Consumers today are in the focus of a wide range of companies in a more and more global world, all of which implies an increase of marketing activities and hence an increase of advertising effort. Hundreds or even thousands of advertising messages are put in front of consumers every day through various media channels. However, every targeted customer has a very limited ability of perceiving advertising messages and even a smaller percentage of what has been recognized is considered as being relevant. Therefore consumers quite often feel harassed and overloaded by the mass of information, the quality of advertising and the context in which it is shown, and react protective towards advertising, especially when they do not belong to the target group of the advertised product or service. This implies a great amount of budget wastage and a potential damage to brand images, since too many consumers are targeted with the wrong advertising message. Furthermore media consumption has changed over the years, while the consumption of TV for instance remains stable, the internet consumption increases dramatically, in the younger target groups it has already outgrown the TV consumption, and therefore an attenuation of this trend can be expected. This means more and more prospective consumers will spend more and more time online and are therefore important potential targets for advertising campaigns. Keeping in mind the negative consequences of the irrelevant and too intense advertising the question arises if there is a way to avoid the drawbacks of offline media and use the opportunities offered by online media. The necessity of defining the right target group for an advertising campaign is as undoubted as the difficulties implied in that process, the end product being able to target the right persons online. Behavioural targeting might offer a way to analyse online media and therefore to contribute to the requirements for optimal media planning in order to achieve a high degree of efficiency. Against the background of the increasing interest in behavioural targeting an examination of its potential importance for marketing will be conducted in this study in order to asses if behavioural targeting can increase the efficiency of media planning in online media. The foundation is provided by the description of media planning in general, its objectives including the target group segmentation, media strategy and selection programmes and concluding by summarizing the requirements for optimal media planning. In order to systematize the subject area of behavioural targeting an insight into online advertising is provided. This study aims to preserve an international scope, however due to the fact that the actual maturity of the online media industry is at very diverse stages worldwide, focus will be on the U.S. and selected countries in Europe such as Germany, France, the UK and Scandinavia.

Text Sample: Chapter 3.1, The importance of online advertising: The amount of media effort has drastically increased in the last years within all types of media. This has resulted in a situation where the audience is not just limited in the capacity to capture advertising messages, it even refuses to do so on a massive scale. Therefore the new keywords are individualisation and personalisation. While traditional offline media work through the ‘push-principle’, meaning that a mass communication and marketing is only directed at the prospect consumer through broad-casting with little or no interaction, the new media internet works with the ‘pull-principle’, meaning the individual user pulls the content and related advertising into attention through his own selection. On the Internet the consumer has the possibility to interact and influence actively, opening the possibility of one-to-one communication, but he can also be targeted with mass communication, the one-to-many communication. The greatest improvement gained by online advertising is therefore the possibility to create a personal and individual communication between consumer and advertiser, which functions in both directions. The ‘Digital Influence Index Study’ from June 2008 which has addressed the issue of understanding the role of the internet in the lives of consumers in the UK, Germany and France is based on an online survey among a representative sample of nearly 5000 internet users across the mentioned countries between December 2007 and January 2008 and shows very well the changed picture within the media landscape. The most interesting finding is: The internet is by far the most important medium in the lives of European consumers – but companies are underinvesting in that influence.” The Internet is twice as influential as TV and has ten times the influence of print media, however the global online advertising spending accounts only for 7-8% of the total advertising market. Reich (2006) arrives at the same conclusion stating that the advertising impact is higher within online advertising than traditional media. The worldwide online advertising spending added up to 32.867.900 in 2007, compared to 9.451.300 in 2002 – an increase of 350% in five years. So online advertising is experiencing strong growth but as mentioned a big discrepancy still exists between online ad spend and online media consumption and advertising effectiveness. The online advertising market can sensibly be divided into the U.S. and Europe, since the rest of the world is currently not nearly as advanced as these markets and can therefore not provide a foundation for the examination of the actual state of affairs. Europe in itself is also very diverse in its development. Therefore the U.S. market has grown much faster than the European one with total internet advertising revenues of .5 billion in 2005 forecast to grow by nearly 500% to .300 billion in 2012. In contrast Europe can be seen as a patchwork with its countries at different stages of development and divided by language barriers. The ‘digital giants’ in Europe are the UK, France and Germany, which account for more than 85% of online advertising spending, furthermore the Scandinavian countries grow rapidly, while other countries still have to cross the tipping point in order to realize a substantial growth within their digital markets. This circumstance causes some heterogeneity in the European market but is forecasted to balance out within the next few years. So although online advertising spending is rapidly growing, from the researchers point of view advertisers are still ‘underspending’ – but this is very likely to change: Advertising spend eventually synchronize with shifts in consumer attention from television to other media formats”.

• Behavioural Targeting

• Online-Marketing

• Media Planning

• Internet

• consumer

• advertising

Alica Klever, geb. 1982, studierte International Business Administration an der Universität Hamburg, Abschluss 2008.