If marketers know what a home is worth and whether owners plan to renovate, sell or buy, that's bankable data. The hot home valuation site Zillow pulls 5 million monthly uniques into data on 82 million of America's 92 million single family homes, about half have been the targets of searches. Plus, it target ads into highly specific and lucrative stages in the renovation, sale and purchase of a family's core asset.

Click-to-call has long been touted for its promise of bringing together the targeting efficiencies of online and the familiarity of traditional phone customer service. For the vast majority of Web marketers, unable to install expensive proprietary systems, however, as Irv Shapiro, CEO of Ifbyphone, discusses, the promise of synergy between these two powerful direct marketing channels has remained unrealized.

Nowhere is the need greater for automated, behaviorally targeted content than the mobile phone. The size, navigation and input issues of the handset demand smarter, personalized media. At long last, this week Sprint rolled out the first attempt by a U.S. carrier to solve the content discovery problem. ChangingWorlds developed the technology over the past decade and has 50 international customers. Stephen Oman, program director, Changing Worlds, explains how this technology works and some of the ways carriers and marketers ultimately can leverage a mobile phone interfaces that really listen and learn from customers.

Forging a truly interactive dialog between marketers and consumers has been the central premise and promise of online media. Yet, as Blake Cahill, vice president of marketing at Visible Technologies, explains, faced with a new reality in which thousands, even millions of consumers are engaged in active, often passionate conversations and communities about products, most brands remain tone deaf and tongue-tied in their response.

Nielsen's many panels, research and measurement products now span almost all consumer touch points, so increasingly the company is exploring ways of integrating and overlaying the data to generate new insights. A series of "fusion" studies recently from Nielsen Connections, for instance, tries to map actual product buying patterns against TV and Internet usage. As Howard Shimmel, senior vice president, client insights, explains, this is the kind of data that gives media planners much more precise methods of targeting their TV buys.

Internet marketers like to pride themselves on working on "Internet time," where the gap (often traditionally a chasm) between idea and execution is radically closed. Though that pride is well earned in many areas, one realm of Internet marketing which has lagged behind Internet time is multivariate testing, as Eric Hansen, president of SiteSpect, notes below.

Cross-platform media planning has been a hot topic at recent advertising and research conferences. As the ad spend moves online, buyers are more concerned that they are following their offline targets accurately. This week and next we engage two of the major players in digital metrics, comScore and Nielesen, about some recent product announcements and how emerging tools can track consumers better across media. This week, comScore's vice president of product management, Steve Dennen, discusses the company's Segment Metrix offerings.

In the digital media economy data is rightly viewed as a form -- perhaps the most critical form -- of wealth. There's a fundamental difference, however, between data-mining mountainous terabytes of amassed customer information and truly targeting relevant offers based on the correct behavioral triggers, as B.J. Morgan, Director of Segment Management of Unica, explains.

A day after testifying at the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, NebuAd CEO Bob Dykes reflects on his day in Washington -- and the hill his ISP-based behavioral tracking solution now has to climb in the U.S. market. In the last month Charter Communications dropped its deal with NebuAd, and a report from the Free Press and Public Knowledge accused the company's technology of adware-like bad practices. And so Dykes went to Washington as a big target for legislators and privacy advocates.

Lead generation and email marketing are often cursorily dismissed as "old school" by aficionados of the ever-new. Yet when it comes to the new next and best in behavioral platforms, so called "predictive modeling," Matt Wise, CEO of Q Interactive explains, lead generation has actually blazed trails well ahead of the pack.