My OMMA Panel Today

Today, I moderated a session on behavioral targeting and the strategic and tactical implications for creative. It was an interesting topic that I hadn't seen covered before at other industry conferences, and the panel seemed to come to some interesting conclusions. What it comes down to is this: Advertisers who use behavioral targeting could probably benefit from making sure their creatives know that they're using BT. We explored a few angles, including the notion that the ads won't always appear in context (and often don't at all). We also talked about retargeting and bucketing audiences according to whether they've purchased or abandoned - basic database marketing stuff. A lot of that never gets considered during the creative strategy. At one point, the panel essentially agreed that looking at creative performance vs. individual behavioral buckets would probably lift brand and DR metrics significantly, but that many advertisers hadn't gotten to the point where it was a priority to look at the data that way.

Chris Marrow was there from Tacoda and he enlightened us with respect to a recent Tacoda study that compared and contrasted behavioral targeting and contextual targeting. We also had Scott Howe from DrivePM, who talked a bit about retargeting, among other subjects. Rounding out the panel were two representatives from agencies, John Gray from Enlighten and Michael Hayes from Initiative.

At one point, Hayes claimed that nearly all of his clients were using behavioral targeting to some extent. How far it's come in just a few years...