The other week, I attended Digiday:Target. It was a great conference with a lot of interesting information, but I left wondering if targeted advertising is really ready for prime time. Sure, innovators in large corporations might be able to use it, but what about the rest of us? Today, I will attend the Digital Publishing and Advertising Conference, wondering the same thing.

Before I go into details, let me present a few terms. In a sense, just about all advertising is targeted, just as almost all media is social. Standing in movie line on a Friday night with buddies years ago was a social event. So was sharing sections of the Sunday paper on the beach. Yet social media has come to mean using specific digital tools to connect and share media. The same seems to be the case with targeted advertising. The media buyer deciding whether to buy on television, radio, or in a newspaper was targeting his buy. It was further targeted based on the expected demographics of people that listened to specific stations at specific times, or read specific sections of specific newspapers. Now, targeted advertising seems to be focused on targeting a media buy on specific data that has been gathered from people using the web to hit a specific audience. Typically, this is thought of in terms of more than just targeting based on a search term.

Targeting on search terms is easy. I can go to Google Adwords, target my ad by location, limited demographics and then keywords. I can make my media buy as large or small as I want and I don’t have to deal with all kinds of pesky complications.

Likewise, if I want to get people to like a page on Facebook, I can do some very nice targeted advertising. They give me a choice of cost per click or cost per thousand impressions. They tell me exactly how many people I am targeting. For example, as I write this article, there are 200 adults in Woodbridge, CT that meet my test criteria. These criteria can include or exclude people based on their friendships or likes. This can get pretty powerful if you do something like target adults in Connecticut that like Dogs on Facebook. The problem is that you may want to reach a lot of other people in Connecticut that like dogs but aren’t on Facebook.

Neither of these examples gets to the real power of targeted advertising. Amiad Solomon of Peer39 spoke about semantic advertising. Simple keyword searches do not recognize irony or sarcasm and an advertiser might not want their ad on a site that is very snarky about the advertisers’ products. Peter Fernquist of Collective spoke about a ‘keyhole effect” when you take the intersection of too much data, narrowing down the search too far. Others spoke about measuring the effect of advertising campaigns and being able to adjust campaigns accordingly or of how to use exchanges to get the best price per ad.

Unfortunately, getting started with targeted advertising seems to be much more difficult than placing an ad on Google or Facebook. In the parlance of the conference, I posted a message on Twitter saying that I was interested in buying some ‘audience’ and invited any attendees selling to contact me.

Perhaps no one on the sell side was on Twitter, because I was only approached by one person; someone that worked for a data seller. While the potential buyer of audience needs to understand the quality of the data that is used in buying audience, and may need to be able to make informed decisions about which data to use in buying audience, the data is not something I would want to buy directly. Instead, I would want to go to a site where I can choose data from various sources and make my buy. The woman selling data gave me her personal views about which exchanges and networks were the best, and I later chased a couple of them down. I explained my project and asked for someone to contact me after the conference about how I could get going buying small audiences. So far, the only response I’ve received has been a NDA from one firm. That might work well for very large and sophisticated buyers, but for the average buyer, it is a big hurdle.

So, I will end off with my same request. I want to buy some audience. I would like to make small buys, perhaps lots of them. I would like the process to be as close to self service as possible and I would like to have as much access and control over the data I use as possible. Contact me if you think you can convince me that targeted advertising is ready for prime time.