Oh, Behave!

So much flap has been in the press regarding behavioral targeting and privacy.  Most of the flap has been on the B2C side of things – which is to be expected when you are dealing with naive, impulsive consumers.  Advertising is painted as the boogeyman in this situation and vast data mining conspiracies are hinted at by those that purportedly champion individuals and freedom.

Should anyone get shrill if behavioral targeting is deployed byB2B marketers for the SMB market?  The Marketing Consigliere hopes not because “BT4SMBB2B” holds a lot of promise (although maybe not as an acronym!).

This week such promise seems to become closer to reality – Inflection Point Media (IPM) announced an “intent-driven” ad network to recognize and serve ads for almost 32 million online B2B visitors to member sites that include American City Business Journals, SBTV.com and StartUpNation.com.   IPM leverages search and behavioral data to identify small and medium business buyers and serves ads that are relevant to a visitor’s established procurement objectives while the procurement cycle is still in play. The illustration from their website below gives the 10,000 foot view:

A member of the Behavioral Targeting Standards Consortium,  IPM is fledgling but has a lot things going for it – an energetic management team, fundng from American City Business Journals, and an advisor that the Marketing Consigliere is very pleased to have had recent acquaintance with – Mark Walsh, the CEO of GeniusRocket, a very brilliant crowdsourcing play for the creative world, and a extremely connected and tech-savvy professional.

This should be an interesting development over the course of 2009.