ClickZ: 24/7 Invades Behavioral Marketing Space

24/7, server of about a third of all Internet ads, introduced ACT, a new behavioral targeting system that links the company's analytics program (Insight XE) to its ad serving engine (Open AdStream). The linkage allows for publishers to segment their inventory based on behavioral measures, cluster different groups and predict availability of inventory for specific packages.

Behavioral targeting, newly popular, became a big Internet holy grail in 1998, when Engage introduced a system that could target ads based on evidence of individual user interest in certain web content. Other companies had introduced similar systems as early as 1995, but they proved to have little performance benefit. The idea was captivating to many online buyers, but didn't attract significantly incremental revenues in the face of the random spending going on during the bubble years. The newly rational marketplace may better reward behavioral targeting this time around.