iMedia: All That Googles Is Not Gold

iMedia published an ode to behavioral targeting, written by Bill Grossman, CEO of Revenue Science, a company that sells behavioral targeting technology to sites selling advertising. The column holds that this form of advertising - where agencies exploit deep market knowledge to use clever targeting mechanisms to get just the right message to the correct type of person - has much greater potential than the fast-growing search market.

But lost in the glowing analysis are marketing realities that agencies don't actually behave so intelligently, nobly, and unprofitably when they can just dump the budget in five or ten media vehicles and call it a weekend. The recent introduction of contextual search - and its very poor performance relative to straight search media - is showing the industry that targeting works, but only when it's very intelligently targeted. That sort of intense farming of media results isn't an attractive model to the buyers. And before sites will implement Revenue Science-type systems, allowing the practice, they want to see that sort of demand percolating in the industry.