Digitally enabled consumer behavior continues to evolve further and further away from the passive couch potato paradigm of yore, as omni-attentional media users become ever more adept at shifting between media and multitasking among them. But till now, as Chirag Patel, CEO of MeMedia, explains, behavioral targeting strategies have lagged far behind actual consumer behavior, stuck in siloed media compartments. The time has come, he argues, for a multimodal targeting across channels.

How many impressions do you need to serve to a past visitor before you admit diminishing returns? That is the question Andrea Palmer, manager of interactive services, Siquis, Ltd., and her colleagues asked of their retargeting program for Spirit Airlines. When they ran the numbers on reach and frequency and discovered how many times customers were seeing the same ad, a radical reduction in the retargeting spend produced a surprising effect: none at all. Palmer tells us what they learned.

By reorienting targeting from content pages to consumers themselves, behavioral targeting radically frees marketers from traditional ad placement constraints. Thus far, however, the methodology has been seen as too uncontrollable for most brand advertisers. The key to applying BT to branding needs lies in tying more advanced consumer segmentation to better inventory forecasting and optimization, as Jarvis Coffin, CEO of Burst Media, explains.

Revenue Science and Tacoda have been spirited rivals since the early days of behavioral targeting, an industry the two companies helped invent and proselytize over the last five or six years. With AOL's announcement that it will acquire Tacoda, however, and the recent flurry of acquisitions, Revenue Science is left as the largest and one of the last BT companies independent of a major media company or portal. We asked CEO Bill Gossman to weigh in on what the Tacoda/AOL deal means for his company and the industry.

For years, behavioral marketers have been engaged in relentless, often obsessive pursuit of data about individuals -- where they've been, and what they've done online. They want to reach that mythic goal of "one-to-one" targeting. All that data, however, argues Mike Svatek, marketing director and product manager of Baynote, may be blinding marketers to a more fundamental fact: It is not behavior in isolation, but rather the charting of similarities and affinities of intent and interest, that ultimately matters.

There may be times when a declining click-through rate on a behaviorally targeted campaign is a good sign. When Advertising.com ran a comparative test of three campaigns that used both run-of-network and BT techniques, Brent Halliburton, director of network strategy, was surprised at the results. The targeted ads demonstrated lower CTRs than untargeted ads, and yet at the same time they showed much better results on the back end. This week, Halliburton walks us through that research and explains what it means to media planners.

The simplest, most fundamental rule of advertising has always been to follow consumers where they are. However simple in theory, this rule is becoming ever more complex in online practice, as content usage patterns and preferences increasingly move beyond the conventional metrics and measures of publishers and advertisers alike, as Quantcast CEO Konrad Feldman explains.

Anyone who has been in the digital media business for the past decade will recognize Alan Chapell. For nearly five years he ran the privacy program at Jupiter Research and then helped DoubleClick develop its research and ad effectiveness products. Before starting his own consultancy, Chapell & Associates, in 2003, he also worked with Yesmail and Cheetahmail. Chapell & Associates provides business and legal advice to interactive marketers, brands, BT firms and media companies. We asked him about the growing importance of user data to the business models of the publishers he consults.

"Matching the right offer to the right prospect at the right time" has become the mantra of this generation of marketers. So far, however, the lion's share of intellectual focus has been reserved for addressing the second part of this formula. Pradeep Javangula, CTO of Tumri, discusses how advertisers can begin to creatively address the first part -- the ad offer itself.

Sports cars and SUVs in Michael Bay's "Transformers" aren't the only things reassembling themselves on the fly this summer. Last week, Yahoo launched a SmartAds product that automatically morphs ad creative according to a targeted user's individual profile. The Yahoo behavioral engine is but one targeting lever a SmartAd can pulls to determine which combination of creative elements to serve a user. It is this layering of multiple target criteria that can double and triple the effectiveness of display ads, says Senior Vice President of Display Marketplaces Todd Teresi. SmartAds launched last week in the travel segment, but expect to …