulatory proposals. Little said outright that some kind of good regulation would actually be best right now because it would set a standard and clarify what remains a muddy issue. When I asked him to expand a bit later, he told me, "Bad regulation could obviously have a huge impact. But I think there are enough forces at play here that will keep something wacky out. This is too complex of an issue for anything to be too restrictive -- and therefore probably won't be very effective against the bad guys. Enhanced notice and a more durable opt -out are two huge steps that need to be in place for everyone."

While Tawakol was still wary about regulation, he does think that the threat of regulation is having the positive effect of forcing discussion and solutions. Getting to meaningful opt-out models, better communications to consumers and "real data transparency" should be the goal regardless the path, he said later. How interesting that two industry figures steeped in BT approaches would be among the first to say that regulation may be one path forward for the industry.

The mainstreaming of BT had its positive and negative implications. Clearly it has been ahead of the curve in understanding the promise and implications of digital marketing generally. But its easy integration into the rest of digital advertising might not be a good thing altogether. One down side (and it may not even be a down side) is that BT loses its discrete character as a technology and identifiable slice of the overall online ad industry. Increasingly, we heard media buyers refer to BT as one of multiple "data layers" they were applying to campaigns. Even though BT requires algorithms and methodologies that are arguably more complex than demographic profiling, I have to wonder if the sub-category behavioral becomes less relevant or distinct or necessary. Is it all just "targeting" now?