In many ways, online behavioral targeting merely formalizes techniques that direct marketers have used for ages. Motivated by the high costs of mailings, catalogers learned long ago how to track customer ordering habits and adjust their mailings accordingly. While email marketers enjoy low distribution costs, a poor understanding of customer interactions can lead to costly opt-outs and missed sales opportunities says Steve Webster, CEO of email services provider iPost. He tells us today how tried and true catalog marketing principles are applied to email in the company's new AutoTarget 2.0 release.

Behavioral targeting in the banner display ad arena has, so far in its still-young life, been driven primarily by a direct response imperative to use search and browsing data to locate where potential shoppers are in the sales funnel. Highly appropriate as this may be in direct response, the challenge of more brand-oriented video is to extend the emotional range of behavioral targeting to learn to target passions, Steve Mitgang, CEO of Veoh, explains.

This week, the Behavioral Targeting Standards Consortium (BTSC), announced an Advisory Board of nine BT experts to help guide the group's mission to establish industry-wide principles and standards for behavioral targeting. Jeff Hirsch is CEO of Revenue Science, the group's founding member and driving force. We took the opportunity to catch up with Hirsch and discuss both the role of the BTSC and the role of BT in the evolving world of ad networks.

The core value proposition of behavioral targeting is to personalize advertising impressions in an unprecedented way by focusing on "users rather than pages." In practice, however, Dominic Bennett, vice president of engineering at Turn.com, explains what's been missing is a pricing model flexible enough to link specific behaviors and behavioral segments to specific goals and strategies.

Until recently, applying behavioral targeting against video advertising suffered the obvious problem: scale. Even as metrics companies report upwards of 11 billion monthly video streams, only a fraction of that impressive number represents credible inventory for most advertisers. Last month, video ad network YuMe decided that a potential reach of 130 million uniques across more than 400 publishers offered enough coverage to start offering behavioral targeting. According to co-founder and President Jayant Kadambi, advertisers are asking to align campaigns against professional-grade content. But will such plans scale?

For decades database direct marketers have seen "lists" as their primary currency and source of wealth. Ryan Deutsch, director of strategic services at StrongMail, explains that while lists are a necessary resource, email marketers need to understand that their true wealth resides in segments.

The race is on to leverage social media data in ad targeting. In most scenarios, ad technologies promise to scrape profile information to locate the most likely consumers for your product. But as Media6Degrees founder and CEO Joe Doran argues this week, simply tracking the communicative links between social media users can render an even more valuable set of like-minded prospects.

As behavioral targeting has moved in the past few years from novelty toward necessity, many marketers have come to realize that behavioral technologies, like consumers, are unique, and that one size does not fit all. As Web developers, optimizers and advertisers attempt to apply an ever wider array of behavioral approaches, Elizabeth Apelles, CEO of Greater Than One, an ad agency widely deploying behavioral solutions, explains, the task of understanding the multi-dimensional impacts of behaviors on results, becomes more and more central.

The new data exchange BlueKai launched publicly this week with an unusual value-add for consumers. Anyone can go to the site and check in detail exactly what any BlueKai cookie on your system is tracking about your online travels. In my quick check, a visit to Autobytel.com added a cookie segmenting me as shopper for a car, a sub-compact or sports car -- and specifically a Mini. BlueKai's "Registry" also lets me remove any of those segment indicators from my cookie. And so, as CEO Omar Tawakol tells us here, the company is trying to be all about transparency throughout …

For digital age marketers, the more data the better, is a deeply ingrained core principle. What is often overlooked, is that without control of that data, especially integrated control across multiple communications channels, targeted messaging can become redundant at best, cacophonous at worst, Rich Enrico, CEO of Juice Media explains.