Abstract: A marketing system and method predicts the interest of a user in specific items—such as movies, books, commercial products, web pages, television programs, articles, push media, etc.—based on that user's behavioral or preferential similarities to other users, to objective archetypes formed by assembling items satisfying a search criterion, a market segment profile, a demographic profile or a psychographic profile, to composite archetypes formed by partitioning users into like-minded groups or clusters then merging the attributes of users in a group, or to a combination. The system uses subjective information from users and composite archetypes, and objective information from objective archetypes to form predictions, making the system highly efficient and allowing the system to accommodate “cold start” situations where the preferences of other people are not yet known.