The biggest barrier to realizing our potential has little to do with the limitations of our technology and everything to do with our failure to recognize that our first master is the consumer, not the marketer. We can't begin to provide full value to advertisers until we address consumers' needs and fears by focusing on the 3 R's: Relevance, Respect and Restraint.

Relevance -- true relevance -- is the grail that still slips from our grasp more often than not. A truly relevant ad ceases being an ad at all and becomes a valuable piece of actionable content. I often find myself clicking on contextual ads served by Google without even looking at the page of search results or content alongside which those ads appear. Google has trained me to give equal or greater weight to ads, and made me feel free to click on whatever is most useful to me. We don't need another Ponemon study to prove that people prefer more relevant ads. It's obvious from the data we see every day (people vote with their clicks) and from our experiences as online consumers ourselves. We need more and better ways to achieve true relevance -- especially approaches that don't require the wholesale harvesting of consumers' behavioral data - so that each ad served is useful and welcomed.

Respect -- you don't hear that word spoken often in our space, but you can't achieve true relevance without real respect. Aretha Franklin got it right when she sang: "R-E-S-P-E-C-T -- find out what it means to me." Most consumers understand and accept that the ads help keep the content or software free, and that ads can be useful. More than half of people surveyed survey said they'd prefer more relevant ads, and many were willing to share at least some information to improve relevancy. Yet cookies get zapped faster than publishers and networks can drop them on desktops, often with the automatic aid of indiscriminate anti-spyware applications whose makers capitalize on consumer fear and sometimes fan the flames. Those fears are not unfounded -- the Good (or at least benign) players are vastly outnumbered by the Bad and the Ugly ugly - and anti-spyware makers do play a critical role in protecting people. But it's our job to make our products more transparent and less invasive. We can't concede responsibility to the anti-spyware watchdogs for educating consumers (or our companies) on the differences between real threats and benign or beneficial advertising. We must take responsibility and address consumers directly, explaining what we do and how we do it, and -- most importantly --what's in it for them. We can only earn respect and loyalty from consumers when we respect their right to control the desktop.

Restraint -- there's another word that's hardly heard, let alone practiced. We must show fewer, more relevant ads. Cookies must be more transparent transparent . Stuff can't be dropped on desktops without clear disclosure and consent. We should make it even easier for the consumer to opt out than it was to opt in. Privacy policies and license agreements must be short and free of legalese. It should be made obvious where the ads are coming from, and why. It's time to abandon outmoded, impossible-to-police distribution models; paying hundreds or thousands of affiliates per-click or per-download is a proven recipe for disaster.

Then there's the fourth "R" -- for Realism. There's been much talk lately about best practices, but not much meaningful action. That's because implementing real change is really expensive and time-consuming. But the payoff for some short-term pain is the ability to put consumers in control, which makes for a more qualified and receptive audience that's more valuable to advertisers.

We could just wait for legislators, ad-hoc industry groups, anti-spyware vendors and other protectors of the public good to tell us what we must do, but we know what to do: we're consumers, too. Why wait? Doing the right thing is the right thing to do, not just for consumers, but for marketers too.

This commentary is insightful. I recommend it to others.