Target Advertising | featured news

After years of promises and false starts, TV commercials targeted at individual homes may finally be ready for prime time. DirecTV Group is planning the biggest rollout yet of "addressable ads," allowing advertisers to reach close to 10 million homes with commercials tailored to each household. Dog owners, for instance, could see ads for dog food, not kitty litter, while families with children could be shown minivan spots.

Akamai’s real-time ad targeting solution could well be an important growth driver in the future for the company given the growing importance of behavioral targeting technology in the context of web advertisement. Companies such as Amazon and Google currently use similar technologies to identify user behavior and then offer suggestions or products that might interest users.

Federal regulators are proposing to create a "Do Not Track" tool for the Internet so that people could prevent marketers from tracking their Web browsing habits and other online behavior in order to target advertising....