Google's Behavioral Targeting Experiment

Another digital marketing post...

Google is now starting to get into the Behavioral space, according to this article.

As usual, there's a potential clash between privacy and targetability.
Google's being careful and very transparent about this, so it will be great to see how this works out. If they can show consumers that non-personally identifiable tracking is actually a good thing, then that opens the doors for advertising through other publishers and networks to be more readily accepted by users.

Of course there are always people like the one quoted in the article who say "If they asked people, 'Do you really want to be followed around and served ads,' most people would say no. Most of us don't really value advertising in any solid way."

Maybe Google needs to start charging for their services for those consumers who are concerned about privacy. No cookies (other than those necessary for basic login purposes), no sharing with third parties, virtually no advertising... but you have to pay, say, $5 a month for access to Gmail, YouTube, Google Docs, advanced search tools like Calculator, and the rest of Google's suite. If they don't value the advertising, at least maybe they'll start to value the things that it normally pays for.

Anyway, that's beside the point.
I'll definitely be trying out Google's BT capabilities (as an advertiser and as a consumer) when I get the chance.