Behavioral target marketing: virtual stalker or virtual coach?

• Author: Bohi, Heidi
• Position: MARKETING

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Behavioral target (BT) marketing is considered the truest way for marketers to understand the interests and habits of consumers. By anonymously observing user behavior, marketers gain a deeper understanding of a consumer's needs and online tendencies. With BT, marketers can serve people relevant and timely advertisements on one Web site or across multiple sites. Businesses use it to increase the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. Information is collected on an individual's Web-browsing behavior, such as the pages they have visited, or the searches they have made, to select which advertisement to display based on what is likely to be of interest to them.

TARGET PRACTICE

In other words, instead of the "spray and pray" advertising, where businesses pay to reach their target market and along the way also inadvertently spend money on those who have no interest in what they sell, advertisers use data analysis to understand what users are doing. And in this economic climate, more data to help you know what a potential customer's buying priorities are is critical and what better way to find that out than by following their every move?

Behavioral targeting is relatively new: the early online ad company DoubleClick, now owned by Google, launched an "intelligent" targeting service in 2000. Cookies were placed on users' browsers to track which Web sites they visited. Now it's a very elaborate system of data analysis. But as the targeting technology improves, privacy advocates objections grow.

"Very few people really understand or follow what's going on. Advertisers and marketers have unleashed these very powerful techniques on the global public without really considering their ethical and societal implications," Jeffrey Chester, founder and executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy in Washington, D.C., says of some of his distrust of BT.

"Everything I post, all of my information, it's available to everyone on the Web. So if you're a marketer this is marketing nirvana," Sarah Browne, an expert on social media marketing and author of www.guruofnew.com says, adding that while there are options for hiding personal data using privacy settings, it is common industry knowledge few people exercise this option.

For a business, Browne says, BT is a huge benefit because it enables reaching the right customer at the right moment with the right advertising. A business can identify and reach qualified audiences based on...