Phil Leggiere has recently posted an interesting blog post for Behavioural Insider. He explains that behavioral targeting is driven by the premise that by paying attention to how people express their interests and needs, brands can connect and communicate more relevantly with the people who most want to hear what they want to say.

Unfortunately, advertisers and publishers too often artificially limit their ability to do just that by confining their definition of behaviour to a single dimension (such as clicks) in a single channel, online. Leggiere presents an argument from Robert Tas, CEO of Sportgenic who says that key to taking advertising targeting beyond its current situation is to pay attention to another component of behaviour: how media, all media, is consumed.

Tas believes that vertical ad networks need to learn to follow their vertical audience and its behaviours outside and beyond the online space. The move from single channel to channel-agnostic behavioural analytics, Tas says, is based on following where both publishers and consumers are already, and where advertisers increasingly want to be.

Jeff Bussgang has recently written a blog post for Seeing Both Sides on what he calls the Revenge of the Nerds, about how advertisers are  now being forced to go technical. He refers to a meeting he recently had with the CEO of one of the major advertising agencies and says that the advertising industry is now focusing on what he calls ‘nerd-like priorities’. Key to this, Bussgang says, is the advertising industry wresting control of data from publishers.

To illustrate this, Bussgang alludes to WPP’s acquisition of 24×7 and Publicis’ acquisition of Digitas. These agencies are changing their contracts to tighten the ownership of the data and prevent advertising networks, publishers and technology-media firms using the data for their own profit purposes.

In Bussgang’s words: “The advertising industry is under siege from the nerds” and now is the time for them to both work together to create the results their clients are pushing for. Advertising agencies should now be competing to recruit technical talent to win the battle to own all the incredible data which is being collected on human behaviour online.

TechCrunch is reporting that search engine Yahoo! has disconnected its ads in RSS service that enables network publishers to insert contextual advertising into syndicated content and get a piece of the action thanks to a revenue-sharing programme.

In an e-mail notice to network members, Yahoo! recommended members remove current Content Match tags from their RSS pages but assured them that it will continue to invest in more broadly used ad products for their publishing partners, Sponsored Search and Content Match. Yahoo! also stated that it’s excited about upcoming improvements to these ad products in 2009.

• Yahoo! Stops Serving Ads In RSS Feeds (ajax-blog.com)
• Yahoo Says Goodbye to Ads In RSS Feeds (montysmegamarketing.com)