Display Advertising Jargonwatch: Is Behavioral Targeting Now Called Real-Time Advertising?

It can be tough to keep up with the online ad industry's jargon.  There have been many new technologies and business models, each adding to the pile of terms already being generated by the ad business.  This is to be expected - advertising and marketing have the job of creating language for effective communications.

Just to name a few terms, we've seen push, contextual advertising, surround session, rich media, interstitial, permission marketing, and more.  On the technology side, we've seen ad networks, DSPs, dynamic ad creation platforms, retargeting, and all manner of techniques enabled by server technologies.

A recent term, behavioral targeting (BT), describes an advertiser of web publisher using a web user's history to serve relevant ads of custom content.

There has been some discussion concerning BT, centered on the way the web works.  Collecting usage histories for users is sometimes seen as a consumer privacy issue, even when operators do so in an ethical manner. BT advertising attracts this attention in part because it is expected to grow by 21% this year and pass the $1 Billion mark.

One thing that's interesting is that David Hallerman at eMarketer spotted a piece in the New York Times last week that probably should have used the term, but didn't.  Instead of BT, the term used was real-time advertising.

In his piece Is Behavioral Targeting Outmoded?, Hallerman examines what might be yet another industry evolution, more in jargon than in underlying technique.  It's worth checking out.