Behavioral targeting can go beyond “did someone see that banner before?” or “did someone go through a specific navigation pathway?” It can even go beyond purchase patterns on a retail website. Some advertisers have looked to coordinate offline initiatives with online to create multi-channel behavioral targeting processes. The more data that an advertiser possesses about its customers, the more it converts that data into actionable knowledge, and the more it can integrate multi-channel behavioral targeting.

The most aggressive online advertisers are beginning to see that they can pull various sources of information about a customer together. For those companies that already have all of the information in one system, such as eCRM, extracting it to create models of customers is arguably an easier step. Many direct marketers -- such as the catalogers -- already do this.

Companies like NextAction and Abacus (now Epsilon) combine profiles of people that you provide from the offline world and return more comprehensive profiles of the customer by combining your data with that of many other marketers. From there you have great customer segments with which you can create models, such as high-value customers or low-value customers, groupings by shopping habits, product preferences, et cetera. Marketers leverage this information to deploy holistic behavioral targeting, targeting preferences internally and externally: site-side and web-side.

Unfortunately, few advertisers have this competency and it is the unnecessary isolation of these technologies that is keeping the rest of us from advancing more quickly.

The cookie battle
Tagging users based on an anonymous membership to a customer segment and targeting those customers behaviorally anywhere on the web requires a first-party cookie. The brick wall that separates each behavioral targeting technique must come down for all of this to work. Third-party cookies keep the technologies isolated because no two vendors can read the information form or write information to another vendor’s cookie without the delegated permission to do so. Tacoda is not granting the rights to Omniture to read/write the Tacoda cookie. Why? For one thing, Tacoda builds a data asset associated with its cookie. Every individual it tags through pixels online becomes a profile in the network, and Tacoda accumulates a data asset of profiles across its network for future advertisers. Omniture is not letting Advertising.com read the Omniture cookie because that would enable them to have access to the Omninture clients’ site-wide data. Vendors are not playing nicely with others, and the advertisers are suffering as a result. There is more to it actually, but for the purposes of this article this suffices as an explanation.

The cookie solution
First-party cookies, however, offer a different opportunity. If everyone were to use the advertiser’s cookie, none of the vendor-specific data assets would be exposed. Revenue Science would not have to worry about the exposure of its data assets generated by all of its other advertisers. With first-party cookies, WebTrends would not have to worry about all of its other clients’ data being compromised, and it could leverage the information written to one advertiser’s cookie by other associated vendors to further extend the targeting and analytical application.

Push your vendors to consolidate their delivery mechanisms on your first-party cookie. Delegate the right to read and write information to your cookie. CRM systems do this today. So do content management tools. Ad server TruEffect, my former employer, leverages information written to the first-party advertiser cookie by the CRM system to define targeting buckets. That drives both new customer acquisition and customer re-targeting.

Adopting that sort of implementation opens doors for you. Then you can make your other vendors get in line.