The BBC reports that the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) has introduced a set of guidelines for behavioral advertising. Behavioral advertising covers a wide spectrum of marketing activities, with these guidelines clearly aimed at the “track everything you do online until we know your life better than you do” techniques like the controversial Phorm service so loved by my own ISP, BT. Today online advertising in the electronics industry is dominated by the pay-per-impression model that is simple but reletively untargeted. I’m sure that in years to come behavioral targeting will allow me to buy ads that only reach engineers who have read stories about specific techologies or products (tracked over several sites), so these guidelins will prove important as the foundations for what I’d call true behavioural advertising are laid in the electronics industry.
