As we explored in our Grill the Vendors panel at last week's OMMA Behavioral, the "optimization layer" of the ad network value chain has come on strong this year as companies like Rubicon Project and AdMeld help publishers squeeze the most revenue from a depressed CPM market. These companies help publishers find in real time the most lucrative opportunity among their ad networks in order to maximize the value of their remnant inventory. In the next few months, however, we are likely to see more companies emerge that optimize on the buy side to ensure campaigns are executing more efficiently.

Integrating loyalty card data collected by brick-and-mortar retail stores will become the next move in retargeting ads to consumers online. That's the buzz from last week's OMMA Behavioral in San Francisco. Some BT companies are merging that data with online cookie data to better understand consumer buying trends.

Like the most effective behaviorally targeted ads themselves, which often appear out of context, I was most impressed by the progress BT has made while hosting OMMA AdNets last week, two days before OMMA Behavioral. I was getting "déjà vu all over again" while listening to those panels on the new agency involvement in ad technology, the ongoing debate between publishers and ad networks, and the increasingly sophisticated uses of data layers to improve targeting.

Preparing for MediaPost's OMMA Behavioral on Thursday, I caught up via phone with Mike Zaneis, VP of public policy at the Interactive Advertising Bureau, to take a deeper dive into the IAB's latest project, the Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising, published a few weeks ago.

My bags are packed for the series of MediaPost West Coast shows we will be managing next week, including OMMA Behavioral in San Francisco on July 30, which I think is the strongest program we have had yet in this series. Talk about bringing in the big guns and the big thinkers. We have keynotes from a major packaged food brand, Yahoo and Microsoft. And all three are coming armed with big ideas about how BT needs to evolve to its next stage

AudienceScience and Hulu inked a deal last week that could eventually move from the computer screen in the home office to the living room TV. The agreement tests the behavioral targeting technology on Hulu's pure-play video ads.

Cracking the social media monetization code has become one of the main obsessions of behavioral targeting in the past year. The data produced by social networks is just too juicy, too intimate, too valuable for any self-respecting data miner to resist.

The lack of technology that sorts and stores the mounds of data collected from cookies and ad tags could contribute to the slow adoption of behavioral targeting, according to some advertising insiders.

In recent OMMA Behavioral shows we have had great success in singling out one or two specific segments and devoting a panel to drilling into the behaviors of that group online as well as providing examples of how marketers are leveraging the learnings. Last time we had a great session on auto intenders and how marketing had moved lower in the purchase funnel in response to the industry crisis. At the July 30 OMMA Behavioral show in San Francisco we will be focusing on another segment that has been challenged by the recession: travel.

By now you have likely heard that U.K. British Telecom Group has pulled out of its agreement to deploy Phorm's behavioral targeting platform Webwise. The decision follows a similar path to the witch hunt spearheaded by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to protect the music industry from college students infringing on copyrights. Ironically, both scenarios lead to the computer's IP address. Let me explain.