Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Marketing on Nostradamus’ Tightrope

Threads from the OMMA conference on Behavioral Targeting are beginning to leak into the news and indicate that BT is looking very promising as a mainstream advertising tactic. Although the conference was a bit niche to justify my travel, I’m watching from afar. Despite that advertising falls outside of my direct research coverage area, the Behavioral Targeting wave extends to site operations as well so I have a vested interest. And, the advertising world, with their deep pockets and liberal creative, often serve as a bellwether for on-site tactics.

Dave Morgan, former CEO of Tacoda, forecast that the Behavioral Targeting market will grow from $700 million in 2007 to almost $10 billion by 2012. Of course, he’s betting on the evolution on IPTV to weigh in on the BT game and sink some serious cash into the biz.

I love this one from Dave Martin, Director of interactive media for Ignited…”It’s only going to get creepier”. He’s predicting pushed outdoor ads for everyone based on RFID chips embedded within credit cards.

While I’m a huge fan of targeting, the show stopper for these technologies is consumer privacy. My research shows that consumers do want some targeted ads, but there’s still a strong undercurrent of “not on my computer you don’t” among the masses. You’ve heard me riff on relevance, context and opt-in before, so I’ll save you the recall…but IMHO that’s where targeting is at.

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