For all the talk surrounding behavioral targeting, and even re-targeting, Signal To Noise's Allen Stern believes content still is king. "To most branding clients, or clients that are looking to brand, content is more important than audience," he declared. Stern said the believe dates back to the traditional, "where am I in the magazine/what television program am I adjacent to" mentality that pervades traditional media planning. That said, Stern believes re-targeting can be a great market extender for brand marketers, by exposing customers already interested in their brands what other offers they may be interested in. …

That's the debate playing out during the "Re-Thinking Re-Targeting" panel at OMMA Behavioral in San Francisco. The consensus seems to be that it's part of the bigger ecosystem, and when used properly, can greatly enhance performance and results. "We were really disappointed with what behavioral targeting was," said Allen Stern, VP, Media Director, Signal to Noise. "It was such a black box. And the price we had to pay for it, never paid out." Now that the industry is beginning to "take the covers off" of the process, Stern said it's become more palatable among online marketers …

As great as behavioral targeting data is, it's not the end-all/be-all for online retailers. That was the sentiment of Omniture's Chris Duskin on the retailer category at OMMA Behavioral this morning. "If all your data is horrible, it's not going to give you any signal," Duskin noted, adding. "As automated as it can be at the far end of the spectrum, it's still about the marketing process." Omniture's Duskin

By the way, if you've been following my dispatches from OMMA Behavioral in San Francisco, you can actually see it live -- via streaming -- right on the OMMA Behavioral conference page: https://www.mediapost.com/events/?/showID/OMMABehavioral.10.SF

That's what iCrossing's Dax Hamman suggested when the OMMA Behavioral "Agency Roundtable" panel discussed the somewhat verboten subject of "attribution modeling." "I have mixed feelings when I hear attribution modeling come up on a panel," Hamman said, adding, "There is no 100% right answer." To illustrate the point, Hamman gave a personal anecdote about how his children did numerous searches – on their own browsers – to research the best hotel to stay at on a family trip. Hamman then booked the hotel via his browser. "Put an attribution model around that?," he said, adding, "There is …

The education metaphor continued during OMMA Behavioral this morning, during the "Agency Roundtable" panel. Andrea Fishman, Vice President - Strategy, BGT Partners, likened her role as an "educator," and said a lot of her job is "teaching people." The most important people for her to educate, of course, are her clients. "Until you know what's going on, it's hard to build a roadmap for this," she said. BGT's Fishman

Asked by OMMA Behavioral MC Steve Smith how the semantic Web is influencing consumer behavior "of the Web," Interpublic's Quentin George cut him off before he was finished asking, and snapped: "There is no off of the Web anymore." The evolution of Web 3.0, he said, means that people are connecting to everything, everywhere and every time. "Think of these things as windows onto the same machine," George said. "There is no off of the Web anymore. At the end of the day, all of this is gaining access into the most reliable machine that consumers have ever …

Well, according to Interpublic's Quentin George, it's all about "meaning." In other words, the semantic Web, or Web 3.0, is a set of "dynamic, standard, enabling technologies," that enable a user to understand and access information on the Web based on what it means to them, not a machine, per se. The implications of that change, he said, would lead to "intelligent shopping agents," and for media buyers, a revolution in planning and buying based on "buying audiences by intent." Other consequences loom large. In fact, the World Wide Web at large. "Wikipedia is being replaced …

That's how OMMA Behavioral opening keynoter Quentin George, the chief digital officer of Interpublic's Mediabrands, started things off, outlining his presentation as being about four things: Languages Evolution of the Web The Semantic Web Impact of marketing and behavioral change Web 1.0, George said, was fundamentally about the syntax of language, and enabling machines to figure out how to find things on a network of interconnected computers based on language. "If you were to characterize Web 1.0, it's about access," he explained. Interpublic's George

That’s what Jeff Hochberg, VP-targeting strategy and sales at AOL, said during an opening comment at OMMA Behavioral in San Francisco. AOL, which is sponsoring the event, and a similar one on ad networks that took place earlier in the week in Los Angeles, thinks the field is morphing into something else, and he predicted that AOL will not sponsor OMMA Behavioral or OMMA Ad Nets next year. “But probably, OMMA Platforms 2011, and OMMA Audiences 2011,” Hochberg said. “It just seems to be the way things are happening.” “We’ve actually been thinking about that,” concurred MediaPost Publisher …