Interactive marketers shifting focus from quantity of page views to quality.

In the old days, online publishers had one purpose: delivering quantities of page views to marketers. Today their focus has shifted to delivering high quality viewers of those pages.

This tectonic shift is called behavioral targeting, or BT for short -- an acronym coined by a panel of experts at the Interactive Advertising World conference in New York on Monday.

Dave Morgan, TACODA founder and CEO, said that these days agencies are shifting from quantity to quality in order  to ensure the quality of their programs.

Cari Weissberg, VP and Interactive Media Director at Hill Holliday, added that it's all about "understanding where a person's interests lie based on their previous online behavior."

Dave Hills, President of Media Solutions at 24/7 Real Media, said that there are two variables in the equation. The first, he said, is understanding what kind of content your target audience is going to want to go and see. The second variable is segmenting the audience to control how frequently consumers are exposed to a marketer's message.

On the client-side on the panel, Weight Watcher's director of eCRM Mark Creasy, added, "Make sure you segment from a product standpoint but also a consumer interest standpoint."

The one mistake marketers make when thinking about behavioral targeting is assuming that the effectiveness comes from subjecting consumers to messages in context. In reality, behavioral marketing has proven effective out of context as well. It is, after all, about targeting people based on their interest, not their location. "Out of context can be more meaningful," but the challenge is creative, the panel agreed.

"Tweaking creative to anticipate [consumer's interests] when they're out of context performs much better," Morgan said.

Weissberg said that out of context behavioral targeting providers marketers with a tremendous leaning opportunity to test the effectiveness of different creative executions on different audiences, because, as Weight Watchers' Crease said, "oftentimes initial assumptions about what creative works for what segment are wrong."

The panel also briefly turned their attention to some of the obstacles and problems currently plaguing the industry, namely spyware and pop-ups. Speaking of spyware, which a lot of people erroneously associate with behavioral targeting providers, Morgan said that "bad actors with bad practices that consumers don't like" are putting all marketers -- not just behavioral targeting practitioners -- in danger.

When it came to the most effective ad formats, there was a clear consensus among the panelists: "stop the pop-ups." As Morgan said, "you don't have to be over-the-top intrusive if you use behavioral targeting, and if you're relevant."

Beyond that, Hills concluded, "it's just common sense."