• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, February 11, 2008

It’s been six months since MediaPost’s last OMMA Behavioral conference, and if anything has become clear during the past half year, it is that the industry is, well, altering its behavior. Specifically, there has been a pronounced shift away from surrogate targeting like demographics, and geodemographic market segmentation and toward data and analysis based on actual media consumption behavior. It was likely overdue for some time, but the advertising world can be slow to change, and takes a good kick to get it moving in a new direction. The kick is coming from a couple of places, including the integration of digital and traditional advertising and media services, greater availability of behavioral data streams, and an overall shift toward interactive and addressable targeting and ROI measures.

To date, the shift has primarily been an online media planning, buying and posting phenomenon, but traditional media at least are beginning to pay it lip service, and the next six months will see a surge in activity of behavioral based planning and buying in all media, as the ad industry begins to demonize demographics. It’s already taking place in television where a couple of key developments â€" Google TV Ads deals local cable operators and EchoStar’s Dish Network, and TNS’s recent deal with rival DirecTV â€" are finally unlocking the kind of behavioral data from digital TV set-tops that had previously only been available from online servers. Watch for this activity to explode as advertisers and agencies embrace these new data streams, and begin applying the same kind of empirical approach to targeting consumers with TV that they do with online media.

To date, only one major agency group, Publicis’ Starcom MediaVest Group, has begun working with the TNS data, and its still unclear how much Google TV Ads has impacted the way big advertisers and agencies by the medium, but watch for another big media investment firm â€" in fact, the biggest, WPP’s GroupM â€" to make a big push in this direction, following its investment in addressable TV advertising firm Invidi. Don’t underestimate this development. Gotlieb may be the most influential man in television, and he’s now on the Invidi board, a company whose underlying business model is to bring the same kind of behavioral addressability to TV that advertisers have on the Internet. To date, it’s been largely conceptual, as Invidi has focused on perfecting its technology and convincing cable operators and set-top manufacturers to get on board. But with Gotlieb on the board, it’s got some significant advertising budget clout. Look for Invidi to deploy its system live sometime in the second quarter of this year with some big name advertisers and cable operators on board.

Another strong sign that WPP is committed to a shift toward behavioral came this morning when its WPP Digital unit announced a stake in Web analytics firm NuConomy. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but WPP described NuConomy as a “performance insight platform,” that enables advertisers and publishers to go beyond page views to measure online users’ behavior and engagement with content and advertising.

The next big development for the behavorialization of TV advertising buys will come when the cable TV industry finally hatches plans for Project Canoe, the super secret initiative being led by Comcast and Time Warner Cable. Canoe has been taking requests for proposals from a variety of technology and database management firms to develop a national infrastructure for buying local cable TV advertising based on behavioral data from millions of TV set-top boxes. Interestingly, Canoe has barred a couple of key players, including Google, from submitting bids, and I wouldn’t find it surprising to see Invidi’s name mentioned in the winning proposal.

Don’t expect any of these developments to revolutionize the way Madison Avenue buys traditional media overnight. They will be slow, though they will begin to accelerate as more behavioral data becomes available. It’s also inevitable, because agencies and marketers will begin shifting toward cross-platform planning and buying that integrates online and digital television into seamless systems.