Online marketers and advertisers are getting choosier and more specific about where they place their ads these days. This strategy is called behavioral targeting and relies on analyzing online activities of customers to see which visitors will be interested in the product and only then place the ads on those sites that these consumers visit. Pepsi used this approach to market its Aquafina Alive to only those consumers who were health conscious and likely to be interested in the product already. Using this method, Pepsi saw a threefold increase in consumers clicking on their ads, as compared to some of their earlier campaigns.

Tacoda, the company that did the Pepsi campaign, is working with several other leading companies on such projects. Tacoda itself has a huge network of sites where these ads are inserted and will be adding 6 new sites to its kitty this week.

“The future of digital media is less about distribution and more about understanding the audience’s interests and being able to project that anywhere,” says Bill Gossman, president and chief executive officer of independently owned behavioral-targeting firm Revenue Science.