Summit attendees debate the present and future of BT, talking about price, effectiveness and the best categories.

As attendees began to sit down at the roundtable and get comfortable, WhitePages.com SVP Susie Kang opened her Next Generation Behavioral Targeting (BT) session with a simple yet telling question: Who among the sellers sitting at the table has actually bought BT? The initial response was surprising: Nobody had purchased BT, although several of the agency buyers were actively planning to do so.

As the rest of the attendees arrived, it soon became clear that some of them had made BT-involved purchases-- some on ad "networks with limited targeting capability," according to one attendee, and some via Yahoo!'s registered user base. However, the first response suggests that no matter how much digital ink publications like iMedia Connection might have already spilled on BT, it is still a new tale to many marketers and advertisers.

Christopher Harris of Avenue A/Razorfish said that for a pharmaceutical advertiser the agency has, "a big commitment with one of the portals" and that "any of the CPA is BT" informed.

Scott Wensman of Tribal DDB noted that with BT "price is a consideration" and that "we think we're going to pay a premium to run BT segments."

Susie Kang then asked the table, "Does the increased price [for BT] convert to good ROI for your clients?"

Christopher Harris answered that it's "still early in the game" and that many advertisers don't feel that they yet have the results on BT, but thinks that ultimately BT means that advertisers will have less media waste.

On the seller side, Deepak Srinivasan of 24/7 Real Media said, "We definitely see a demand for BT, and… the value of that goes up tremendously when it's a real-time part of a greater whole."

Chelseah Perth of Advertising.com added that "the opportunity is limited but popular. Some of our choice is based on the clients' user populations."

Susie Kang then said, "From my perspective as a publisher, we've seen a lot of great response" to BT, but that limited inventory is limiting BT's growth. WhitePages.com has seen "tremendous response from new clients and existing clients," but "the jury's still out on what categories are going to perform best."

Deepak Srinivasan said that at 24/7, BT is "part of the lifecycle of customer behavior. For us, BT doesn't stand alone." Instead it is part of a suite of technologies that enable advertisers to target and optimize their targeting in real time.

Kang then asked Revenue Science director Aaron Dalin for his perspective.

Dalin replied that, "one measure of success is renewal business," which is mostly an indirect success marker. "We provide the technology. Publishers sell it. Advertisers renewing is the indicator of success."

Tribal DDB's Wensman asked Dalin to comment on inventory premiums.

Dalin replied, "We advise, but it's up to the publishers. The advice I typically give is that if CPM for run-of-site inventory is five dollars, and premium inventory has a CPM of $15, publishers should typically sell BT somewhere in between." In that example, a $10 CPM will wind up, "reaching the most valuable users of that segment."

Referring to a comment by the morning's keynote panelist Kate Sirkin, Kang said that "exposure does not equal engagement." And that's where BT fits in. "We can take all the behaviors of a customer… but there may be 10 different behaviors. That's how we can get beyond clickthroughs to the more engaged user."

But the question remains, will these more engaged users respond more to advertisers?

Kang then turned to the inventory question: Is there really an inventory crisis?

Revnue Science's Scott Greenberg replied that, "in-market auto sites" are "really, really constrained" with inventory, as well as financial and tech sites. "Those are all the usual suspects when you talk about constrained inventory."

Picking up on Greenberg's use of "in market," Kang then asked the table if there is a difference between "in session" and "next session or next visit." "The way I translate it," Kang said, "with in session, we're targeting the person during that same session, versus the return visit… the next time they come back, which may be 10 days later."

Greenberg noted that auto shoppers have a longer longitudinal window, "for auto, you can be in market for 10 weeks."

Aaron Dalin, also of Revenue Science, said, "There's a difference between somebody using a car configurator versus someone reading articles" about cars. "The configurator user is more in market."

In contrast, Greenberg said that for a low consideration purchase like movie tickets BT may not work very well.

"That's when in-session targeting gets more important," Susie Kang observed.

Avenue A/Razorfish's Christopher Harris noted that BT can create "a lot more work for the creative departments as things get increasingly more targeted, otherwise the creative gets less relevant." Asked if his agency was tweaking creative during campaigns, Harris replied, "not in pharma" due to the narrow legal rules about marketing pharmaceutical products. But in other verticals, like entertainment, tweaking an offer on the fly can be a powerful use of BT.
 
As time began to run short, Kang asked the table, "How do publishers get the word to sellers, and how do the sellers… interact with your clients on why BT should be part of the equation? What are the challenges that agencies face?"

Marlene Kruelle of Definition 6 observed that for some clients, "knowledge is very limited. We have to explain a lot in the client meeting." 

Others at the table also noted that the publishers could better identify where particular users are spending time on their sites, particularly when the market segment -- for, say, a relatively obscure medical problem -- has limited inventory. The publishers could also do more at-cost testing of BT for the advertisers as a way of encouraging them to invest more in it, the table agreed.

Turning to the attendees from Revenue Science, Tribal DDB's Scott Wensman asked, "How do you guys build your segments? What's the raw audience size" necessary to create a segment? 

Aaron Dalin replied that Revenue Science has data "on a rolling 12-week basis," and that there are six or seven different ways to build segments. The best use of BT involves understanding "the deep capabilities." The advertisers describe what the audience is, and then they "can build a customized segment for any campaign."

"So it's not a set 200 segments?" Wensman asked.

"No, not at all. It's highly customized," Susie Kang replied.

"I sometimes hear that as a frustration on the agency side because two different financial publishers may build and define their mutual fund segments differently, but you can build a customized segment in real time," Dalin said.

At the end of the discussion, one thing was clear: Managing a behavioral targeting campaign can afford advertisers a real-time opportunity to optimize results and significantly increase ROI, but doing so also requires a real-time management of the campaigns.

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