Being on the fairway consistently puts any golfer in a good mood. Marketers will hit their "fairway" in 2008, adding behavioral targeting to their contextual search efforts. For the uninitiated, behavioral targeting is the ability to deliver online ads to consumers based on their recent viewing behavior. Contextual targeting is the fancy term for search buys on Google, MSN and Yahoo.

AOL certainly believes in the future of behavioral targeting, having spent $275 million this year to buy Tacoda, the category leader. Tacoda claims to reach 120 million people in 31 discrete audience segments every month. eMarketer predicted this year that behavioral targeting will increase 10-fold over the next five years, growing from $350 million to $3.8 billion in ad spending. Other behavioral targeting firms, including Revenue Science, WhenU and newcomer Collective Media are expected to share in this growth.

A test we ran for Panasonic yielded 50 percent more imminent buyers of a particular consumer electronics product, making it a fair ways better than a simple search buy. If you haven't yet taken a swing with Tacoda and friends, put it on your short list for 2008.