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Behavioral targeting

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Behavioral Targeting is a technique used by online publishers and advertisers to increase the effectiveness of their campaigns. The idea is to observe a user’s online behavior anonymously and then serve the most relevant advertisement based on their behavior. Theoretically, this helps advertisers deliver their online advertisement to the users who are most likely to be influenced by them.

Market Dynamics

There are two market leaders (Tacoda & Revenue Science) in the USA, that focus exclusively in helping publishers & advertisers implement behavioral targeting. Additionally, Microsoft has added some behavioral targeting to their ad network. This is different from Google who claim they will focus exclusively on the targeting of ads based on the content of the specific page the ad is displayed on. This is, in fact, a technique called Contextual Targeting.

Yahoo! Inc has launched Behavioral Targeting in the US in late 2005 and in the UK in early 2007. Their current product is named BT2 as a reference to improved functions that make for an intelligent next generation version of the technique, providing Yahoo! with comprehensive Behavioral Targeting capabilities. The company will be introducing BT2 in their many localized branches across the globe by the end of 2007.

Concerns

Many online users & advocacy groups are concerned about privacy issues around doing this type of targeting. This is an area that the behavioral targeting industry is trying to minimize through education, advocacy & product constraints to keep all information non-personally identifiable.

In addition to privacy concerns will be the issue of truly understanding the nature of the person being targeted. For example, there is some disagreement over the validity of focus groups since there is implied influence. In the case of online behaviour, there is the issue of people having alternate online personalities, the Jekyl & Hyde scenario. Many people will use a different online personality. This will mess with any collected data (i.e. from Cookies), in addition, its really only targeting based on search streams, and that's not really behaviour, its just a search. The EA may booking travel for her boss, and how does a BT system identify this when it serves up tourist ads? IP address detection may come from a residential provider, or a business but what's missing is intent and true context.

As anti-spyware legislation, followed by anti-spyware software, identity and IP masking and alternate identity protection applications, along with increased interaction via XML come into play, Behavioural Targeting may be just a better way to detect micro-search versus macro-search activities.

Citations

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