• by Shankar Gupta , May 13, 2005

Behavioral targeting, although a powerful tool for serving relevant ads to engaged buyers, could become another reason for privacy-concerned consumers to distrust the advertising industry, said Matt Freeman, CEO of Tribal DDB Worldwide, at an online advertising forum Thursday.

"How we do it will make all the difference," Freeman said. "We have a bad history of misusing the things we can do."

Citing an eMarketer study--which found that 56.9 percent of consumers surveyed said they did not want sites collecting and using information about them or their browsing habits--Freeman said that misuse of behavioral targeting could create consumer ill will similar to what exists for spam, adware/spyware, telemarketing, and junk mail. He added that the behavioral targeting space must avoid three major pitfalls--the prospects of being invasive, presumptuous, and inhuman.

"Let's make sure that as we learn more and more about consumers' behavior, we mind our own behavior as well," Freeman said.

Freeman also spoke about the disconnect between measuring consumer behavior and consumer intent, noting that sometimes the type of ads a consumer will be interested in won't be immediately apparent from their Web behavior. "Behavioral targeting, for the foreseeable future, will be as much an art as a science," he said.