Is Behavorial Targeting Outmoded?

Much of marketing is language. Marketing to marketers is also very much a question of language. For instance, look at today’s New York Times piece on real-time bidding for online ad placements.

The article gives this example of the process:

“Say a man just searched for golf clubs on eBay (which has been testing a system from a company called AppNexus for more than a year). EBay can essentially follow that person’s activities in real time, deciding when and where to show him near-personalized ads for golf clubs throughout the Web.”

In fact, the method of personalizing ads based on user activity has not really been, as the article’s lead puts it, “largely missing until recently.” Instead, the term more commonly used for such real-time ad personalization has been “behavioral targeting.”

However, it’s fascinating the way the Times article refrains from using the word “behavioral.” That absence is in sync with how some people in the online ad industry are also looking to move away from the term behavioral targeting. They have two key reasons:

• One, behavioral targeting pushes privacy hot buttons among concerned advocacy groups, the FTC and Congress, and a fair share of Internet users.

No wonder then that Google execs are quoted prominently in the article, because while they don’t want to be associated with behavioral targeting, real-time advertising is exactly what search is. Therefore translating the same real-time targeting concept to display—as Google looks to ramp up its revenues for such advertising—is a better fit for the company, at least linguistically.

• Two, the use of data to target ads in real-time, based on audience behavior, is becoming ever more sophisticated in the details used for targeting. For example, as The Times article notes, “One factor is the site the person is visiting: Is this a site that has performed well for eBay? Is the spot where the ad would run an attractive one, or downpage where someone might miss it? Another is how many ads the person has seen recently.”

So maybe behavioral targeting is outmoded. Even if the technique is still alive, all the potential negative issues attached to “behavioral” increasingly make the term itself poor marketing.

Whatever you call it, US spending on display ads that use audience activity for targeting will grow by 21.6% this year, passing the $1 billion mark.

For more on the topic, see my recent report, Audience Ad Targeting: Data and Privacy Issues.