Commentary

Just An Online Minute... Cookie Monster Haunts Ad:Tech

If the throngs of Ad:Tech exhibitors and record number of attendees--more than 8,000--made anything clear this week, it's that online marketing is continuing to gain momentum.

But the buzz about online advertising wasn't unfailingly positive. At least two separate panels at the conference dealt with what many view as an alarming trend--the growing consumer rebellion against cookies.

Users are deleting their cookies, especially the third-party cookies placed on their browsers by ad companies that can track users as they go to various sites. One study by JupiterResearch this spring showed that around four in 10 users delete cookies at least monthly; other studies have reached similar conclusions.

Cookie deletions potentially play havoc with measurement metrics, leaving ad-serving companies no way of knowing how many times visitors have been shown particular ads. The erasures also can make behavioral targeting impossible; if users reject the cookies that monitor which pages they're viewing, it's harder to figure out which user is interested in which kind of product.

These prospects naturally make some industry execs very nervous. "If, all of a sudden, everyone starts deleting cookies, all of your reach and frequency measures go away," Young-Bean Song, director of analytics, Atlas Institute, said at one panel discussion.

Some say it's the spyware removal companies that are at fault, for giving cookies a bad reputation. Not only do many software programs remove third-party cookies, but they also flag them as threats--in effect, giving cookies negative publicity.

Other marketing execs are blaming themselves, saying that consumers are deleting cookies because the advertising world hasn't done enough PR to give cookies a good reputation.

What seems lost on many industry insiders, however, is that the issue goes beyond public relations. "There's a basic value proposition problem," Ari Schwartz, associate director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said at the conference. "Unfortunately, individuals don't act on behalf of the communal good in the marketplace."

As things are, consumers have no real reason to keep third-party cookies. Unlike first-party cookies--which remember users' names, passwords and preferences--third-party cookies don't make life any easier for consumers in any obvious way.

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