By collecting, analyzing and sorting user data, Web publishers have a unique ability to target audiences of interest to advertisers and reach them with little waste.

That great sage of the dugout, Yogi Berra, once said: "You can observe a lot just by watching." For the past year, I have watched Internet advertising grow and change, all for the better. And here is what I have observed:

Observation 1: Advertising is out, targeted marketing is in.

Many millions of dollars of advertising have been sold and bought for decades. What can possibly be new and different now? Actionable audience data, that’s what.

Every day, thousands of people visit Web sites and, like the scavenging critters that leave tracks in the February snow, users leave traces of themselves on every visit. Most publishers are content to let the snow melt without learning if it was a squirrel or a mountain lion that ate their rhododendron bush last night.

Some publishers, however, have begun to study visitor “tracks” and convert them into actionable audience data that can result in new ad sales. For example, PilotOnline (Hampton Roads, Va.) recently “tracked” human resources directors visiting its Web site and created an ad package it sold to a major advertiser wanting to reach this group.

By collecting, analyzing and sorting user data, Web publishers now have a unique ability to target audiences of interest to advertisers and reach them with little or none of the waste traditional offline media offer.

That’s what I mean by targeted marketing.

Observation 2: Data controls all media, not just the Internet.

Imagine you’re publisher of a monthly magazine. Twice yearly, you report your subscription and newsstand sales for the preceding six months. By the time your unaudited circulation statements are printed and distributed, your advertisers are looking at data that might be nine months old. It’ll be another year or more before those numbers are audited, printed and distributed. Your reps are knocking on media buyers’ doors trying to get insertion orders for campaigns that won’t appear until eight weeks from now, using 18-month-old data.

TV audiences are based on a small sample of people supposedly being honest when recording their viewing habits then projecting this data out to represent the nation’s viewing habits. This is not a process where “fresh audience data” even comes into play.

The online publishing space has a huge advantage over magazines and broadcasters in this one important respect. We have the ability to deliver accurate, actual user data in a more timely fashion than any other medium.

It’s all in the data.

Observation 3: There is no “next big thing.” There is only the consumer.

No medium owns its consumers; it earns them. The best publishers of anything can hope for is that audiences will give them a chance to earn their trust and loyalty. Publishers earn it by giving users real value, respecting their intelligence, time and privacy, and keeping them connected in ways that are ethical, entertaining, informative and useful.

Once you have the audience, you can think about “behavioral marketing” or “behavioral targeting.” It involves defining an individual as the sum of his or her actions online cross-matched with known demographic data about users—collected by applications like site registration, promotions, etc.—and serving them content or ads accordingly.

For example, if someone visits your travel section at least every week and your business section more frequently, and if they have also clicked on travel ads, you can reasonably infer that he or she is an active traveler and likely a business traveler with real value to advertisers. The theory behind “behavioral marketing” is that you should be able to target relevant offers about business travel to these people even when they are elsewhere on your site, such as checking the high school football scores or community events.

Most advertisers assume most publishers can do this today. But, most of you cannot do it, because your ad servers can’t execute at this level of targeting. While some think this is “the next big thing,” we know publishers who have moved on to more complex targeting than this.

TACODA works with a smart group of people at Belo Interactive in Dallas who used behavioral target and registration data on behalf of an auto dealer for an audience-targeted online ad campaign that exceeded national response norms by a stunning 2,200 percent. Here are the details:

DallasNews.com ran a campaign for a Mitsubishi dealer three ways: run of site, in the auto section, and outside the auto classifieds targeted to people who’d visited the section twice in the last 30 days. The site served Mitsubishi dealer ads the people in this latter group when they came back to the site and visited sections outside of automotive classified. This group returned a 7.7 percent click rate, which was more than 20 times the ROS rate, and more than the in-content click rate.

The dealer tracked all responses from eight different promotions running in different media simultaneously. The Belo Interactive campaign drew 44 percent of all telephone responses to the campaign from all sources, including print and radio.

After the campaign’s successful conclusion, Belo’s people decided to see how they might have done even better. They discovered by doing a registration data overlay that, had they also targeted the campaign to only residents of the Dallas-Fort Worth DMA, they might have increased the response rate from 7.7 percent to more than 9 percent. The advertiser is running continuously with them now and Belo is discussing additional targeting opportunities.

You can do this, too. You’ve already done the hard work of building a high quality site and attracting a loyal audience. The rest is just software and process and good creative thinking.

Observation 4: Search is here to stay, but don’t let it suck up all the ad dollars.

We’re fortunate to have search as a tool and revenue source. But what about those mom and pops we’ve turned over to Google for safekeeping? What happens when they are ready to start running real ads and they don’t know your sales reps or anything about your site? Use these partners wisely for your benefit, but don’t become too dependent on them.

One way to avoid that dependence is to show advertisers that by running targeted ads to people specifically interested in their products and services, they can get the performance of search plus the visibility and impact of an ad, as opposed to a text link. Try it with a client running contextual ads in real estate, for example. Offer to run a banner targeted to people who visit real estate. Compare results and see what happens.

Observation 5: Every online publisher is either building an audience database asset or planning for a sale or bankruptcy.

If you want to compete, you need to know your users intimately. Not just where they are going today and whether they clicked on an ad or not, but what they do over time on your site, what they are worth in dollars and cents to your site and how to capitalize on their loyalty and trust.

You can’t do this without an audience database that collects and integrates the data from your Web logs, ad server logs, registration system, offline subscriber lists, ecommerce customer files, and so on. When you integrate all of this data in unified profiles, and have the ability to target against large segments of consumers in this manner, you have all the power you need to thrive.

Finally, always remember Yogi’s observation that “Half the game is 90 percent mental.”

Bennett Zucker is Executive Director, Customer Success. A 25-year print and online media veteran, Zucker joined TACODA Systems, The Audience Management Company, in March 2003 as Executive Director of Customer Success, where he works with such leading publishers as USAToday.com, Tribune Interactive, weather.com and CondeNet on creating ad sales success using TACODA’s Audience Management System.

Zucker began his career as a magazine editor and writer, then moved to the business side as marketing manager with McGraw-Hill. Later, he rose from advertising manager to publisher of two monthly consumer magazines during six years at Rodale Press.

Beginning in 1990, Zucker headed such electronic publishing initiatives as Phillips Business Information’s electronic products group, and helped form CityMagNet, an online network of city and regional magazines in major markets around the U.S. when he led custom publishing for Philadelphia and other city magazines.