Though she never dealt with the international economy or interactive advertising campaigns, my grandmother did use her amazing wealth wisdom to solve an endless parade of family dilemmas (that my aunts will tell you were no less complex than, oh, say, NAFTA).

So let’s take a look at her chicken soup theory a little more closely:

We tend to get sick because we don’t listen to what our body tells us. We work late when we’re exhausted and then we eat take-out and hit up the vending machine when we should be nourishing our body … and inevitably, we get sick.

When I got sick, grandma would have me come over to eat some of her chicken soup.

But eating soup meant first waiting until it was just right. Next, eating chicken and vegetables along with the soup with a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. And finally … resting.

In essence, she just changed the bad behavior which caused us to get sick in the first place.

As we approach times of uncertainty in 2008, it’s also important for us to evaluate our behavior. Are we committing budgets to campaigns without testing our efforts? Are we developing social networking campaigns which do not engage our prospects just to say that we’re doing ‘something’ social? Are we running elusive video-branding campaigns with repurposed TV commercials?

If so, then it’s time to change our behavior.

What behavioral targeting has always offered is a way to engage with our target audience in a way that is in-line with their behavior. So if a consumer just happens to read a few reviews of laptops, then they’re probably at scouting out laptops to buy. And if they visit several Web sites about Hawaii, then they’re probably interested in taking a trip to Hawaii.

Though there could be other reasons why they’re reading up on laptops and Hawaii, the likelihood that they’re somewhere in the purchase process has been supported by a spate of recent studies.

To paraphrase a report by eMarketer’s David Hallerman, the three reasons he cites for gains in behavioral targeting are:

1.    Marketers are able to reach more engaged audiences in fewer advertising impressions with behavioral targeting.
2.    Publishers are able to monetize their ‘long tail pages’ – remnant inventory that is hard to sell without behavioral targeting.
3.    Users tend to find behaviorally targeted ads more relevant to their needs, and therefore more acceptable, even welcome.

As creatures of habit, it only makes sense to target our marketing efforts according to habits and behaviors. And in economically questionable times, stepping up every aspect of your game is more important than ever.

As Janet correctly noted, social networks are the key to demographic targeting. Because of their required sign-up process, only social networks provide reliable source for demographic targeting. Beyond the availability of data for targeting, social networks are also a treasure trove of behavioral data that can be layered on the demographic data to provide one of the best targeting opportunities available on the Internet.

So Janet is right to want to target social networks beyond the ones currently included in Google’s offering.

One solution that could potentially offer Janet what she is looking for would be data exchanges. But what are data exchanges?

They are exchanges that work between multiple ad networks and many publishers, enabling the data from one source to be utilized across the rest of the exchange.

That’s why data exchanges could aggregate data from multiple social networks and other publishers while working with multiple ad networks and advertisers.

Data exchanges also eliminate privacy concerns because the data transferred can be one isolated incident which is not personally identifiable. Furthermore, it is not likely that any social network will release any personally identifiable information to any third party source. And data targeting can work without the creation or use of user profiles and without cross-site information transfer.

Data exchanges would enable advertisers to target the greatest reach by targeting data across multiple ad networks simultaneously. Ad Networks could benefit by gaining access to users and publishers outside of their network. Publishers would be able to better target their advertising which will result in greater revenue. And advertisers would benefit from a data network with greater reach than any single ad network.

So Janet, in the future, look beyond Google for a data targeting exchange that will enable reaching all of the social networks you’re looking for.