Melissa: Thanks for participating in our third eChat. Today we'll be discussing behavioral targeting. Let me start by asking any of you: How do you use behavioral targeting? Can you offer some examples?

John-Scott: Shopping, degree of commitment, discount orientation, affinity. These are the types of behavior we are able to detect and respond relevantly to. Relevance increases conversion.

Toffer: Behavioral targeting is at the core of what ChoiceStream does. It's how we make personalized product recommendations for our customers like Overstock and Blockbuster. The beauty of the Web is that it provides a wealth of information about how a user is behaving. If you can use that information in real time to deliver personalized promotions, you can increase average revenue per session, total sales and repeat visits.

Ron: Our business model and technology enables us to track shopping behavior. Since we also have the user's home address as part of the experience, we are able to add location and shopping behavior to create a valuable targeted marketing opportunity.

Sarah: It also enables advertisers to reach audiences of interest beyond limited, and often expensive, contextually relevant inventory, thereby increasing frequency and the potential for cost efficiency.

John-Scott: We do things a little differently. As an example, let's say you run recruiting for Arizona State University located in beautiful, sunny Tempe, Ariz. Imagine a prospective student is just about to arrive at your Web site and you detect that they are from St. Louis, Miss., that they have looked at the Web sites for the University of Michigan, Creighton [University] and Purdue [University]. For each of those institutions, they navigated to the Fine Arts curriculum section. You also noticed that they had viewed both the national Delta Chi and Sigma Chi Fraternity Web sites. So, we know this prospective student is probably male, interested in the Fine Arts program and just might be interested in warmer weather!

Ron: Another unique attribute that RecycleBank provides is that we have a long-term contract with the user's city, so we capture our data over many years and can change and develop our marketing message with the growth and changing lifestyle of the user/household.

Melissa: When you talk about behavioral targeting, are you talking about using it for e-mail? Online display ads? Search? All of the above?

Sarah: At Mindset Media, we actually look beyond the face value of the behavioral information and examine total clickstream patterns that indicate someone's mind-set, or psychographic makeup.

Toffer: We use it to help our customers put personalized product recommendations on their Web sites, but also leverage e-mail, TV and mobile phones as customer touchpoints where personalized recommendations can be delivered.

John-Scott: We wouldn't welcome them with the same old one-size-fits-all Web site - it could also be used to change online display ads if you wanted to.

Sarah: We use it to amass large audiences of people that share personality traits that fit a particular brand or category. Like 2 million people who are very pugnacious (and more likely to own or want to own a truck).

John-Scott: Ahh, great Sarah! So we would work with Mindset Media to make the visitor's experience even more relevant -- the right truck models to match the purchase ecologies.

Jere: At Prospectiv, we use behavioral targeting to upsell and cross-sell our client offers based on both implied and implicit data points we have on our traffic.

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