• by Karl Greenberg , Staff Writer, February 11, 2008

Peter Horan, CEO, IAC Media and Advertising, the first speaker at today's OMMA conference on Behavioral targeteting, sounded a warning about the role of behavioral targeting in larger campaigns. Actually two warnings. The first: it's in its infancy. Second, it's the cherry on the sunday of a marketing campaign. "It's a beautiful thing but not enough by itself."

Horan used a Chevy Silverado campaign he'd worked on to illustrate that "The goal of any targeting strategy is balancing efficiency and scalability; it's a media business, not personal sales, or cold calling. It's advertising: messages broadly delivered to desireable customers."

In his example, Chevy had decided to run ads only on pages delivered to readers only reading about Silverado. "GM wanted s to psend a lot of money with very precise targeting," he says. " I had to say 'I'm giving your money back, because they had so targeted the audience that we couldnt spend the money. What they had done is they solved the equation for efficiency at the expense of effectiveness. They only wanted to talk to qualified buyers, but there were three of them!"

"We are heading toward a world where you can speak to interested consumers in context. It's a much better experience, and much more powerful from a marketing perspective."