Publishers Clearing House (PCH) ran a six-month pilot program supported by TRUSTe, which supplies privacy policies and trademarks, in an effort to educate consumers about behaviorally targeted ads. Marketers and advertisers, however, need to take program's findings with a grain of salt because the company conducting the survey supports the technology.

It looks as if the recent public scrutiny of online privacy and data collection, including controversial reports on the issue from the Wall Street Journal, have rattled the Obama Administration. The Journal itself reports this morning that the White House is about to unveil new legal proposals to control the industry and suggest a new watchdog to oversee Internet privacy.

Those who follow MediaPost's search news know I've become fascinated by the collision of search engine marketing and social signals. In fact, it left me wondering how the integration of the two will influence behavioral targeting. Here's what I've learned.

Just when you thought that the roll-out of industry self-policing efforts was going to stave off digital advertising regulations, last week's panel on the topic at OMMA AdNets certainly suggested the topic is as lively and undecided as ever.

Buy a company overseas for its proven technology and adapt it for other markets worldwide. It's a classic global expansion strategy for tech companies. Now it appears the online advertising industry caught on to create more transparency.

Getting the creative right has always been a problem in behavioral targeting. Once you parse that audience down to the truly interested users, serving all of those segments messages that really match their interests or their stage in the purchase process is costly. Dynamically served creative is one answer, especially if you can target that user by the kinds of items they may have shopped for or even the weather in their area of the country. But there are a lot of different possible ways to work with a segmented audience, not just sell them the goods right away. With …

An interesting post by Cameron Kerry and Christopher Schroeder on the White House blog describes the formation of a new advisory panel that will create a policy framework for the collection and use of personal information on the Internet.

As Mediapost's AdNets conference returns to New York on Nov. 2, it will mark about two years since we started this show to cover what was then the "400 ad networks cluttering the market," or so many said. Even then the conventional wisdom stated there would be a great and necessary consolidation of these many vertical, horizontal, platform-specific nets and the many targeting and data technologies mushrooming up around them. Well, here we are two years later, with hundreds of players still standing and little evidence that the market is going to consolidate soon. But this week did bring a …

Data management has become painful for the online advertising industry. While the technology exists to improve consumer experiences, the dilemma becomes how to use it without causing a leak or breaking the rules. <

Predicting what site visitors might want to read next most often is done by semantic or contextual analysis of the content they are reading now. A recommendation engine can pull from a page its topic and related categories, or even use the aggregated predilections of previous users who read that or similar articles. When it comes to video recommendations, things get a little trickier.