The world's biggest online auction house knows a lot about its users' bidding, browsing and buying habits, and now eBay is leveraging this knowledge in behavioral ad targeting both on and off the site. The company is coupling this BT rollout with a new AdChoice opt-out program. AdChoice is hoping to chart the next stage in privacy and behavioral targeting by making the model as transparent as possible and the opt-out option clear and ever-present.

YouTube debates and the power of the blogosphere are two signs that online is becoming integral to the American political process. Yet until now political advertising strategy has remained largely TV-centric. In 2008, behavioral targeting will begin to change that, predicts Dakota Sullivan, CMO of Blue Lithium.

Lead generation is a discrete wing of interactive marketing, and so the ways in which it uses behavioral targeting are a bit different as well. Active Response Group uses behavioral tracking to enhance its ability to gather qualified leads from its banner network. In a recent campaign for Leo Schachter Diamonds, ARG not only generated hundreds of thousands of leads, but also used precise targeting and an ongoing relationship with the targets to move them into stores as well. ARG CEO Brad Powers explores how online behaviors generate leads.

Not all behavioral targeting involves media buying, Offermatica CEO Matt Roche reminds us. Coming out of Mediapost's own Behavioral Marketing Forum last month, Roche was eager to widen the conversation about BT beyond the hot news about Tacoda/AOL, perennial concerns about scale, and the privacy hot button. Engaging users require a more engaged marketing effort, Roche likes to say. He works with CNet, eLoan, MusiciansFriend.com, among others and thinks marketers need to leverage more effectively the profiles of their own customers at their own sites. We asked him to scratch that surface for us with a few recent examples.

Variety is the spice of life. One of the most daunting challenges of ecommerce sites, however, is to shape the seemingly limitless variety of potential page elements into just the right mix for just the right customer. To do so, marketers need to learn to integrate statistical analysis with behavioral segmentation, as Jim Wehman, vice president of global strategic marketing at Digital River, explains.

We interrupt out usual Q&A programming here at Behavioral Insider for a public service announcement. The FTC wants YOU! Earlier this week, the Federal Trade Commission announced it would hold a two-day Town Hall on Nov. 1-2 specifically on the privacy issues surrounding "behavioral advertising" at FTC headquarters in Washington D.C. The full announcement is here, and it outlines an agenda of questions that range from nuts and bolts about the technology behind behavioral targeting to anticipated changes in data-gathering techniques as the technologies evolve in coming years.

Digitally enabled consumer behavior continues to evolve further and further away from the passive couch potato paradigm of yore, as omni-attentional media users become ever more adept at shifting between media and multitasking among them. But till now, as Chirag Patel, CEO of MeMedia, explains, behavioral targeting strategies have lagged far behind actual consumer behavior, stuck in siloed media compartments. The time has come, he argues, for a multimodal targeting across channels.

How many impressions do you need to serve to a past visitor before you admit diminishing returns? That is the question Andrea Palmer, manager of interactive services, Siquis, Ltd., and her colleagues asked of their retargeting program for Spirit Airlines. When they ran the numbers on reach and frequency and discovered how many times customers were seeing the same ad, a radical reduction in the retargeting spend produced a surprising effect: none at all. Palmer tells us what they learned.

By reorienting targeting from content pages to consumers themselves, behavioral targeting radically frees marketers from traditional ad placement constraints. Thus far, however, the methodology has been seen as too uncontrollable for most brand advertisers. The key to applying BT to branding needs lies in tying more advanced consumer segmentation to better inventory forecasting and optimization, as Jarvis Coffin, CEO of Burst Media, explains.