Last November Meebo, a noteworthy conversational tool, managed to raise the last $25 million as an investment, mounting up to $60 million received in 2010. Meebo is now using these finances to buy Mindset Media, the online ad measurement and targeting firm. The aim of the acquisition is to enhance Meebo’s existing products work even closer with brand advertisers, without sacrificing its direct response business.

Over the last few years, Meebo has been developing features designed for advertisers to directly connect and learn from end users, featuring overlays on content sites like TVGuide.com, Mediaweek.com and Maxim.com. Targeting is Meebo’s specialty, and this is what they see as a monetary future. Meebo will incorporate the 12-member Media set team into its own team, which is now managing over 8,000 sites, reaching 76.6 million people in the United States alone.

Mindset Media CEO Jim Meyer considers psychographic targeting to be on top of traditional demographic targeting, as the latter is too broad and lacks efficiency. As Meyer explained it, “psychographic targeting is interested in the ‘who’ people are as opposed to demographic, which is the ‘what’ people are. The problem with demo targeting is that every developed category, from tech, to autos, is crowded with too many products into a certain space. Psychographics is more about the sophisticated categories are where the big brand dollars reside.”

Undoubtedly, social ad targeting is a big hype point at the moment, as emerging data markets provide new fodder for effeciency-based advertising.  In October 2010, Facebook applied for ad-targeting patent, for ads to be based on what a user’s friends interests may be. Hence Facebook can better serve ads toward users who have not fulfilled out their profiles with enough information for traditional ad targeting. Facebook mentioned on repeated occasions that any stored data is confidential, yet many still argue whether this is true, considering they applied for ad-targeting patent.  Despite Facebook’s privacy and security issues, targeted advertising is still a booming sector, and will continue to be an integral part of many  companies dealing with web and mobile content, on the delivery and interaction sides.