"If anyone should be bored with the ad network business, it should be me," confesses Joe Apprendi, CEO of Collective Media. "But I have never been more excited by this business," he tell us. As networks aggregate greater reach and consolidate to achieve scale, he argues that they will need to differentiate themselves in the market. Media buyers need to ask deeper questions about how behaviors are being gathered and where the ads are showing up.

By now it's widely understood that the core focus of targeting is not the content of the page, but the consumers of that content -- and, even more important, how they consume it. Unfortunately most advertisers and publishers still approach Web 2.0 with models of consumer behavior based on Web 1.0 limitations, as Andy Monfried, founder of leading social media technology developer Lotame explains.

When you start linking user behaviors across channels, you stop speculating about how your marketing works and actually start seeing it. Even for veteran email services company iPost, in the business for a decade, its own new Autotarget product rendered some surprises. Chief strategy officer Steve Webster explains how the next stage of email metrics involve combining email response with other data streams like purchase behavior to create predictive models that clients can use to shape their promotional strategies. Webster says the new data shows that the effect of an email message is more subtle and long lasting than we …

The Web, as David Weinberger has written, is about reminding us we are "connected creatures in a connected world." For targeted advertising to function constructively in that space, it must itself become a vital connector between people and their shared passions and relationships, as Sharon Peyer, director of business development at media sharing site Pixamo, explains.

The world's biggest online auction house knows a lot about its users' bidding, browsing and buying habits, and now eBay is leveraging this knowledge in behavioral ad targeting both on and off the site. The company is coupling this BT rollout with a new AdChoice opt-out program. AdChoice is hoping to chart the next stage in privacy and behavioral targeting by making the model as transparent as possible and the opt-out option clear and ever-present.

YouTube debates and the power of the blogosphere are two signs that online is becoming integral to the American political process. Yet until now political advertising strategy has remained largely TV-centric. In 2008, behavioral targeting will begin to change that, predicts Dakota Sullivan, CMO of Blue Lithium.

Lead generation is a discrete wing of interactive marketing, and so the ways in which it uses behavioral targeting are a bit different as well. Active Response Group uses behavioral tracking to enhance its ability to gather qualified leads from its banner network. In a recent campaign for Leo Schachter Diamonds, ARG not only generated hundreds of thousands of leads, but also used precise targeting and an ongoing relationship with the targets to move them into stores as well. ARG CEO Brad Powers explores how online behaviors generate leads.

Not all behavioral targeting involves media buying, Offermatica CEO Matt Roche reminds us. Coming out of Mediapost's own Behavioral Marketing Forum last month, Roche was eager to widen the conversation about BT beyond the hot news about Tacoda/AOL, perennial concerns about scale, and the privacy hot button. Engaging users require a more engaged marketing effort, Roche likes to say. He works with CNet, eLoan, MusiciansFriend.com, among others and thinks marketers need to leverage more effectively the profiles of their own customers at their own sites. We asked him to scratch that surface for us with a few recent examples.

Variety is the spice of life. One of the most daunting challenges of ecommerce sites, however, is to shape the seemingly limitless variety of potential page elements into just the right mix for just the right customer. To do so, marketers need to learn to integrate statistical analysis with behavioral segmentation, as Jim Wehman, vice president of global strategic marketing at Digital River, explains.

We interrupt out usual Q&A programming here at Behavioral Insider for a public service announcement. The FTC wants YOU! Earlier this week, the Federal Trade Commission announced it would hold a two-day Town Hall on Nov. 1-2 specifically on the privacy issues surrounding "behavioral advertising" at FTC headquarters in Washington D.C. The full announcement is here, and it outlines an agenda of questions that range from nuts and bolts about the technology behind behavioral targeting to anticipated changes in data-gathering techniques as the technologies evolve in coming years.