According to panelists speaking at the OMMA Behavioral Conference yesterday, “behavioral marketing” from mobile devices is not yet ripe enough for practical widespread use, but they all concluded that ISP-based behavioral targeting “will not be viable in the near future because of privacy concerns.”
The one day conference at hotel Nikko in San Francisco brought to center stage the practice of behavioral tracking, which now forms the bedrock of content and retail sites throughout the web. As the director of the panel discussion put it, “Recommendation engines, contextual links, user logs, social media, audience profiling, content management, site optimization tools, are all now build upon a foundation of data about how people really shop, read, and interact online.”
As we already know (and all too well), delivering targeted ads to mobile devices is advantageous to mobile advertisers in myriad ways. For starters, more and more consumers on a daily basis are using mobile devices to access the Internet and shop, which leaves a virtual breadcrumb trail of valuable user data that is interpreted into behavioral data. According to Elgin Kim, the head of sales for Nokia Interactive, “Nokia achieved conversion rates of 40% with ads targeted using behavioral data about people who watched movie trailers on their mobile devices.”
Although the panel discussion shed light on the many ways that the US lags behind the rest of the world (mostly Asia and Europe) with mobile marketing penetration, mobile ad firms in the states are expected to do the most in coming years to advance the practice of behavioral marketing, which could do more than just about anything else to advance mobile marketing as a whole in the United States.
