Behavioral targeting is driven by the premise that by paying attention to how people express their interests and needs, brands can connect and communicate more relevantly with the people who most want to hear what they want to say. Unfortunately, advertisers and publishers too often artificially limit their ability to do just that by confining their definition of "behavior" to a single dimension (clicks) in a single channel, online. Key to taking advertising targeting beyond its current silos is to pay attention to another, currently poorly followed or completely ignored, component of behavior: how media, all media, is consumed, argues …

A day after the Federal Trade Commission issued its revised guidelines for managing privacy concerns in behaviorally targeted advertising, industry figures are starting to weigh in and pore over details.

At the moment the tantalizing (but somewhat elusive) promise of a take-off for mobile advertising pivots, in the minds of many, around the iPhone and other data-rich smart phones. While the industry has been mostly focused on trying to scale mobile Web banner and text ads, Apptera has staked its claim to a less beaten track, one where there aren't so many obstacles. "There are five BILLION cell phones on the planet and every single one of them has voice," says Randy Haldeman, the company's CMO.

Behavioral targeting technologies can extrapolate from raw usage data and patterns a remarkable amount of implied information about a consumer's intent and mindset. It cannot tell us much about what people really are thinking during their interactions with a Web site or a brand online. For that, you really need to talk to people as they traverse your site.

It took brands a long time to acknowledge the existence of consumers as autonomous entities with voices of their own, as opposed to focus group "subjects" filling in the lines of scripts. Though most brands today have crossed that threshold intellectually, few have actually figured out what to do about it. A few are attempting to open up new ways in which consumers can not only speak about -- but TO and WITH -- the brand, as collaborators. One of the most interesting initiatives along these lines is Chrysler's Customer Advisory Board, a "collaborative community" developed by Passenger.

Educating consumers about what behavioral targeting is and is not up to, deep within the cookies of their browser, seems to be a bit like alternative energy development. Pretty much everyone says the industry should be doing more about it, and yet it is hard to see where and with whom it starts. Most online materials related to BT are pitched to one end of the value chain, marketers. It's not clear to me that most of the companies in this space are even comfortable talking directly to consumers, let alone taking the time to develop an accessible language to …

Though the phrase predates the modern Internet, "one-to-one communication" remains the best way to describe the end point most marketers would cite as the goal of their online strategies. Though they may celebrate the end, most fail, however, to take advantage of, indeed seldom even recognize, the most salient opportunity to fulfill this goal: the inbound communications initiated by customers themselves.

As the auto industry stalls and sputters out of its worst year in memory, how will the crisis affect online ad planning strategies? Not only has the auto segment been among the biggest online spenders in recent years, it has also been among the most sophisticated in tracking and targeting buyer habits and online behaviors. Rarely has the in-market "auto intender" been more prized. We asked Joe Kyriakoza, vice president of national advertising solutions at vertical ad network Jumpstart Automotive Media, to pop the hood on the current auto ad market for us.

As investors are forced to shift from trading to value investing in their stocks, so advertisers must seek ways of shifting from quantity to quality. This shift can manifest itself in numerous ways, including more intensely scrutinizing the blind spots in current display spending strategy and tactics, especially areas where behaviorally based targeting has been under-utilized, or entirely ignored up till now. One major area of "low-hanging fruit" till now almost entirely ignored is lead generation, according to Keith Johnson, vice-president of product management at i-BehaviorOne, a database firm.

Just because I am paranoid doesn't mean someone isn't following me. But just try to prove it. One of the perennial issues with behavioral targeting is that it is virtually invisible both to users and to clients.