Getting a lot of email questions from the last post. . . so I dug around try to figure it out. . . found this but didnt help too much so I asked around for a no bullshit answer. This is basically what I gathered, there are two kinds of behavioral ad targeting

1) Bullshit Behavioral - Basically what Claria is doing, serving ads to you when you are surfing another website. Using the content/category of another site you are on to serve you relevant ads. Some times this might include serving you travel ads two or three pages after you left Expedia. More sophisticated ones combine a few websites and do some calculationg around what that means as far as your likelihood to click on an ad (silicon.com + travelocity = United Ticket to SJC). No even a simple implementation of a logit model, mostly hardcoded.

2) Wanna Be Amazon Behavioral - Think of the way Amazon serves you up product recommendation, but instead serve up banner or text ads instead. Using (People who bought product X also bought product Y) and applying it for ads (People who clicked on ad X also clicked on ad Y).

So there you go, I’m sure other people have their own secret sauce they dont want to share with me, but at this point doesnt seem like such a black box, rocket science, or breakthrough at all.