Increase Marketing effectiveness: use behavioral targeting

It's been around for quite a while, the late 90's. But as privacy and technical issues are going away, marketers should consider behavioral targeting in their on-line advertising campaigns.

For those who just missed it, behavioral targeting is the ability to deliver ads to consumers based upon their recent behavior viewing web pages, shopping online for products and services, typing keywords into a search engine or a combination of all three. You can have some more details on behavioraltargeting.com and behavioral targeting 101 on iMedia Connection.

Microsoft recently added it to its offering -- read Microsoft adds behavioral targeting - Tech News & Reviews - MSNBC.com -- as Yahoo did before as well -- read Yahoo! behavioral targeting.

Interestingly enough, AdAge Digital highlights that Behavioral Targeting becomes The New Killer App for Research. Some even put forward some effectiveness performance:

"The behavioral targeting ads increased ad awareness by 51%, while content targeting resulted in only a 33% boost." -- Snapple

As Marketing 2.0 is all about considering your customers and prospects literally as Stars, this should be no surprise to you that I wanted to stress the use of it as a "must have" advertising tactic. Relevant context is king.

e-commerce revenue over $100 Billion!

Wow! This is a confirmation that e-commerce is now for real and significantly impacts the retail industry. The overall traditional retail business in the US just grew between 2.5% and 3.5% during the 2006 holiday season according to analysts. To be compared with the 26% growth for the retail e-commerce in Nov/Dec 2006 according to comScore Networks (see emarketer.com chart and E-Commerce Hits All-Time High in 2006 ). Daily scores averaged $600M A DAY, with a peak at $667M on December 13 according to comScore, to be compared with the $556M peak in 2005.

For the full year, 2006 online retail spending reached $102 billion, a 25% increase on 2005. Don't ask if Marketing 2.0 needs to deal with e-commerce returns, just make sure your e-commerce web site and entire back office organization is up and running.

Read more about e-commerce in Marketing 2.0.

Internet creation festival

I wanted to highlight a close friend initiative, Christophe Ginisty. He passionately organises an Internet creation festival: Le festival de Romans.

Go ahead, at least on the net, and vote! (you need to read french a bit though ;-) )

I'll let Christophe tell us why:

This event aims to celebrate creativity at a time where the masses can access the Internet. Our goal: demonstrate that the web did set creation free and let an entire new artists generation arise.

Happy new year 2007

On my way for a new venture,
I wanted to wish you a wonderful
and exciting new year.

"Whatever the public blames you for;
cultivate it, it is yourself" -- Jean Cocteau