NEW YORK – The ability of new media to monitor what consumers are doing is fueling the interest in “behavioral targeting,” a new type of consumer advertising.

The Microsoft Corporation is investing in “well-targeted advertising,” said CEO Steven Ballmer, “as aggressively as we’ve ever invested in anything,” he said. Its acquisitions include the $6 billion purchase in August of aQuantive, a leader in online advertising, reports The New York Times.

Roger Adams, senior vice president and CMO at Home Depot, described how the company regarded its Web site as “a learning laboratory” because it spends more time and money on understanding the customer.

One finding was that the underlying component of the emotional connection to the brand is the power of ‘I did it,’ Adams added, just as the ownership of a home becomes very personal because it is personally created.

“We’re experimenting with a lot of behavioral targeting, online and offline,” Adams said, noting that the retailer is moving away from a “one size fits all” approach using ads in mass media like TV and print. He also commented that Home Depot has the advantage of access to individual customer purchase history as it seeks to customize ads.

“There are different messages in different media for different consumers,” Adams said. “It’s incredibly complex, but that’s the way it is.”

Robert C. Lachky, executive vice president for global industry development and chief creative officer at Anheuser-Busch, said that the brewer, like Home Depot, is segmenting its customers.

Anheuser-Busch is taking a bit of a deeper dive going beyond factors like age, gender and ethnicity to aim at customers through “use occasions,” writes the newspaper.

For example, a beer drinker might order a domestic light beer while watching a baseball game at a sports bar and a full-flavor import while on a date at a nice restaurant.

Anheuser-Busch sought to tap into the power of the Internet this year with an ambitious online project that offered entertainment programming at a Web site named Bud.TV. But visitor traffic fell far below initial predictions, and the content is being rethought, writes the newspaper.

Lachky said the programming had nothing to do with AB’s brands. “Branded content is what the consumer wants, and it’s what we’ll use that space for,” he said.