Targeted advertising is a form of advertising, including online advertising, that is directed towards an audience with certain traits, based on the product or person the advertiser is promoting. These traits can either be demographic with a focus on race, economic status, sex, age, generation, level of education, income level, and employment, or psychographic focused on the consumer values, personality, attitude, opinion, lifestyle and interest. This focus can also entail behavioral variables, such as browser history, purchase history, and other recent online activities. Targeted advertising is concentrated on certain traits and consumers who are likely to have a strong preference. These individuals will receive messages instead of those who have no interest and whose preferences do not match a particular product's attributes. This eliminates waste.

Traditional forms of advertising, including billboards, newspapers, magazines, and radio channels, are progressively becoming replaced by online advertisements. The Information and communication technology (ICT) space has transformed recently, resulting in targeted advertising stretching across all ICT technologies, such as web, IPTV, and mobile environments. In the next generation's advertising, the importance of targeted advertisements will radically increase, as it spreads across numerous ICT channels cohesively.

Through the emergence of new online channels, the need for targeted advertising is increasing because companies aim to minimize wasted advertising by means of information technology. Most targeted new media advertising currently uses second-order proxies for targets, such as tracking online or mobile web activities of consumers, associating historical web page consumer demographics with new consumer web page access, using a search word as the basis of implied interest, or contextual advertising.