Here’s the basic marketing description for this session, to start off with:

The days of targeting searchers only via keywords are coming to an end. Now search engines are giving you the ability to target searchers by age, gender and other demographics. In addition, search profiling makes it possible to target searchers with ads long after they’ve done a particular search. Say someone searches for information about a new car. New programs allow you to show them ads based on that search behavior days after the initial query was done. Learn more about products and strategies, in this session.
Moderator:
Detlev Johnson, VP, Director of Consulting, Position Technologies
Speakers:
Kevin Lee, Executive Chairman and Co-Founder, Did-it.com
Danielle Leitch, EVP, Client Strategy, MoreVisibility
Jed Nahum, Director of Product Management, MSN Search  (speak with when session is done)
Roy Shkedi, CEO, AlmondNet
Dana Todd, Founding Partner, SiteLab International, Inc.

The large room where this session was held was so packet that in was impossible for me to get a seat and there were probably 2,000 - 3,000 people in the packed room. I’s say that demographic profiling is HOT.  

Jen Nahum of MSN kicked off the session with by announcing they were opening up their new AdCenter tool to anyone at the show over the next couple of days (and to stop by their booth at SES to get the details).  I missed most of the MSN presentation as I arrived late.

Next, a heavily accented, Roy Shkedi spoke about his company’s offerings centered around AlmondNet (why is it called that?  What’s the relationship to an Almond?  Don’t know).   AlmondNet is supposed to be a new distribution channel focusing focusing on behavioral marketing.  Roy made a statement but did not give the source of this information:

"40% of Internet advertising money is spent on search engine marketing while people spend only 5% of their time on search engines of all their time online"

I’m not someone who would throw a statement like that out without having the data to back that up, but Roy did.

"clicks from behaviorally targeted ads were clicked on about the same number of times as untargeted ads but converted 4 to 5 times higher than untargeted ads"

Now, that is interesting!   That made sense to me and would explain why personalized content does not always seem to be clicked on as much as one would hope.   According to Roy, most of the magic happens after they click to go the site.  "it’s the quality of the purchase intent profile" that’s the main reason the behaviorally targeted responders converted at such a high rate.

Niche Vertical searches is the wave to the future because the Niche Engines have a lot  more information about your behavior than the typical search engine.