That phrase is part of a Google job ad for a “Display Account Manager” focused on the auto industry (based in Detroit). Here’s an excerpt:
You will drive the online video marketplace forward and engage advertising agencies and brand marketers in programs that move the needle for their companies. The primary responsibility of the Display Account Manager is to drive new business revenue for YouTube and other Google display services and products with Fortune 1000 advertisers across multiple industries. You’ll manage business relationships to ensure that your clients’ needs and requirements are met. Additionally, you will be involved in the operational execution of your clients’ campaigns. This role is not for the faint of heart…Identify and execute on new business with new clients and upsell opportunities for existing clients and prospect within accounts and agencies to uncover leads, new contacts, and revenue.
Microsoft’s just announced a new consumer tracking and profiling tool for advertisers using its Massive video gaming platform service. Calling it a “breakthrough” in its press release, the new Microsoft/comScore research tool enables advertisers:
“… to see the direct impact that in-game advertisements have on consumer online behavior…, advertisers will get an inside look at the degree to which in-game ads motivate gamers to visit Web sites, conduct brand-related search queries and engage in other online actions, something that previously had gone unmeasured…Through this collaboration with comScore, we will also now be able to measure those consumer actions that result from in-game ads. We think this has the potential to literally ‘change the game’ for both advertisers and publishers who want to improve the effectiveness of their in-game ad efforts.â€
AdEffx Action Lift for Gaming matches in-game console ad serving data from Massive with comScore’s third-party, post-campaign panel data to track and measure in-game advertising effectiveness. By combining Microsoft’s proprietary, non-personally identifying Anonymous ID data, which is common across Xbox LIVE and Microsoft Web properties (known as Windows Live ID), with user data from comScore’s panel of 2 million Internet users worldwide, comScore can determine if panelists who saw in-game advertising subsequently visited a brand’s Web site, searched brand-related terms or engaged in other online behaviors important to advertisers.”
As we just told the BEUC conference on consumer protection and online marketing, we couldn’t make this up if we tried. Here’s what Microsoft Advertising says it can do via its UK site for marketers:
Just say who, when and where
Profile Targeting can help you find the people you’re looking for by who they are, where they are and when you want to be seen by them. Just name the characteristics that matter most to you. It could be anything from the consumer’s age, gender or country, to the day of the week you want to target the audience on.
[and here’s what they say about behavioral retargeting, which they euphemistically now call “re-messaging“]”
With Re-messaging we can narrow our audience by finding the people who have already visited you. It means we can ensure they always stay intouch and help create continual engagement with your brand. Re-messaging is effective on its own, but works at its best whencombined with other forms of targeting and campaign performance. By placing action tags on your website, we can track visitors throughout the course of their online journey and re-message them on our network. For example the consumer may have previously searched for a hotel but not booked, compared credit cards but not applied, or visited a promotional website. Whatever it may be, if they’ve gone part way to making a purchase or performing an action, we can help you continue the conversation and ensure that the relevant message is seen by the people it matters most to.
Facebook is expanding what brands and other marketers can do to target its users. As InsideFacebook explains, “Facebook has just launched a new way to draw more people to your Facebook Page or application, called “Friends of connections†targeting. Here’s how it works: before today, advertisers could already target any of their “connections,†where connections are defined as:
Fans of any of your Pages
Users of any of your Applications
Members of any of your Groups
Attendees of any of your Events
Now, advertisers can target ads specifically to friends of any of these connections as well. When this option is selected, friends of connections who see the ad will also see a message about which of their friends is connected to the advertiser…This feature should lead to increased conversion on Facebook Ads…this is the first time it has allowed advertisers to specifically target just friends of connections…We also spoke directly to Tim Kendall, Facebook’s director of monetization…In many ways we view Social Ads as less surreptitious than many types of behavioral targeting technologies.”
The Federal Trade Commission should examine the privacy issues connected to the Google/AdMob deal. As we informed the FTC yesterday, AdMob says it can target via “age, gender, HHI, ethnicity, education & context.”
The CDD/USPIRG complaint on mobile advertising provides useful analysis. Here’s an excerpt on its discussion about AdMob:
AdMob: “Mining All the Data We’ve Capturedâ€
AdMob is a “mobile advertising network†seeking to “target mobile users and monetize mobile traffic.†There is inadequate notice and little opportunity to opt-out of this data- gathering. Few mobile users realize that their communications and actions are monitored and recorded in order to create intimate profiles for marketing purposes.
