Can behavioral targeting achieve greater economies of scale?
Evidence of the unique advantages of a behavioral focus on targeting users rather than pages accumulated steadily over the past year, as a widening spectrum of case studies show decisive differentials between BT and both “run of network” and contextual ads in click-throughs, conversions and other metrics. Thus far, however, scale (or more specifically, lack of scale) has been a stumbling block preventing more extensive deployment in the very large-scale campaigns top-tier advertisers would ideally like to do online. While portals and major ad networks made significant headway in 2006 in expanding behavioral targeting opportunities within their core content properties, the obvious next step is to extend the reach of behavioral targeting more widely into the “long tail.” In this regard, the partnership between auto specialty network Jumpstart and ValueClick last summer may be a harbinger of what we’ll likely see much more of (whether via partnerships or mergers/acquisitions) in 2007. Can
