The rich are different. Not only do they have more money, but they are simply more wired than the rest of us. While marketers chase youthful demos as the natural target for digital goods and interactive advertising, they may be missing the real sweet spot: the wired affluent. A standout insight from the 32nd iteration of the Mendelsohn Affluent Survey is how the 23.3 million households making $100,000 and up (19% of U.S. adults) are deeply committed to digital media. As Ipsos Mendelsohn President Bob Shullman and Vice President Richard Vogt tell us, money matters when it comes to media …

"The Japanese have a saying that a man is whatever room he's in." Fictional advertising patriarch Bert Cooper's pronouncement in the TV series "Mad Men" may or may not be sage philosophy. It does, however, illuminate a central challenge of behavioral marketing, and above all, personalized optimization of content. For no matter how extensive and deep their transactional and behavioral profiles, a consumer's intent is only truly revealed by what they're doing in real-time on a site, in the "room" they're in now, Meyar Sheik, CEO and co-founder of Certona, explains.

As we have been covering in this column over recent weeks, online data gathering technologies and interactivity are slowly migrating to TV set top boxes as those infrastructures mature and become IP-centric. An early arrival to increasingly cluttered TV menus may come from a subset of behavioral tracking, the recommendation engine. One of the leaders in that space online, ChoiceStream, services Blockbuster Online, Borders and Overstock.com. Now they are moving the technology to the living room in pending rollouts with IP-based Tv providers later this fall and early in 2009. We spoke with Toffer Winslow, executive vice president, sales and …

In the era of the long-tail marketers, content providers and, of course, merchandisers, have come to the realization that deep catalogs are critical to consumer engagement, and with it, winning share of time, share of wallet and share of mind. Customizing and optimizing all that deep content, however, requires building new bridges between IT and marketing, as Mark Wachen, Optimost managing director at Interwoven, explains.

As we discovered last week, addressable TV technologies already deliver targeted video spots and display ads into millions of homes, rendering important learnings about formats, sequencing and effectiveness across different contexts. This week we ask Mitch Oscar, executive vice president, Televisual Applications, MPG, to drill into the current and planned targeting capabilities of these systems and whether BT as we know it online will in fact migrate to the living room.

The prospect of tapping the rich psychographic and behavioral profiles being generated by social network users has, for obvious reasons, set off a race among advertisers, ad networks and social networks themselves to find ever more clever ways to exploit these "target-rich" environments. In their haste to target, however, marketers have so far neglected to understand that advertising in an interactive community must proceed not by its own traditional rules but by the rules of the community, as Fred Bauer, CEO of Gamervision, explains.

As cable, telco, and satellite providers all start migrating TV delivery to IP-based systems, we can imagine an infrastructure where individual TV screens can be tracked and segmented in much the way Web traffic is today. But what is the status of these interactive TV technologies? The undisputed guru of ITV is Mitch Oscar, executive vice president, Televisual Applications, MPG. In a lengthy discussion with us recently, he walked through the history of interactive TV technologies, the state of the model, and the hurdles he sees to moving forward with the platform. In this first part of the interview, Oscar …

The underlying premise -- as much philosophical as technological -- of behaviorally based marketing is that one size does not fit all. Ironically, however, the way BT is most commonly spoken about, understood, and sold, belies that premise, as Joshua Koran, vice president, targeting and optimization, ValueClick, Inc., explains.

Just when we thought (hoped) that the "pork bellies" controversy over commoditized ad inventory had eased, the Interactive Advertising Bureau stirred the pot again this week. Its report on the selling habits of major online publishers showed substantially increased reliance on ad networks in 2007 over 2006. This study comes after a season of publishers complaining about CPM erosion caused by horizontal networks. What better time to check in with some of the ad networks focusing on behavioral targeting? This week it's InterCLICK, which sees demand growing on both sides, according to the company's President/Founder Michael Katz. Some of the …

With growth typically comes growing pains -- of which behavioral targeting has had its share, over the past six months or so. As the industry has scaled, outside scrutiny, from the public, media and politicians has intensified, and misunderstandings about what behavioral targeting is, and isn't, have proliferated. Effectively addressing those misunderstandings, AlmondNet CEO: Roy Shkedi explains, requires an industry-wide commitment to greater transparency.