• by Jeremy Fain , February 7, 2008

The digital performance marketing industry is tackling a number of important issues as it evolves into a more mature medium. Recent Performance Insider columns seem to revolve most frequently around increased government scrutiny of industry practices. It is therefore my pleasure to announce the release of the culmination of a proactive industry effort to collectively raise the bar: the IAB Lead Generation Committee's "B2C and B2B Best Practices for U.S.-based Advertisers and Publishers." This document directly addresses industry practices that are susceptible to misconduct and lays a clear path for companies that wish to operate as responsible corporate citizens.

The Lead Generation Committee's membership, which includes both publishers and agencies, worked over the past few months to develop recommendations on far-reaching topics including publisher and advertiser consumer disclosures, data ownership, consumer experiences such as pre-selected offers, and incentivization. Not only will these recommendations help ensure the industry understands what is acceptable; by standardizing practices, the document will also help companies operate more efficiently.

As we developed the recommendations, a few topics stood out for me as ones that the entire committee agreed were of extreme importance. A lack of an accessible and clear privacy policy from advertisers was identified as a serious challenge for lead generation publishers, and it is something we commit a fair amount of space to. Transparency of privacy disclosures to the consumer was also an area of major concern within the committee; our members believed it was absolutely essential to give consumers every chance possible to understand how and where their data is being collected and used. Finally, we had a large number of discussions around how to create consumer experiences that would not be deceptive.

Overall, the committee's goal was to create a document that would champion consumers' rights to transparency and understanding, giving them a sort of "Bill of Rights" that would apply if they chose to participate in lead generation by submitting their data. I believe the committee has achieved that goal in an extremely strong fashion. Hopefully all companies who practice online lead generation will decide to implement all the recommendations.

I would like to end with a quick observation about documents like these and how they relate to industry-wide conduct. During my time at the IAB, I have had many talks with many committees that all start out the same way: someone will stand up in a meeting and say, "We have to make sure that companies can't do this any more!" While an industry body can make standards or regulations pertaining to this or that practice, we ultimately have to admit that it is hard to prevent a person or a company from doing bad things if they have their hearts set on it, even if it is against the law. This document is the IAB Lead Generation Committee's way of drawing a line in the sand. I hope that everyone decides to stand on the right side by adopting the many best practices released today. Only together will we be able to build a healthy industry with a reputation strong enough to weather the storms of bad actors.