By Joanna Glasner
SAN FRANCISCO -- Picture this: You're shopping online for a new
minivan, surfing automaker websites and buying guides. You then head
to the homepage of your local paper to check out the headlines, and at
the top of the page is an ad for a local car dealer, offering rebates
and low financing on new minivans.
If you're like many web users, you probably find it creepy that your
local paper knows you're looking for new wheels. Even so, advertisers
are betting you're far more likely to click on the car dealer's ad
than a random banner for a dating site or DVD rentals.
That's the theory behind behavioral marketing -- a growing niche in
the online advertising industry focused on targeting promotional
messages to an individual's online activities. Some might call such
tracking across websites by a less flattering name: adware. Marketers
call it a promising revenue stream.
Behavioral marketing was a prominent buzzword at this week's Ad:Tech
conference in San Francisco. The conference, held in the midst of a
boom period for internet ad sales, devoted considerable resources to
identifying ways for online publishers to generate bigger profits from
advertising. Many of the most popular strategies involved mining more
information about individuals.
Targeted marketing is nothing new in the online world, as anyone who's
ever received personalized book recommendations from Amazon.com can
attest. However, by recording peoples' movements over networks of web
properties rather than just individual sites, some marketers are
betting that they will be able to improve response rates to online ad
campaigns dramatically.
http://www.wired.com/news/ebiz/0,1272,67365,00.html
Monty Solomon (monty@roscom.com)