AdMob also targets the youth demographic. It segments “market audiences†into several categories, including a “Digital Natives†category, which include boys and girls as young as 13. AdMob also focuses on social networking sites, claiming it “enables developers to monetize Facebook mobile applications by integrating AdMob’s industry-leading mobile publishing solutions into any Facebook mobile application. Developers building mobile web applications for the Facebook community using the Facebook Platform for Mobile can easily integrate the AdMob code to start serving ads….â€
And AdMob is continually seeking to mine and monetize the data gathered on unsuspecting youths and other mobile users. AdMob’s CEO Omar Hamoui admitted, “We are investing a fair amount of development resources into mining all the data we’ve captured over the last 12 months of ad serving and targeting.â€
AdMob gathers this data (and targets youths) without adequate notice to the consumer, making it difficult for a mobile user to weigh the costs and benefits and choose whether to opt out of this profiling. This constitutes unfair and deceptive practices, and the Federal Trade Commission should scrutinize these actions.
That’s the title of comments filed at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission by my Center for Digital Democracy and U.S. PIRG. I also just gave a presentation with the same name at last week’s meeting of data protection commissioners in Madrid, Spain.  It’s available here.
Here’s an excerpt:  Today, consumers online face the rapid growth and ever-increasing sophistication of the various techniques advertisers employ for data collection, profiling, and targeting across all online platforms. The growth of ad and other optimization services for targeting, involving real-time bidding on ad exchanges; the expansion of data collection capabilities from the largest advertising agencies (with the participation of leading digital media content and marketing companies); the increasing capabilities of mobile marketers to target users via enhanced data collection; and a disturbing growth of social media surveillance practices for targeted marketing are just a few of the developments the commission must address. But despite technical innovation and what may appear to be dramatic changes in the online data collection/profiling/targeting market, the commission must recognize that the underlying paradigm threatening consumer privacy online has been constant since the early 1990’s. So-called “one-to-one marketing,†where advertisers collect as much as possible on individual consumers so they can be targeted online, remains the fundamental approach.
The advertising lobby has been working to undermine the FTC’s ability to serve the public interest. Advertisers are fearful that the FTC–finally awakened from a long digital slumber–will actually investigate the numerous problems linked especially to marketing (think prescription drugs, financial marketing of subprime loans, etc.). They are especially concerned that the FTC will effectively address privacy and consumer protection problems related to privacy, interactive advertising, children and adolescents, and “green” marketing. Here’s the letter which was sent late yesterday to Chairman Waxman and Ranking Member Barton:
October 28, 2009
Chairman Henry Waxman
Rep. Joe Barton, Ranking Member
Energy and Commerce Committee
(via email)
Dear Chairman Waxman and Rep. Barton:
We write to support the provisions in H.R. 3126, the “Consumer Financial Protection Agency Act of 2009†(CFPA Act), designed to ensure that the Federal Trade Commission has the resources and authority to protect consumers from unfair and deceptive practices.
We believe that the FTC must play a more proactive role addressing critical consumer concerns, including privacy, online marketing, and food advertising to young people. Therefore, we fully support the legislative language in H.R.3126 that would enable the commission to conduct consumer protection rulemaking under the provisions of the Administrative Procedures Act (APA); provide it with aiding and abetting liability for violations of the Section 5 of the FTC Act involving unfair or deceptive practices; and enable it to seek civil penalty liability for unfair and deceptive practices found to violate Section 5. We also support providing the FTC independent litigating authority in civil penalty cases.
As you know, the FTC’s ability to serve consumers has been hamstrung because of its “Magnuson-Moss†rulemaking procedure. As a result, the FTC has not been able to effectively engage in a timely and effective rulemaking process. By providing the FTC with the same APA rulemaking authority enjoyed by other federal agencies, it will enable the commission to engage in consumer protection activities in a timely manner.
