Most online verticals have evolved from an early emphasis on targeting media to a belated recognition of the importance of optimizing and personalizing on-site and "point of sale" content and experience. Travel marketing online has followed a somewhat different route until now, as Doug Miller, vice-president of global media solutions at Expedia, explains.

Last week I dipped my toe into the emerging world of consumer opt-in/opt-out through BlueKai's very attractive consumer-facing interface. BlueKai's approach was abbreviated and simple. This week we go to the opposite extreme perhaps. Google's approach is verbose and intricate, but the portal is also very, very careful with its words.

Jeff Hirsch's prediction at the recent Omma Behavioral conference that behavioral targeting would overtake search growth over the next decade in advertiser dollar share was no doubt meant to be -- as it was -- provocative, in the classic manner of insouciant underdog challenges of Goliaths by aspiring Davids. Whether Hirsch's prediction will live on to become the online ad world's version of upstart Joe Namath's famous prediction of a NY Jets upset win over the then-"invincible" NFL champion Baltimore Colts (or not), only time will tell. In a more immediate sense, however, Hirsch's keynote can serve as a useful …

Google's announcement this week of a new behaviorally targeted ad program and accompanying privacy policies seemed to follow themes raised at the OMMA Behavioral event in late February. In ads it serves on third-party sites, the company says it will offer consumers links to explanations for why they are seeing these particular ads and how Google is tracking their behavior.

Publishers and advertisers by now have internally devoted enormous investments in money, time and intellectual capital to behavioral targeting platforms. Yet when it comes to consumers themselves, most brands still like to pretend that behavioral targeting doesn't exist, treating it like a secret vice to be locked away, hidden from the public that simply "can't handle the truth." A study issued last week by Trust(e), an independent nonprofit online privacy advocacy organization, documents why that is precisely the wrong message for brands to be communicating.

At last week's well-attended, highly interactive OMMA Behavioral conference, I was struck by the force with which some long-dormant themes in the behavioral targeting field emerged. I can't remember a show in this series where the move forward in general discussions was so apparent.

While e-commerce marketers have access to powerful platforms for personalizing and optimizing the on-site consumer experience the advertising messaging they deliver off-site has remained, by comparison, static and generic. For that reason display advertising, in the minds of many, has become the ugly duckling of direct response advertisers, living deep in the shadow of paid search and its vaunted database of intentions. One personalization optimization firm which has spent much of the past decade helping e-marketers build recommendation engines to enhance the on-site consumer experience, believes the time is right to expand the of personalization process to off-site advertising creative …

The proposition "If we build it they will come" is by now nearly universally recognized as a fallacy by marketers, as well as, nowadays, even most real estate developers. Unfortunately in many sectors of the online advertising world, where behavioral is all the buzz, another often unwarranted assumption has taken hold, namely that "If an ad is (apparently) relevant consumers will engage with it," regardless of how inappropriate or irrelevant the context of the page it runs on. The latest survey on consumer attitudes toward privacy, advertising and related matters from Burst Media is a useful reality check on that …

Once again, tomorrow at OMMA Behavioral we assemble the leading thinkers and practitioners of the online audience targeting arts. Almost two years ago we started this series wondering whether the ad world really needed a show devoted to a specific model of digital targeting. Yet the need for a BT gathering was evident at that first event. We so overwhelmed the Yale Club that people were filling the balcony. On both coasts now, OMMA Behavioral has grown, because there's an acute need to discuss, in a focused way, behavioral tracking techniques, and the special issues of complexity and privacy that …

Something happens to parents on or around the time their kids turn 12. Most of us know intuitively that we are dealing with a different kind of sentient near-adult by this point, and the sheer terror of parenting a teen must kick in some kind of special defense mechanism. But the change is not only in the way we relate to our kids. Our children's move into that next scary stage of their lives also triggers different media consumption behaviors in us. As we drill deeper into social networks and watch more carefully how people gather information online, the behaviors …