• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, February 13, 2008

The Federal Trade Commission isn't the only group turning its attention to behavioral targeting.

The Council of Better Business Bureau's National Advertising Division also is casting an eye on interactive targeting techniques, senior vice president Andrea Levine said this morning at an Association of National Advertisers Conference.

Behavioral targeting, she said in response to a question from the audience, is "an area that's ripe for our involvement."

At the same time, she unwittingly gave ammunition to privacy advocates who argue that the industry's self-policing efforts have failed and the government should take steps to protect users' privacy. Asked for her thoughts on the Network Advertising Initiative, created eight years ago as a self-regulatory body for online marketers, she admitted she was not familiar with the group. Consultation with ANA general counsel Doug Wood, on stage with her, proved useless; he suggested the NAI was involved in pre-clearing commercials that ran on network television.

The NAI was actually created in response to a backlash over DoubleClick's acquisition of Abacus. Advocates feared that DoubleClick would combine information about people's Web-surfing habits with Abacus' information about consumers' offline profiles. The NAI requires member companies to let people opt out of behavioral targeting, or receiving ads based on their Web-surfing history.

Later, Ari Schwartz, deputy director of the digital rights group Center for Democracy & Technology, said the inability of Levine and Wood to even recognize the name of the Network Advertising Initiative -- a body that created self-regulatory principles endorsed by the FTC in 2000 -- pointed to "seven years of failed self-regulation in this space."

While it might be true that the ANA shouldn't be expected to know every organization in the online ad space, it's also undeniable that the NAI has kept a very low profile in the last few years. Whether that changes now that the FTC and others are pressuring companies to rethink some of their online ad techniques remains to be seen.

But even if the NAI becomes a bigger force to be reckoned with, there are real questions about how much change any voluntary body can accomplish. Ultimately, if online ad companies can choose to simply ignore any voluntary principles, it's hard to see what kind of impact they'll have.