Ad inventory for the automotive sector is getting harder and harder to come by, and so sites are drilling deeper to make everything they have more valuable. Venerable auto brands CarandDriver.com and RoadandTrack.com start deploying behavioral targeting solutions in the coming weeks, hoping to serve original equipment manufacturers who are hungry for ever more targeted inventory.

The promise of e-mail as an advertising medium has been to bring brands and consumers together more directly than ever before. Reality, unfortunately, has proven more complicated. One way of moving beyond any limitations is for direct marketers to adapt behavioral methodologies still mostly associated with their brethren in the online advertising world, says Elaine O' Gorman, vice president of strategy of Atlanta-based interactive marketing firm Silverpop.

With upwards of 90 percent of American adult consumers using the Internet to research travel-related plans and purchases, travel firms theoretically have a raft of data about consumer behavior to leverage. The industry's current challenge, according to Greg Saks, director of travel practice for Boston area-based industry research firm, is how to translate that data into deeper customer knowledge.

NetPlus Marketing CEO Robin Neifield has executed as many BT campaigns as almost anyone in the business. But don't drown in the Kool-Aid, Neifield warns even the most devoted fans of this technology. The sexy ROI of BT can be, well, seductive. She tells us how a proper media plan keeps a BT engine from burning out by feeding it with classic branding and PPC elements as well.

For most online marketers, behavioral targeting is a methodology limited strictly to advertising. But Kelly O'Neill, director of product development at Art Technology Group Inc., argues that realizing the promise of behavioral targeting requires going beyond conventional boundaries among advertising, e-commerce and customer service.

JupiterResearch had some good news for the behavioral targeting industry last month when its "Effective Targeting" report found that advertisers for products with long purchase cycles were embracing BT in a substantial way....

Joe Kyriakoza, vice president of product development for Jumpstart Automotive Media, explains why the next step for verticals is likely to be horizontal--that is, finding ways of effectively reaching and targeting auto buyers in non-automotive venues as well.

If you really want to know how people act and what they want, just watch them romance one another, says Mary Spio, director of media services, Next Galaxy Media. Her company maintains a 300,000-member database of active singles searching for mates via One2One magazine. Looking for love online leaves a dense trail of desires and affinities that Next Galaxy has used to find contestants for ABC's "The Bachelor" reality show and identify sponsors for the new Mary J. Blige tour. Spio started as an engineer who helped an online dating service drill its own user profiles to market more effectively …

The topic of behavioral targeting has yielded no shortage of speculation and analysis, much of it, for better or worse, of the "40 thousand feet-high," long-view variety. There are signs, however, that a new stage of discourse, this one a little closer to the ground, may be upon us, as advertisers, networks and publishers begin to share their data and experiences with targeting....

While MSN, Google, and Yahoo lurch towards incorporating some kind of behavioral targeting into the search process itself, directories like WhitePages.com may try to beat engines to the BT wave....