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.” (Read more…)