Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.
By Alyssa Royse
I’m not a huge privacy freak. One cruise through my blog and you’ll find everything from photos of me in a bikini to thinly veiled tales of my romantic life and very explicit statements about how I feel about drugs and sexuality in general.
However, I am no fan of my “data” being spread around the web, which has more to do with safety than secrecy. At the same time, I like business, and I “get” that advertisers want to reach me, and publishers make money by helping advertisers reach the right people with the right message.
So, when Firefox and Chrome announced that they were building “Do Not Track” features into their browsers I was, on the one hand, thrilled. On the other hand, I wondered what that would mean for online advertising, as we know it – and the ability for web-based content sites to survive.
(I did revel in the irony that if they can’t do it with ad dollars, they might be forced into subscription models. And if they can’t track individual users, ads would be content based rather than user based. Wow, that sounds a lot like magazines and newspapers. Remember those?)
I emailed a good friend of mine who is kind of a big deal in online advertising. He’s an algorithmic ad geek who’s been in the trenches on all sides of the industry for years. I asked him how this “no track” trend in browsers would change online advertising. Starting with a bit of clarification on how things work now.
Q: How are cookies currently used to serve ads to consumers?
A: Two ways: One – cookies are used by all ad servers to manage frequency caps, or the number of times you see any given campaign or creative. Two – cookies are used to segment users into broad buckets – for subsequent targeting of ads, or specifically not showing an ad too. On that last point, cookies are used today for all current opt-out mechanisms, meaning it’s an indication that ad networks use to know to not track you with more cookies.
A: With or without cookies, advertisers use many other targeting mechanisms including geo-location, time-of-day, site/domain, and page content/context.
A: For the most part, it isn’t a big deal because the vast majority of online ad spend is cookie-less – either major brands advertising on well-known and clean-lit sites, or buying search keywords. But all advertisers really have the same objective – to focus ad spend where it is most effective, and de-focus ad spend where it’s not effective. Cookies allow advertisers to decide on a per-impression basis whether you’re someone they want to reach, or not.
A: This will not change anything right away; it’s one of many approaches. We’re at this stage in the market where there are a lot of new and competing technologies/approaches to reconcile end-user privacy controls with relevant, effective and even helpful (gasp) targeted online advertising – and it’s driven entirely by the FTC and numerous online advertising industry groups. The problem is that there’s no economic model or benefit to drive progress in this area, so it’s currently more a matter of “compliance”. Even on the consumer side of things, the vast majority of online users don’t go out of their way to take control over their online privacy – in fact, one could argue they’re volunteering more (private) information online than they ever have. At the end of the day, I think the publisher (not the network, agency, or advertiser) needs to own the end-user relationship and offer end-users full control over data collection, ad targeting, and privacy preferences.
All of that makes sense to me, intellectually, but there are still some very big missing pieces, things that can’t necessarily be quantified in an algorithm or a cookie.
In the “old days,” advertisers would design ad campaigns largely to fit in with the place in which the ad would appear. As such, ads in Vogue magazine were as compelling as the content, and were designed to appeal to people with an elite sense of style. I’d be willing to bet that those display ads did more to enhance brand reputation and customer loyalty than most current online ads. Of course, there’s no real way to track that, since you can’t get a click-through rate on a magazine display ad, and advertisers are now hooked on the instant gratification and cheap rates of a quickie click-through.
These “old fashioned” display ads were psychographically designed. They weren’t designed for “women in their 40’s,” they were designed for “people who value style.” Indeed, “women in their 40’s” are wildly diverse and cannot be counted on to react to anything in the same way.
Like most people, I gather that vast majority of all my media online. There are enough breadcrumbs in my surfing trail that advertisers know I am a 41-year-old woman. I am constantly fed ads for weight-loss and jewelry. (I weigh 110 pounds and do not wear any sort of jewelry, ever.) Waste of space and money. Demographic FAIL.
But if you can’t track me and don’t know anything about me, how are you going to serve me at all?
I don’t know the answer. But I’d be willing to make some bets (or offer some advice.) I think that we’re going to see online advertisers head back to content over click-through, brand over broad-bombing, and psychographic over demographic.
All of which makes sense. I make decisions to purchase things based on what matters to me, not based on how old I am. I do judge you, and your brand, based on the places I see you. And if you support content that matters to me, I am more likely to support you. The lowest common denominator of both content and advertising may just fall out the bottom of the barrel.
At the end of the day, advertising is about relationships. The frenzy of the web and social networking has made online advertising into the worst kind of bar-cruising-one-night-stand-skeevy encounter possible. Being stalked by strangers with bad lines is not the road to brand loyalty. (I don’t believe I can lose 6 pounds by the weekend any more than I believe I am the prettiest girl in the bar and remind you of your first love.)
