Behavioral Advertising: Wave of the Future? - The Future of Behavioral Marketing
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Back in late 2004, Nate Elliott, an analyst with Jupiter Research, observed that "most advertisers still haven't run behavioral ads, and those that have still aren't spending much." There has been a little change since then, but not very much, and the process of change has been slow. Many advertisers still aren't quite sure what to make of this kind of marketing, and are likely to approach it gingerly.
That point was reinforced recently by a Forrester Research report, "Interactive Marketing Channels to Watch in 2006." The study interviewed more than 250 senior marketing professionals to find out what forms of media they hope to use for advertising this year. It turns out that they're a relatively conservative bunch; while there is interest in blogs, social networks, RSS, podcasting, and video games, these don't figure into their advertising plans yet.
What this means is that marketing professionals are more likely to stick with what they know works. The study noted that marketers continue to emphasize the importance of effectiveness in their marketing campaigns. This should mean that they'll turn to behavioral marketing fairly quickly, but they'll be comparing its performance to a very high benchmark. Being as good as a typical site banner won't be enough; behavioral advertising will have to perform as well as search and email marketing to make the grade.
Speaking of search advertising, you'd think the search engines would be trying to get into behavioral targeting of ads. None of the major ones currently offer it, but they seem to be edging closer. Microsoft's adCenter, for example, offers extensive demographic ad targeting. It's thought that all three of the top search engines are at least testing behavioral targeting, and may offer it in the future.
Indeed, I believe you can expect to see online advertisers run test campaigns involving behavioral marketing all this year and next. Given the relative lack of direct experience with behavioral advertising among marketing professionals, I don't expect to see a big jump in spending on behavioral advertising until the end of 2007 at the earliest. That will change if and when one of the three major search engines starts to offer behavioral advertising in a big way. If they get behind it with an educational campaign that calms consumer worries about third-party cookies, 2008 could be the year that behavioral targeting of ads finally starts to take off.
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