Video formats continue to proliferate nearly as fast (sometimes seemingly even faster) than the voluminous influx of digital video content. Yet in comparison video targeting, particularly targeting based on behavioral profiling and segmentation, has been glacially slow. Indeed, despite many incremental starts, video targeting has yet to move fully and decisively beyond the Pavlov's Dog approach of slewing ads at a captive audience of couch potatoes that defined targeting a generation ago. Seriously closing that gap, Steve Robinson, CEO of Panache Technologies, explains, will be the major challenge of video publishers and advertisers alike in 2008.

As traffic fragments around the Web, finding a large qualified audience to target becomes an everyday challenge for media buyers. The usual suspects in a given segment, whether it is entertainment, auto or fashion, become the natural locus for ad dollars, inventory squeezes and CPM inflation. Behavior Match is an intriguing new planning tool from Compete Inc. that segments users into 150 categories and then tracks their usage and concentrations across thousands of large and small sites. As CMO Stephen DiMarco tells us this week, the approach helps media buyers discover hidden gems in the ever-expanding mediaverse fragmented audiences

We've come a pretty long way in 40 years from "the medium is the message," the mantra of the modern mass market, to the consumer is the message. Or so it often seems. A huge gap remains, however, between recognizing the need to customize both medium and message for each consumer and actually doing so, as Brian Deegan, CEO of Knotice, explains. Successfully bridging that gap, he predicts, will differentiate the winners from the also-rans in behavioral marketing in 2008.