A group of leading businesses and industry associations in the online advertising sector, the Australian Digital Advertising Alliance (ADAA) published Australia’s first self-regulatory Guideline for companies engaged in third party online behavioural advertising (OBA) last month.

For those who aren't au fait with behavioural advertising, it is essentially a clever way for online publishers (such as Yahoo) to offer a more effective way of promoting the right adverts to the right Internet users. By building up a profile of your activity across the network, publishers are able to better understand your interests and thus able to serve ads which are more suitable for your profile.

As marketers in the digital space, we look at maximising our client's marketing dollars by trying to ensure that their display adverts are seen by as many relevant eyes as possible. One key to this success is by planning their campaign to run across the best possible publishing networks that meet the tastes of their target audience. This is all good and well when you have a niche campaign but when those targeted networks don't get the impressions required to hit targets you need to look outside. That's where behavioural targeting can offer you the volume of impressions without a hit or miss strategy.

As part of the ADAA's initiative they have created the website Your Online Choices aimed at informing consumers about how behavioural targeting works and giving them options as to protect their privacy if they so wish.

The move to a more transparent relationship between advertisers, advertising agencies, publishers and consumers shows the coming of age for digital marketing in my opinion. A democratic society calls for democratic advertising.