If you are an all-natural energy shot product, there is a steep wall for you to climb at retail called 5-Hour. The heavily promoted kick-start liquid in the red and yellow mini-bottle owns about 80% of the market. So when Scott Salik, VP of Media at new rival BAZI, was looking to digital media to make the most of his small budget, he knew the core concern. "No one had ever heard of us. We needed impressions, impressions, impressions."

How does AudienceScience collect and distribute the mounds of data across the Internet worldwide? It leverages IP services from Internap. Yes, a little geeky on the IT side, but as marketers and advertisers use more data to target ads in real time, knowing how companies speed

If done artfully and well, mobile media and technology is capable of reversing a century-old model of selling -- where salespeople went to people's homes or waited for interested consumers to come to them. In some ways, mobile replaces the traveling and in-store salesmen with the newer (albeit slightly creepy) model of the "following salesman." Finding a way to leverage movement behaviors via mobile without alienating consumers is going to be one of the great "oppor-challenges" of the mobilized era.

The Internet offers a wealth of information, so it seems predictable that marketers and advertisers would learn how to turn the bits, bytes and keywords that make up data strings into gold. Efforts are aimed at better targeting for display advertising -- a service Google lacks. Until now, anyway.

A little known agency and subsidiary of The Washington Post Company, SocialCode, got some visibility last month when it published the results of a campaign it ran on Facebook to gather data about voter sentiments in key battleground states.

Simpli.fi CEO Frost Prioleau says his company engineers have developed a method to improve the way advertisers buy behavioral segments. Prioleau calls it de-averaging behavioral targeting, a process that, theoretically, allows the audience segments to generate better results with a narrower focus. He explains the process as "the ability to understand the performance and value of micro-segments within an overall BT segment, and to vary bid prices based on the performance of each micro-segment."

Retargeting is the kind of tried and true behavioral targeting tool that is associated most with consumer retailers as they try to recapture some of the customers their SEO/SEM and banner programs first attracted to their site. B2B service companies may not seem like a natural fit for the method.When customer community and support provider Get Satisfaction first looked at the model, it was admittedly skeptical.

It will take about a month for the Travel Ad Network to get up and running on AudienceScience's Gateway data management platform, enabling targeting campaigns worldwide. The company plans to announce the agreement Wednesday.

The recommendation and personalization engines that have been working to make e-commerce an increasingly efficient channel over the years are moving into the ad ecosystem data game. This is a natural extension of what they do, of course. Many of these companies have so much richer, deeper data about a user than just what content they last visited that the theoretical value of these profiles could be enormous.