• by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, November 1, 2007

As Louise Story pointed out in The New York Times Technology blog, a subtext of the current FTC hearings is that all this online content, especially from traditional media companies, that consumers now largely get free, must somehow be paid for. Just as advertising paid for over-the-air radio and television and kept the cost of newspapers and magazines to something reasonable for subscribers and newsstand buyers, so too will advertising pay for online content.

Online offers us the tools to serve the most relevant and useful advertising in the history of marketing. But relevance comes at a price. And some on the privacy ramparts think that price is getting too high.  They have imagined nightmare scenarios where the bad actors in our business can assemble so much personal data that it can be effectively used to spy on people, to discriminate against them, to reveal their private secrets or expose their families to potential harm.  While I am foremost an online advertising person, I am also a human being with a wife and children, and I share their concern over the potential misuse of  PII data.  But I am comforted by the conviction that it is not in the long-term interest of anyone connected to online advertising to abuse our customers.

Early on. when we were first developing behavioral targeting at TACODA .we knew that tracking cookies had the potential to make some folks uncomfortable, even though we emphasized from the start that we never collected PII.  We launched an aggressive opt-out program for those who didn’t want our cookies on their browsers. Interestingly, over the year, even thought we launched program after higher profile program to promote the opt-out, only a relatively few folks ever chose to do so. While lots of studies claimed folks were deleting cookies that enabled highly targeted advertising, they never did it in sufficient numbers to hurt our business.  Why?  They liked the ability to customize their portal pages and not have to reenter passwords every time they went to a site that had earlier required registration or a dozen other shortcuts made possible by cookies.

 Consumers understand that they have gotten something of a free content lunch for over a decade and have said in lots of studies that they’d rather see ads than pay for online content. The charge now is to help them understand that the new tools we are developing are not designed to invade their privacy, but rather to make their online experience more rewarding by only getting ads for products and services that really interest them. We don't want to have an adversarial relationship with consumers, but rather a collaborative one in which we both understand the necessary commercial relationship between content and ads, and realize that the process should make that relationship fruitful for all parties concerned -- that no data will be misused, and no trust will be broken.

advertisement

advertisement