Don't be shortsighted about behavioral targeting, says Paul Lewis, senior vice president of sales and marketing at the interactive agency MindComet. Rather than using behavioral technologies to improve return on investment for a single campaign, he'd like to see more advertisers build better relationships between customers and their brands by taking full advantage of information gathered through the behavioral marketing process.

VisionEdge Marketing's b-to-b clients include 3M Electronics Products Division, Adobe and Cirrus Logic. The firm's founder and president, Laura Patterson, says that although the companies she works with are beginning to embrace technologies for CRM and database integration, it's up to behavioral targeting tech providers to court b-to-b advertisers and help them recognize the value of behavioral targeting for their online marketing efforts. Behavioral Insider chatted with Patterson about what behavioral segmentation and targeting means to her b-to-b customers.

In his work for clients such as AT&T, Holiday Inn, Schering-Plough, Levi Strauss and Sun Microsystems, Target Marketing's Jim Sterne often recommends behavioral targeting. In fact, the Internet marketing strategy consultant believes that true behavioral targeting goes well beyond advertising. Behavioral Insider spoke with Sterne, who's never short on opinions.

Women's marketing expert Andrea Learned likes to think that women test out brands almost as if they're dating those brands. When it comes to employing behavioral targeting to woo women, Learned, the president of Learned on Women and co-author of Don't Think Pink: What Really Makes Women Buy , stresses the fine line between attracting women and turning them off.

Our industry has to work on educating consumers about the need for and benefits derived from cookies. Consumers need to understand that an Internet without a cookie-enabled targeted advertising model will inevitably lead to more and more content accessible only by subscription or micro-payments.

Cheerleaders for behavioral marketing techniques say the latest data- tracking and audience-segmenting technologies allow publishers to truly define their audiences. Finally, they say, publishers have the potential to sell all their inventory at a premium. Now that publishers can individually track and serve ads to dieters or celebrity gossip junkies, advertisers won't clamor only for high-demand contextual placements, but for any page their target market visits.

Online ad industry talking heads spout off all the time about the need for transparency. And this is true in the niche world of behavioral targeting (BT), especially BT networks. However, the incessant development of new ways to target consumers on the Web brings with it new ways to go undercover, too.

The NETives are getting restless. Yes, alongside their anti-cookie brothers-in-arms, freedom-fighter factions are taking to the virtual streets in an effort to sabotage Web publishers and the data they rely on to stay in business. Call 'em the Free My Media Coalition or The Web-Stir Underground. Whatever these Web warriors are called, their uprising could have both positive and negative effects on publishers, advertisers, and vendors in the behavioral targeting (BT) industry.

The behavioral targeting network concept is gaining ground. Well, maybe. From the network side it looks that way, anyway. Announcements this week from Claria and Tacoda, at least, indicate that they see growth in their respective behavioral targeting (BT) ad network offerings. Tacoda, what you might call a BT-veteran, unveiled new partnerships with Burst Media and Akamai. Burst will be providing customized ad serving and inventory management technology for use in a large-scale network environment. And Akamai's EdgeSuite technology will apparently bolster Tacoda's network response time capabilities and broaden its geographic reach. From the looks of it, Tacoda's getting …

Last June, in an effort to illustrate to its readers just how much data could be gleaned about an individual without his knowledge or explicit permission, Reason magazine sent its subscribers personalized issues with satellite photos pinpointing their residential locations right on the cover. A subscriber at the time, I received a copy displaying the roof of my house surrounded by others. Lincoln Park was north a few blocks. But the park's cricket players and shaved ice vendors, the guy grilling spicy pork kebabs across the street -- the vibrant characters of my Jersey City neighborhood weren't revealed.