How many behavioral segments can most publishers really service with any reasonable scale? That is the question Advertising.com subsidiary ADTECH US tries to answer with its upcoming release of behavioral targeting capabilities for ad service partners. Nils Winkler, managing director, senior vice president of sales, U.S., estimates that if a PC is active online, the odds are it has an ADTECH cookie on board that the company can leverage for BT profiling. Still, as he tells us this week, most publishers he services simply do not have the traffic scale or the sales infrastructure to support the kind of granular …

Though it still has its naysayers, mobile advertising so far this year has succeeded both in radically expanding its scalability and, as the recent acquisition of Third Screen Media by Time Warner AOL shows, galvanizing the serious interest of the biggest players in the online space. As a critical mass of consumers, content and ad inventory move onto the mobile Web, the next, still daunting challenge, as Brian Stoller, vice president of marketing at Third Screen discusses, is evolving effective mobile-friendly modes of enhanced targeting.

Marketers continue to seek ways of scraping and mining the most common interactive behavior of them all -- talk. Discussions about products should be some of the most valuable activity for both marketers and consumers, but conversation is difficult to surface in an organized way. RelevantMind tries to tap the collaborative nature of purchase decisions by connecting products and services with the online conversations occurring around them. CEO Aaron Mann tells us how the newly launched site plans to reign in conversations both for consumers and brands.

A generation ago, demographic targeting revolutionized marketing with the realization that consumers were not a mass market monolith but rather a rich array of different segments or niches. More recently online behavioral targeting shook up the marketing paradigm by teaching marketers consumers within a demographic were not a monolith either, but individualized by their behavior. Chirag Patel, CEO of MeMedia, makes the case that what we now need to learn is that media behavior is not a monolith either. The next iteration of the behavioral revolution, Patel believes, must encompass the multiple range of behaviors individuals actually exhibit across media …

Sometimes we take a detour from the usual cast of characters in the behavioral ad targeting realm and talk with academics about broader issues of online behavior that marketers (all of us) need to understand and appreciate better as we engage the digital realm. Deception has become an entire sub-field of computer science, and Lina Zhou, associate professor, Department of Information Systems, University of Maryland Baltimore County, is among the most prolific researchers in the field. We asked her to help us understand both the kinds of identity misdirection marketers might expect to see in these worlds, as well as …

Advertisers have come a long way since the tantalizing vision of "one to one" marketing was put before us way back in 1993, at the pre-dawn of the Internet era, by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers. Web tracking and measurement tools provide an infrastructure to take the kind of total customization Peppers and Rogers envisioned to a radically new level. Bringing that vision to fruition requires a deeper partnership between technologists and marketers, and a new synergy between analytics and creativity, as Alistair Goodman, vice president of strategic marketing at Exponential Interactive, explains.

Here in the U.S., most of the discussion of behavioral targeting into mobile sites is both theoretical and premature. Only 10% of us even access the Web on a handheld device each month. Revenue Science is getting a head start on the eventual market here by launching Japan's first mobile BT ad service. Partnered with KDDI, the second largest carrier, and media firm Digital Advertising Consortium (DAC), Revenue Science could reach up to a third of mobile customers in Japan.

The fundamentals of behavioral targeting are simple: getting the right message to the right person at the right place at the right time. Applying those simple fundamentals to real-world media behavior, however, is unfortunately not so simple. In fact it's getting more complex all the time. As consumers become ever more nimble at moving across myriad media channels to get the information and entertainment they want, marketers remain frustratingly flat-footed in traversing the new digital arena. Adapting targeting to the complexities of digital behavior, Bob Walczak, CEO of mobile ad network MoPhap explains, requires a truly multi-modal data platform.

Another week, another acquisition. Longtime direct mail marketer Acxiom purchased re-targeting and behavioral network EchoTarget this week. Acxiom forms a new unit from the marriage, Relevance-X, with former EchoTarget CEO Greg Smith in the lead. Promising to combine segment-based and behaviorally based marketing in order to target display ads, Smith and Rich Howe, chief marketing and strategy officer, Acxiom, explained how and why the companies came together.

In their quest for data, marketers often lock in on browsing and surfing behavior (gathered non-consensually) as the royal road to unlocking consumer value. Understandably -- but short-sightedly, as Chase Norlin, CEO of image and video search firm Pixsy, explains below. Browsing data may give an interesting snapshot of what consumers are sampling online, Norlin says, but real understanding of what consumers want requires a consensual opt-in model of consumer cooperation and participation in behavioral targeting.