It's time for the creative industry to catch up to media and media agencies when it comes to behavioral targeting. What is the problem? Certainly one of the issues we have is that BT is still relatively new, so it is not unusual that we are still trying to figure out the best creative executions. Also, in many cases, media agencies and creative agencies have been separated, so while the media side of the business has advanced, the creative side has lagged. So far, BT has been a media issue and a media technique, not a creative one.

In the world of contextual placements, creative agencies work closely with their media agency counterparts. They spend considerable time and resources developing creative executions that can best exploit the website or the content where their ads will be placed.

For example, a creative agency will go to great lengths to tailor a luxury car ad to a golf publication or golf website and end up with creative that would be very different if it was generically targeted to all active athletes. This is a big part of what they do.

It is not yet the same when it comes to behavioral campaigns. Even though behavioral targeting companies can now segment consumers according to many different behaviors and separate these from the broad consumer groups that most marketers and agencies are used to dealing with, much of this targeting goes to waste since there is very rarely unique creative designed to exploit it.

Now is the time to bring creative into the BT process. Now is the time to focus on aligning messages to target groups of people, not just groups of pages. Now is the time to test, refine and repeat the act of targeting different creative messages to different behavioral audience segments. Now is the time to start institutionalizing creative-driven BT, just like it is being institutionalized on the media side. Now is the time to create some successes and celebrate them. How can this be implemented?

I'll show you.

Author notes: Dave Morgan is the chairman of TACODA. Read full bio.