Behavioural targeting turns a person’s past behaviour into instructions for what they should see next.
The digital advertising problem is not only that there are too many messages. It is that the message can be selected for a particular person using a profile built from their behaviour. Behavioural targeting is the practice of observing or inferring interests and characteristics from activity, then using those inferences to decide which advertisements to show and when.
The inputs may include pages visited, searches, clicks, purchases, location, device information, app activity, or interactions with other services. A platform or intermediary combines these signals into audience categories or predictions. The advertiser does not necessarily need to know the person’s name. It needs a system that can recognise a relevant pattern and place a message in front of the person most likely to respond.
This differs from contextual targeting. Contextual targeting places an advertisement because of the subject of the page or programme being viewed. Behavioural targeting places it because of what the system believes about the viewer, based on activity across time or services. The distinction changes the object being sold. The market is no longer only access to a relevant environment. It is access to a predicted person.
Behavioural targeting can make advertising more relevant, but relevance is not the same as consent, benefit, or truth. The Federal Trade Commission’s report on data brokers describes an industry that collects and combines consumer information, often outside a direct relationship with the people described, and recommends greater transparency and control. Behavioural targeting therefore sits at the intersection of advertising, profiling, privacy, and power. It makes private behaviour legible to systems designed to influence future behaviour.
The final target is not a fixed identity. It is a probability. Each response becomes another signal that can refine the profile, alter the next selection, and make the system appear to know the person better than the person knows the system. The practical consequence is that attention becomes a feedback loop between observation and persuasion.
*Source: Federal Trade Commission, Data Brokers: A Call For Transparency and Accountability, 2014.