• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, February 13, 2009

GroupM, which on its Web site says that its focus is "...to bring unfair competitive advantage to our clients and our companies..." in a 3,551-word add-on to its 5,723-word standard contract, now claims ownership of all data related to online ads and deems it "confidential."

While publishers and ad networks and ad servers and ad exchanges and countless industry panel discussions to come are nervously sorting out exactly what this means in terms of doing business with one of the biggest media buying conglomerates (if only to shake their heads and call it a land grab), the announcement will have the unfortunate side effect of inching data usage and privacy a little higher up on the new administration's to-do list.(Who would ever have thought there was an upside to the collapse of the banking system?)

I don't know about you, but it kind of makes me feel special. Just think, these big advertisers and publishers and media companies (and those self-appointed nut cases who have built nice little businesses agitating "on behalf" of consumers about online privacy) fighting about my cookies. And yours. If I was ever inclined to delete or block cookies, I'm not going to now, because suddenly I am an important bit of "user data."

I am trying to decide how to best exercise my GroupM-anointed power. Let's see, I could visit a bunch of marketers' sites and click around pretending to be interested in buying a car or a new pair of red sneakers to see how many ads I later get served for BMWs or Pumas. Maybe I'll fill out a couple of forms so that I can be sold and resold as a hot lead. Maybe I'll search for all sorts of really expensive crap that I'll never buy, like a three-story escalator or a nuclear magnetic resonance imaging machine so that somebody pays somebody else a few hundred bucks for my cookie. Even though my youngest kid is 12, I think I'll read up on baby carriages and infant formula to see what the behavioralistas out there will serve me downstream.

I used to think that the pinnacle of power was being a Nielsen home. Those guys could help renew shows they liked by leaving the TV on when they went to the movies or vote guys right out of the prime time lineup just because one of the stars cheated on his (real) wife while on location shooting a movie. But now for all those reasons that roadblock slides 3 through 8 in every online ad company PowerPoint, the power has shifted to trackable user data. Even though I am just one small cookie, the fate of the online advertising economy rests in my code.

Maybe I should ask for a rev share from those who auction me to the highest bidder? Or collaborate with publishers I like to increase my market value but do all sorts of "intender" stuff that turn on advertisers. Or maybe I'll just write my congressman and say that I find it creepy that when I look at beach resorts on a travel site, I later get served ads for, well, more beach resorts. Plus, I think it's kinda unfair that after I look at porn I get served bogus punch the monkey ads instead of more porn.

Of course the other alternative is to shut the hell up and enjoy all the personalization and one-click aps and little "Hi George..." messages I get because I have cookies (and in fact make certain I import them from old PCs to new ones). And, frankly, being served ads that have relevance to my life is no invasion of my privacy. It is a vast improvement over having to see the same stupid prime time TV ads over and over,.

But a check from Google would kinda take the edge off.