Respectfully,
American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
Campaign for Commercial Free Childhood
Center for Democracy and Technology
Center for Digital Democracy
Center for Science in the Public Interest
Children Now
Consumer Federation of America
Consumer Action
Consumers Union
Consumer Watchdog
Free Press
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Media Access Project
Privacy Rights Clearinghouse
Privacy Times
Public Citizen
Public Knowledge
Public Health Institute
U.S. PIRG
World Privacy Forum
David Britt, CEO (retired) Sesame Workshop
Prof. Kelly Brownell, Yale University
Prof. Robert McChesney, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
File this under “we aren’t concerned about the public interest when it may affect our bottom line.” At yesterday’s Web 2.0 Summit conference, a panel on the future of news included representatives from HuffPo, Google, the NYT and others. When a question was asked from the audience about behavioral targeting, here’s what Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau said [according to the WSJ]:
“it’s much ado about nothing. “I’d much rather see an ad I’m interested in,†he says. Efforts at regulation are made by people who “don’t get it.â€
Shame on Mr. Hippeau.  Perhaps he opposes protecting consumer privacy because it would be inconvenient while his company expands its online ad targeting business. HuffPost uses a range of online data collection and targeting tools, including Pubmatic for ad optimization, and Admeld. It uses Time Warner’s behavioral targeting subsidiary Tacoda [advertising.com] and also Google’s DoubleClick service. Here’s an excerpt from HuffPost’s privacy policy:
“The more we know about you, the better we are able to customize our web site to suit your personal preferences and interests… We may also from time to time send you messages about our marketing partners’ products. To maintain a site that is free of charge and does not require registration, we display advertisements on our web site. We also use the information you give us to help our advertisers target the audience they want to reach…the ads appearing on HuffingtonPost.com are delivered to you by DoubleClick, our Web advertising serving partner. Information about your visit to this site, such as number of times you have viewed an ad (but not your name, address, or other personal information), is used to serve ads to you on this site. And, in the course of serving advertisements to this site, third party advertisers may place or recognize a unique cookie on your browser.”
As we have said, we can both protect privacy and also foster the growth of the online ad market. Mr. Hippeau revealed a starkly uninformed–and crass–dimension to the HuffPo’s corporate leadership.
The Facebook economy—built on allowing marketers to harness what’s called the “social graph”–is big business (and will grow as consumers also buy more virtual goods). AllFacebook reports that:
“When the Facebook platform launched two and a half years ago a massive cost per install economy sprouted up. Whether it was individual developers looking for more users or large brands looking to expand the user base of their branded applications, money was flowing…There are entire ad networks still supported by the cost per install economy…So how much do fans sell for? There’s a wide range but I’ve heard Facebook is selling fans between $4 and $10. That adds up to substantial revenue for Facebook. For example, let’s assume that the top 100 advertisers each want to purchase 100,000 fans. Theoretically Facebook could generate $100 million just from the top 100 advertisers. As you move down the long tail the numbers begin to add up quickly.”
source: If Brands Want Fans, Facebook Will Sell Them Fans. Nick O’Neill. AllFacebook. Oct. 20, 2009.
Steve Lohr of the New York Times reports in Bits that “Murthy Nukala, the chief executive of Adchemy, calls his company’s technology “statistical personalization.†It doesn’t really identify a person, he said. But by probing vast data sets, from click streams to marketing information from firms like Acxiom, Adchemy can identify the sorts of people -– by age, gender and interests -– that advertisers want to pinpoint.“We don’t hold any data. We just connect to 30 or 40 data sources,†Mr. Nukala said.”
Adchemy is a good example of the growing data collection apparatus that fine-tunes the pitch by using “customized marketing content” along with its real-time analysis. Here’s an excerpt from its website:
Highly customized marketing based on visitor context. All prospects – even anonymous ones – can be described by multiple attributes, including publisher, placement, search query, ad displayed, ad element clicked, geography, demographics, time of day/week/month and other marketer-defined attributes. Adchemy calls the sum total of all these attributes “visitor context.” At every level of the Customer Acquisition Funnel, the Adchemy Digital Marketing Platform dynamically generates the most customized marketing content for the prospect based on the visitor context.
Continuously optimized, real-time content delivery. Based on the user’s visitor context, the best content is served to each visitor in real time without any manual, human involvement. The learning engines proactively synthesize advertising performance and respond automatically to each customer with appropriate content based on powerful patent-pending statistical techniques. Adchemy’s patent-pending statistical techniques speed up the traditionally slow process of gathering statistically significant marketing insights.
