Pat McMurray of Quinn Gillespie was kind enough to forward me an article called “Mistaken Identity” from last week’s Wall Street Journal. Emily Steel of the Journal makes the point that online marketers have come a long way in micro-targeting consumers, but still have a long way to go. In some cases, a very funny long way to go.

As Steel writes, she is a “’hip homemaker’ who probably trades stocks and buys expensive clothes and boats.” Well, so she has been told. Except that “I’m 24, single and I live in a cramped New York City apartment where my television sits on top of my refrigerator.” Boats? “[T]he closest I’ve come to one most recently was during a run past a yacht club in St. Petersburg, Fla., three years ago when I was an intern at a newspaper there.”

You would think that this science has improved markedly since the early days of behavioral targeting. Of course you’d be right. Steel reports on two companies, Revenue Science and Acxiom, both big players in the burgeoning industry. The data sources are legion, although interestingly the methodologies across the industry vary based on the sources combed. According to Steel, Acxiom, for instance, collects information about consumers using both offline information (publicly available information) and online data (habits observed through cookies). Revenue Science gathers information only from web traffic.

The results sometimes reflect the process. Several industry executives interviewed by Steel told her that if she visits airline websites and a bridal registry she may be assumed to be a newlywed. When she may be nothing more than shopping for a friend getting married.

Another problem is the relatively small slice of the web actually participating in cookie deals with marketers, limiting the depth of any reporting of consumer web activity.

But is this anything more than a report on the state of the industry? The example of the bridal registry and the newlywed is revealing because, while she may be no more than an interested spectator at a wedding, she is still in the market for wedding-related information. What was it about her web activity that led Revenue Science to think she’d be interested in boats after all? And was it really such a stretch?

I have to think the utility of marketing information is vastly improved since the early days of web trafficking. The full realization of the logical benefits of combining web data with the (still comparably large) trove of offline data harvested by the marketing industry is what seems noteworthy. “[T]argeted marketing companies aren’t aiming to create profiles of every individual consumer – that’s too inefficient and not very useful for marketers. Instead, they want to make sure that the profiles the have created about consumers actually fit.”

Seems to me that they might very well be getting as close as we think.