At Online Marketing World, we’ve been speaking to many potential clients and partners and one thing that has really resonated is the move from demographic based behavioral targeting to contextual targeting. At Baynote, we’ve been championing contextual targeting for product and content recommendations over the last 3 years. Initially, this wasn’t a popular position, likely due to a lack of technologies on the market being able to distinguish one context of a user from another. However, over the last year, the success of contextual targeting and the failure of demographic based targeting has ushered in a new era, one where Context is King.

Yesterday, one of the conference attendees that visited our booth created a blog post explaining her take on targeting technologies, but on a personal level.

My favorite part of Baynote’s technology: it ignores demographics. Yes! When are people going to figure out that this is an individualistic age? Advertisers, you are wasting your dollars on serving me with endless weight-loss and dating ads. Not all 27-year old females are the same!

I’d have to agree with this point, not all 27 year old females are the same. Not simply because I’ve seen our technology benchmarked against demographic or profile based targeting technologies(which I have), but also because my 27-year old wife would have me sleeping on the couch if I said otherwise.

If you are a new reader, or would like more background on our contextual targeting approach, check out our whitepaper “In Search of The Human Element.”