Few advertising technologies are as misrepresented as behavioural targeting. Remarkably, BT is both over- and under-hyped. There are three key reasons why this is the case:

1. The term “behavioural targeting” is hopelessly vague and ill-defined
2. The vast majority of what is called “behavioural targeting” today is limited in effectiveness (especially when compared with the promise that behavioural targeting looks to fulfill in the future)
3. A large number of challenges have to be met before the promise of BT can be delivered – challenges that the industry (or at least coverage / hype around the industry) neglects

What is “Behavioural Targeting”?

Let’s start with the easy bit, the “targeting”. Advertising on the internet can be, and often is, targeted to specific individuals, meaning that two people looking at the same website will see the same content, but different adverts.

Advertising can be targeted on a number of different criteria. It can be contextually targeted e.g. shown to people viewing websites of a specific content category, or demographically targeted e.g. shown to single, middle class males aged 25-40.

Behavioural targeting should mean targeting based on a users behaviour, typically on specific websites or across all the websites they visit. Even this limited definition of behavioural advertising covers a huge number of practices, from advertising a book that someone has browsed on Amazon back to them when they’re on their favorite newspaper site (retargeting), to building target segments to advertise a specific campaign to (e.g.” investment savvy individuals”) based on statistical and even psychological analysis of people’s viewing habits across a wide-range of sites.

However, the “promise of behavioural targeting”, which is never fully-articulated, but underpins the way many people (esp. privacy advocates) think about behavioural targeting, encompasses an even broader vision of what behavioural targeting might be. And that is that individuals might be targeted based not only on their “behaviour” on the internet, but their offline behaviour, including where they go, what they wear, what they purchase, who they talk to, how they spend their free time etc. Many are understandably spooked out at the idea that advertisers might start to understand us better than we understand ourselves, giving them enormous power over us.

What does behavioural targeting look like today?

BT today is very limited. Basic retargeting is common: if you’ve spent a lot of time browsing digital cameras on an e-commerce site, chances are you’ll start to see camera ads with surprising frequency when you’re on unrelated sites. On large web properties e.g. portals, if you spend a lot of time on the finance section, you may find finance-related ads when you’re browsing the sports section.

What isn’t happening today, at least not on any kind of scale, is advertisers taking the massive volumes of web browsing data across large numbers of individuals, and working out things about those individuals that even they don’t know about. Nothing even close to that is happening at scale.

The challenges that need to be met before the “promise ‘of BT” can even begin to be realized

1. BT companies need to get good at using large volumes of data to making intelligent inferences about someone’s behaviour and hence their likely response to particular adverts:
   • Currently the inferences made are enormously simple e.g. “this person visited a BMW site therefore they like BMW, let’s advertise a BMW to them”
   • A huge amount of data is collected whenever individuals visit websites. (More on big data in a later post.)
   • We don’t yet know whether that data can be used to make more intelligent inferences, if it can, which bits in the data are relevant, and what kind of analysis is necessary
   • Part of the problem is not just the enormous volume of data, it’s the fact that we have a limited understanding of how different people react to / engage with different adverts, so aren’t yet in a position to tie those differences in reaction to differences in their behaviour prior to seeing the ad. (More on this in a later post.)
2. Individual consumers need to actively take part in the targeting process, rather than being passively segmented and targeted:
   • It is often easier and more reliable to find out that e.g. an individual takes fashion seriously and which brands / styles they like by asking them rather than inferring it from their online behaviour
   • For BT to really add value, it has to build on the information consumers are willing to directly share with advertisers (more on this in a later post) by saying something more, rather than revealing things we either already know, or should be asking for.
   • In order to do this, consumers need to have a voice / input into the BT process. This is actually something Google is already letting people do:

     

3. BT companies need a robust way to identify individuals across across platforms, on and offline
   • In order to tailor advertising to a particular individual, you need to know that the person you’re serving the ad to is the individual that you think he / she is
   • Today, the vast majority of targeting is done through cookies. This is a really weak solution: cookies identify a particular browser, not the person looking at the browser. As a result, it can’t differentiate when two different people use the same browser, or work out when the same person is connected to the internet using a different browser (e.g. on her mobile phone)
   • The rise of social networks demonstrates that where there’s a benefit, individuals are more than happy to identify themselves accurately online. Indeed, technologies like OpenID or Facebook connect could provide the “glue” required to realize the promise of BT. (More on this in a later post.)
4. Individuals need to understand and be able to control who has what data on them
   • There is simply no way that long-term, consumers will tolerate companies collecting large volumes of data on them, and using that data to manipulate them without any comeback
   • At Keplar we believe that people will be willing to input into the BT process, and give companies data on themselves, if there’s a benefit to them. For now, there’s no clear benefit, and when people experience current attempts at BT on the Web, they find it deeply intrusive – hence the current furore around BT

The promise of BT is huge. Advertisers will always care more about whom they’re advertising to, and how they’re likely to respond to their ad, than where an ad is placed. But until the challenges outlined above are addressed, we’re stuck with a very limited version of BT, one that falls well short of “the promise”, but is enough to spook privacy advocates out. The worst of all worlds…