Revenue Science announced an initiative about creating the Behavioral Targeting Standards Consortium (BTSC). This group will look to define behavioral targeting and set industry standards. They are looking for individuals from all aspects of the business, agencies, advertisers, publishers, industry thinkers and anyone else who uses behavioral targeting. Their first measure is to work on creating a standard definition of behavioral targeting as many people use the word, but many different definitions exist.
I am excited for this consortium to begin defining behavioral targeting as I believe all parties involved in online marketing will benefit. One of the struggles of online advertising is understanding exactly what is happening where and when. Traditional media is pretty simple, buy an ad, it runs and move on to the next. Online marketing is much more dynamic as constant changes and optimizations can be made from creative, placement, time, targeting, and several others and that causes some grey area to some marketers, especially those that are new to online. They know enough that they need to advertise online, but don’t know how and where the advantages are.
Once the consortium can begin to define some industry best practices and definitions, I think they will be able to move on to consumer privacy as several different groups have had concerns how sites are collecting information and using that in their marketing strategy. Companies that are more progressive with their targeting abilities such as NebuAd will likely embrace the consortium to help spread the comfort level of online targeting capabilities and also endorse consumer privacy policy.
They will also look at standardizing what behavioral segments are. Tacoda will likely push their 22 “targets” to the consortium which they develpoed in 2004 to help optimize the media buying process. Competitors might feel that they will now have to follow the Tacoda model, but the consortium will hopefully decide the targets, and they are defined/created.
If you are interested in joining, you can join online.
Tags: behavioral targeting, Behavioral targeting standards consortium, consumer privacy, online marketing, Tacoda
