I agree with some that we need to move out of our industry jargon-laden world and start using words and ideas that we can understand as consumers. Behavioral Targeting is one of those phrases I love to hate – and despite the name of MediaPost’s pub on the matter, Behavioral Insider, today’s article by Steve Smith is well worth a read.

His piece discusses Google’s new behavioral offering and the access it provides to consumers to customize their interests, which has gotten some press recently. Mark Zagorski of eXelate also mentions in the comments that not only does Blue Kai offer a feature that lets users express their data preferences but so does eXelate [disclaimer: we work with both companies and Google of course] — apologies guys, but hate to break it to you that you could offer almost anything to users and it still isn’t Google. So it’s newsworthy. That being said, Google more than almost anyone has to dance around and think very long and hard about how any cookie- or data-related policy or product they adopt/launch. Makes sense.

In general, hopefully everyone will realize that more accurate (and not necessarily, more) data can make a big difference and actually turn ads into something of value for people. But I wouldn’t count on this, from Steve’s article:

In response to last week’s exploration of BlueKai’s system, Scott Milener of AdRocket said “These dreams of consumers managing their ‘ad’ profiles is absurd – will NEVER happen en masse. People just want to ignore ads.” This is true now, of course. And in the end, these sorts of preferences sites may just be like privacy policies, more for show and ass-covering than for real use.

I don’t think it’s that people want to ignore ads – they just do because they are not compelling enough, AND they interrupt people actually looking for things and consuming content. So we need to get smarter about figuring out which ads people think they ignore but have a real effect, and the places where ads can go and actually deliver real value to people. Targeting is part of the puzzle, but please let’s stop calling it Behavioral and start thinking how we can get the consumer to be part of the discussion.