Behavioral Targeting in banner advertising is not new. I have a presentation somewhere from Advertising.com (owned by AOL/Time Warner) who promote their behavioral targeting technology as a means to target banner adverts across the web - this being achieved by pixels (cookies) being downloaded to your browser.
They create profiles of users who visit certain types of websites (e.g. mainly female etc.) then by interest (holiday's) to serve the best matching creative - so when Mrs A. hops onto ebay she gets served banners about holidays with creative designed for women.
Phorm seems to be the next level of sophistication by learning your search patterns and thus allowing advertisers to bid on keywords that broadly match your terms so that if I search via a participating ISP (BT are currently evaluating their test run) 'lawn mowers' in the last 24 hours and I visit say multimap - i'll get ads from Flymo - cool!
As a digital marketeer I love this and as a consumer I have no problem so long as my details are not stored anywhere. After all as I register with sites I don't know and when I make a purchase I sharing personal financial details.
Under the watchful eye of the guilty conscious privacy lobbyist - Phorm can only go further than any other platform to encrypt personal data. I bet they'll go further than Google. In fact if you have a Google account and you leave yourself logged in go an look at your web history (held for years in my case).
Of course I want to know my details are scrambled but Phorm will be luck to get out of the blocks now the EU are getting involved.
Listed to Rory Cellan-Jones (BBC techology correspondents) radio snippet.
Give me a better targeted experience any day; but do let people opt-in and out easily.
@MylesDavidson
