There has been a lot of discussion lately about behavioral targeting and how it fits in to the targeting pantheon. Its an interesting discussion, because targeting is not the end goal, its using targeting to find people at the right time.

At Gupta Media, we use the term “Psychographic” targeting (new term under fierce discussion) for targeting users at the exact moment that they are thinking about a product. We see this online is during “search” activity, mostly on search engines, but it can manifest itself in different areas (i.e. reading white papers via a white paper syndication network like TechTarget). After psychographic targeting, we currently believe the next best targeting is “contextual” because if the content is relevant, their is an implication that the reader is interested in your product. A good example of this would be a person reading about running shoes, and Nike targeting them through contextual advertisements. They aren’t actively searching for Nike running shoes, but they are showing interest in running shoes. After contextual, we get into genre targeting (Nike running ads against gym ads, running trails, etc). Finally, the lowest form of targeting we use is demographic targeting (I call demographic targeting a “blunt” instrument). This is the most traditional form of advertising - Nike running ads that target men and women that are 18 -35 (or some other specific demographic segment).

So, the question becomes - where does “behavioral targeting” fit into this paradigm? Is it betweeen psychographic targeting and contextual targeting? If you watch users across sites, can you imply what they are thinking about ? Is it between genre & contextual, because contextual advertising has some definitely insight into a user’s current state of mind? Would love to know your thoughts.