Commentary

Just An Online Minute... An Ad Campaign For Cookies?

Research aggregator eMarketer has now joined the cookie fray, with a report issued today urging marketers to persuade the online population that cookies are good for them.

"To convince consumers, marketers must cajole them into accepting cookies if they want to continue getting free content online, make Web browsing easier, and enjoy other real benefits," wrote Senior Analyst David Hallerman in "The Cookie Report: Threats to Online Ad Measurement." "The best persuasion for this purpose," wrote Hallerman, "would be a full-blown ad campaign promoting all the ways cookies help not advertisers but consumers."

The eMarketer report comes at a time when cookies are increasingly seen as threats to online privacy. Just last week, The Wall Street Journal's Walter Mossberg wrote a column condemning third-party tracking cookies for intruding on consumers' privacy. "Many Web sites, even from respectable companies, place a secret computer file called a 'tracking cookie' on your hard disk," he wrote. "This file records where you go on the Web on behalf of Internet advertising companies that later use the information for their own business purposes. In almost all cases, the user isn't notified of the download of the tracking cookie, let alone asked for permission to install it."

Mossberg goes on to suggest that rather than marketing campaigns, companies consider compensating consumers for allowing tracking cookies.

Marketers likely would respond that they already compensate people for cookies -- both in the subtle form of serving "relevant" ads, and in the not-so-subtle form of free content. In fact, eMarketer suggests that publishers refuse to make free content available to consumers who don't accept cookies.

But content online already is ad-supported -- with or without cookies. While tracking cookies might increase the ability to target ads and analyze campaigns, online marketers don't require cookies to serve ads.

As for making advertising more relevant, not all consumers see that as a benefit. Some, in fact, undoubtedly view ads that appear targeted to them personally as a violation of privacy -- which is one of the reasons they delete cookies in the first place.

As evidence mounts that consumers distrust and discard cookies, marketers must either come up with persuasive reasons for people to preserve cookies, or resign themselves to the realization that online advertising won't yield analytics as precise as they would have liked.

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