• by Mark Naples , April 1, 2005

Suddenly, I’m a food columnist.

So much energy has been directed toward the JupiterResearch study announced recently, which found that nearly 40 percent of Web users deleted cookies from their computers on a monthly basis.  While there has been much justifiable gnashing of teeth over this study and its conclusions, its significance is perhaps being missed by many in our industry.

After all, as more sites move toward subscription models, won’t the old way of counting unique viewers be passé soon anyway? As for advertising analytics, I’m with Tacoda’s Dave Morgan and others who’ve stated that they’re more interested in fresh data anyway.  A cookie that’s been set for a month or even a week or two is of little use to most cookie-based advertising tools today.

Besides, is it possible that we’ve lost track of what the cookie and its measuring ability was intended to do anyway?  It’s a proxy, after all.  Anyone who has thought cookie-based metrics are precise has never used the word “discrepancy” in a sentence about reconciling multiple ad servers’ numbers before. 

I’ve written much in this space about how silly our precision is when we disagree with each other on different sides of the relationship – especially compared to how imprecise measurement is for other media.  So, these great cookies may enable us to claim precision for our meager slices of the media pie, while the archaic ways of measuring other media are used as little more than proxies for decision makers who spend far more elsewhere.

In other words, while I agree with my colleagues in this space who have called for someone to DO something about this (Hello, IAB?), I disagree with them about its urgency.  TV has done pretty well over the years with the less-than-scientifically-precise Nielsen Ratings, proving that if we all agree, it matters less what method of measurement we use. 

With cookies, we’ve had this “precise” method of measurement, but we haven’t been able to agree whose cookies are right.  Now we learn that nobody’s were.

If our industry persists with its focus on tactical measurement, we’ll keep getting little more than crumbs, when compared to other media.  So… as many as half of all web users delete their cookies on a monthly basis.  Can’t that be factored into any cookie-based analysis?  After all, 99 percent of all TV viewers have never filled out a Nielsen Ratings Report Card.

Ninety-nine percent of web users also know better than to provide their credit card information to an anonymous email from a Phish scammer, but the Phishers still make a ton of money.

That’s why I was so pleased to see that Microsoft has filed 117 lawsuits against people who it charges created phishing Web sites designed to look like pages hosted by their branded companies.

The lawsuits were filed Thursday in Seattle in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington.  Microsoft has brought them against operators of Web sites that feature trademarked logos or images used by Microsoft on its official Web pages and products. The "John Doe" suits do not identify the individuals involved, and a Microsoft spokesperson disclosed that every site involved has been taken down.  But, as someone who gets Phishy emails perhaps three times every day, I was very pleased to see the big dog get after the scurrilous crooks behind them.

While these two topics may not seem linked, I’m afraid they are linked – and directly so.  See, it’s too easy for marketers to dismiss the intelligence of the average consumer.  Most of us didn’t believe the Jupiter survey data when it was announced.  I know I didn’t.  But, the same consumer who feels violated by the persistent Phishing scams that show up in his in-box also hates having all those tracking cookies placed on his hard drive by third party ad servers.  Go ahead and tell him that he’s wrong to think that, despite what his Ad-Aware and Spy-Bot program told him.  We’re the ones responsible for the Phishing that he barely understands too, right?

Sometimes, I hate the reminders that our industry is still in its infancy.  But, these issues are a reminder that it is.