• by January 30, 2009

MediaPost's story "NARC Hopes to Curtail Privacy Laws with Bigger Board" unfortunately scrambles together two separate stories in a way that leaves a misimpression about both.

Let's try to set them straight. First, the expansion of the NARC Board of Directors.

The Board of Directors of the National Advertising Review Council (NARC) sets policies and procedures for advertising industry self-regulation. The addition of three new members to the NARC Board is a historic move, resulting from an in-depth review of NARC self-regulatory programs, that predates any involvement in behavioral advertising issues.

The addition of the CEOs of the Electronic Retailing Association (ERA), Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Direct Marketing Association (DMA), recognizes their longstanding support of self-regulation and the expertise that they bring to addressing the challenges of self-regulation.

The ERA, for example, is the sponsor of a highly successful NARC program that addresses the truth and accuracy of direct-response retailing advertising claims; the DMA has for years maintained highly regarded self-regulatory programs in the direct-marketing area and the IAB is one of the acknowledged leaders on a wide range issues in the digital marketing revolution.

The NARC Board, made up of top leaders from the Association of National Advertisers, American Association of Advertising Agencies, American Advertising Federation and Council of Better Business Bureau, has a longstanding history of stewardship of advertising self-regulation. For almost 40 years, NARC programs have promoted the highest standards of truthfulness and accuracy in all forms of advertising and promoted strict standards for truthfulness and appropriateness in advertising to children. The expansion of the Board complements this existing expertise.

To suggest as the article does that this expansion is driven by the current concerns about behavioral advertising is factually incorrect.

Second, behavioral advertising.

As the article notes, the ANA, AAAA, IAB, DMA and CBBB have announced a joint effort to try to develop a cross-sector set of industry guidelines. While the article refers to this as an effort to "derail a push for new laws restricting behavioral targeting," the actual impetus is the Federal Trade Commission's call for the industry to develop self-regulatory principles and the belief that a self-regulatory approach has significant advantages to regulation, especially in a fast-moving, highly dynamic area like behavioral advertising.

If issues of behavioral advertising are presented to the NARC Board, the expanded membership will strengthen the ability of the Board to address them, just as it will strengthen the Board's ability to deal with a host of other issues in the digital marketing area like blogging, viral marketing and advertising on new media like Second Life, just to name a few.

In sum, the expanded membership is important for many reasons, and is not as the MediaPost article states, driven primarily, principally or directly by the separate effort to develop a self-regulatory program in the area of behavioral advertising.