• ClickZ, Wednesday, May 3, 2006 10:45 AM

In its most recent behavioral targeting report, eMarketer says it expects the market to hit $2 billion in 2 years' time--a big jump indeed, writes David Rittenhouse, group media director at WPP Group's Neo@Ogilvy. I love it when you get a buyer's opinion on these reports, because they're the ones looking at everything from the trenches, so they have to view these projections with a more skeptical eye. What about the inhibitors to growth? Sure, BT grew 127 percent from 2003 to 2004 and then 43 percent from 2004 to 2005, so maybe steady growth in the 25-40 percent range isn't unimaginable, but there are some big caveats. Marketers don't love relinquishing control to a third party over where their ads end up--especially when the data used to determine that is user behavior. Witness the recent horror stories of Yahoo resellers putting big-name brand advertisers on porn sites. Also, what effect will Elliot Spitzer's prosecution of Direct Revenue, a so-called "behavior targeting company" that delivers pop-ups, have on the way the tactic's viewed by marketers? Rittenhouse also points out that the TACODA study assessing the eye movements of consumers as they surf the Web used a very small sample size, and largely confirms what many people already believed to be true. He adds that regardless of what the 2008 number turns out to be, no one would argue that behavioral targeting isn't an effective way to advertise, or that further refinement of the technology will be crucial to how advertising is bought and sold in the future.

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