• Weighing In On Privacy
    If Thanksgiving is about anything, it is about family bickering. And so in that festive spirit this week we knock back a few too many eggnogs and reopen that family sore spot -- privacy. In early November the Federal Trade commission held public hearings about consumers protecting their personally identifiable information and online habits from corporate scrutiny....
  • Video: Targeting The Learning Curve
    In these still early days of online video, targeting remains more trial and error than art or science. Two major schools, however, have already emerged, one concerned with contextually serving ads based on deep meta-tagging of editorial contents; another, on leveraging the demographic profile information available in social network registration data. Keith Richman, CEO of video entertainment site Break.com, suggests that the next phase of video targeting will focus on the learning behaviors through which consumers use tools such as recommendation engines to match their personal interests and content choices over time.
  • TACODA's New Captain Charts The Course
    Since finalizing its sale to AOL in recent months, TACODA's deck chairs have shuffled considerable. In his first interview since taking the post of president, Daniel Jaye tells us how the TACODA/AOL integration will evolve.
  • Bringing ISPs Into The Behavioral Mix
    Once the vital center of the Internet eco-system, Internet Service Providers are now more frequently looked at commodities, marginal if not entirely irrelevant to the emerging future of Web advertising. Yet, as Bob Dykes, CEO of NebuAds explains, ISPs are a crucial, still largely untapped, component of a behaviorally based advertising infrastructure
  • Following The Segments Online
    When offline audience research company Experian recently acquired online traffic analytics service Hitwise, there was an obvious marriage waiting to happen between offline data and online tracking. As Hitwise president Chris Maher tells us this week, the two products now combine in Hitwise Lifestyle, which promises companies deeper intelligence about how their and their competitor's customer target markets behave online.
  • Toward Transparency: Taking BT Outside The (Black) Box
    In the past two years ad networks have finally gotten on the radar screens of big brands and brand agencies. While behavioral and other enhanced targeting tools have been the keys to this newfound success, ad networks need to bring their targeting outside the "black box" and offer new levels of transparency if they want to truly become integral to online branding strategy, Joe Apprendi, CEO of Collective Media, argues.
  • Scoring The Lead
    Understanding the likelihood that an incoming customer will convert, or even if that customer is legitimate, a high spender or just a deadbeat, is a sixth sense among ace retail salespeople. In the digital world, you can't tell by the look of the shoes or the tone of voice whether this user or that is worth investing marketing resources or company trust. That is where predictive scoring comes in.
  • Targeting Offline Behavior Online
    Online marketers tend to be fond of the conceit that advanced thinking about targeting emerged "ex nihilo" with new media, leaving behind the dark ages of advertising in the BI (Before Interactive) era. In reality, as Acxiom chief marketing and strategy officer Rich Howe explains, "old school" direct mail marketing has much to add to the online behavioral targeting mix.
  • I'll Take My Profile To Go
    The thing about a "personal profile" is that it generally isn't very personal. In most behavioral targeting systems, the user never sees or touches her own data and rarely has control over when and where it might be applied across a network. The newly launched service for publishers and consumers, matchmine (www.matchmine.com) tries to make personal preferences and behavioral data both personal and portable by planting it within a desktop application that users bring with them to apply to member sites.
  • Toward User-Generated Targeting: From Intrusion To Invitation
    In migrating from a traditional mass market "shotgun" approach to more targeted solutions, advertisers have developed ever more granular and sophisticated ways of segmenting consumers, both demographically and behaviorally. What they've yet to do, as Matt Sanchez, CEO of VideoEgg explain, is rethink on a deeper level their model of what a "consumer" of information and entertainment is. To remain relevant in a user-generated media world, brands need to move beyond their current comfort zone of targeting unique but still passive consumers, to engaging active "prosumers."
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