IAB’s Lobbying Against Privacy Safeguards: Trade Group Will Add New Members to Help Fight Consumer Protection Legislation

The trade lobbying group Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) plans to add new members to help it generate “grassroots support against proposed legislation in New York and Connecticut that would ban the collection of data about online consumers without a person’s specific consent.” According to ClickZ, the IAB will create a new low-dues membership structure which will enable smaller online advertisers to swell its ranks. What is IAB’s pitch to its prospective members about privacy safeguards offered by state legislators in New York and Connecticut? ClickZ says that “[T]he IAB contends that the proposed measures would have a disproportionate negative impact on small publishers that rely on ad networks to manage advertising sales.”

The IAB’s leadership is off on a irresponsible mission to persuade online marketers and the public that privacy rules would “kill the web.” Such an self-serving view of why privacy rules are required in the age of online marketing will only further diminish the credibility of the IAB.

ATT: DoJ, EC and Congress: Yahoo!’s own claims should raise alarms about a Google or Microsoft deal

No one should sit by and let either Google or Microsoft carve-up or take-over Yahoo! without a serious examination of the competition, privacy, and other consumer protection issues. This week, Yahoo! ran a four-page ad inserted in Advertising Age. Here’s some of Yahoo!’s own copy for regulators and the public to ponder:

“Yahoo! delivers the largest audience in the U.S.-the most 18-34 year olds, the most 35-54 year olds, the most women….Today, Yahoo! reaches over half the world’s Internet users. And with our growing network of premium publishing partners, including over 625 leading newspapers, we’re working with the other half…Our insights and understanding of our users lead to smarter targeting, so we can connect the right audience with the most relevant message–yours…With more ways to connect to your customers more deeply than ever, the future is wide open.”

From Yahoo! Advertising Age insertion. June 2. 2008 entitled: “What Happens When You Can Connect To More Than 550 million People From Over 170 countries Who Spend 2 Billion Hours Each Month In One Place?”

Digital Marketers Plans for China Emblematic of Global Ambitions

We view the rush to advance digital marketing in China as a key example of how the forces of interactive advertising are being deployed globally. China is more than a “test-bed” for broadband and mobile advertising campaigns, given the growth of its Internet connected population. But we should be concerned about the impact of such marketing campaigns. Here’s an excerpt from a story appearing in Advertising Age China on Procter and Gamble’s (P&G) work there:

“The battleground now is branded entertainment and media innovation,” said Alfonso de Dios, P&G’s Guangzhou-based associate director for media in Greater China. “Globally, we are focusing on digital marketing to build long term and meaningful consumer relationships. We’ve escalated the spending and the quality of what we do online.”

That means going beyond web pages to internet protocol TV, known as IPTV, as well as mobile phones, social networks, search marketing and other high-tech applications. China has become a “learning lab in an ecosystem of providers and platforms,” he said. “We’re following a directive set by [P&G’s Global Marketing Officer] Jim Stengel, who wants the company to go beyond telling and selling, i.e. the 30″ spot, and go towards building more meaningful consumer relationships.”

source: China is P&G learning lab. Normandy Madden. Ad Age China. June 2008 [sub required]

Privacy Oxymoron: “Anonymous” but “custom ads for each and every individual”

We file this in the `FTC has to change its definition of what should be considered personally identifiable information’ department.

Via adknowledge. “Our Targeting: Adknowledge use behavioural targeting technologies behind the scenes to deliver the most appropriate ads. Our system processes billions of calculations a day to deliver ads to the right user at the precise moment that they are most likely to purchase…These systems are strictly anonymous and operate without any specific user-level data (non-PII data). Our systems work with over 200 million behavioral data points and 100 terabytes of storage to calculate custom ads for each and every individual.”