Jeff Chester Reports on Digital Media and the Public Interest
Via “The comScore 2008 Digital Year in Review [January 2009].”–
“U.S. Internet users viewed a total of 4.5 trillion display ads (standard and non-standard IAB units, includes both static and rich media, but not video) during the past twelve monhs, with the average person viewing more than 2,000 ads per month.”
Here’s a telling comment via a senior Disney executive:
“Disney says it sees online as a vital part of its strategy to turn its very well-known brand name into greater market share by making itself more relevant than ever to both children and parents…”That’s why [says Edward Catchpole, senior European VP for toys, Disney] all the sites we operate for our brands are not extensions, they’re seamless integrations, part of owning that toy, part of the play pattern. A young girl will run around pretending to be a fairy, then play with a toy and then go online and immerse themselves in a virtual world at one of our communities, like Pixie Hollow or Club Penguin. We also have a social network based around [Disney/Pixar movie] Cars in the US, which tends to be used more by boys,” Catchpole adds.”
source: Vertical Focus: Toy retailing. Sean Hargrave. New Media Age [UK]. November 27, 2008 [sub required]
Google suited up people with special biometric monitoring equipment to test how well YouTube ads affect them. According to New Media Age [excerpt]: “YouTube users are 1.5 times more attentive and engaged in advertising than TV viewers, according to research conducted in partnership with General Motors Europe, Motorola, media agency MindShare and the Online Testing Exchange (OTX). The research used eye tracking and biometric data to reveal the brand impact of advertising on YouTube. It found recall and attribution for an ad viewed was up to 14% higher than watching the same ad on TV. Viewing a silent ad on YouTube in addition to a normal TV ad also improved ad recall and attribution.
Ads on YouTube can impact the perceptions of elusive audiences like young men and infrequent TV viewers. They also have a halo effect and increase brand perceptions such as innovative, cool, dynamic and unconventional.”
Google measured such metrics as heart rate, physical movement, respiration rate, and skin conductance.
NMA: Ads on YouTube have higher impact than on TV. Danielle Long. NMA. December 18, 2008 [sub. required]
As the debate on privacy, consumer protection, and online marketing is renewed, it may be useful to see how the interactive ad industry classifies its practices. Here is the definition of behavioral targeting from the IAB’s own glossary of terms. My bold:
“Behavioral Targeting-
A technique used by online publishers and advertisers to increase the effectiveness of their campaigns. Behavioral targeting uses information collected on an individual’s web browsing behavior such as the pages they have visited or the searches they have made to select which advertisements to be displayed to that individual. Practitioners believe this helps them deliver their online advertisements to the users who are most likely to be influenced by them.”
Here are a few other terms used by the IAB that illustrate some of the the online ad industry’s data collection and targeting process:
“Click-stream –
1) the electronic path a user takes while navigating from site to site, and from page to page within a site; 2) a comprehensive body of data describing the sequence of activity between a user’s browser and any other Internet resource, such as a Web site or third party ad server.
Heuristic –
a way to measure a user’s unique identity. This measure uses deduction or inference based on a rule or algorithm which is valid for that server. For example, the combination of IP address and user agent can be used to identify a user in some cases. If a server receives a new request from the same client within 30 minutes, it is inferred that a new request comes from the same user and the time since the last page request was spent viewing the last page. Also referred to as an inference.
Profiling –
the practice of tracking information about consumers’ interests by monitoring their movements online. This can be done without using any personal information, but simply by analyzing the content, URL’s, and other information about a user’s browsing path/click-stream.
Unique user –
unique individual or browser which has either accessed a site (see unique visitor) or which has been served unique content and/or ads such as e-mail, newsletters, interstitials and pop-under ads. Unique users can be identified by user registration or cookies. Reported unique users should filter out bots. See iab.net for ad campaign measurement guidelines
Web beacon –
a line of code which is used by a Web site or third party ad server to track a user’s activity, such as a registration or conversion. A Web beacon is often invisible because it is only 1 x 1 pixel in size with no color. Also known as Web bug, 1 by 1 GIF, invisible GIF and tracker GIF.
One of the areas my group and USPIRG asked the Federal Trade Commission to address in our complaint filed this week was mobile marketing to Hispanic-Americans. An entire marketing infrastructure has evolved to target this important group; many questions remain about what they are being offered and how the mobile marketing has been structured. As Media Post explained yesterday in an article on the Hispanic mobile market: “…because they lag behind the general population for Internet access, many will first go online via their cell phones. In fact, they significantly over-index when consuming mobile content. According to comScore m:metrics, 71% of Hispanics consume content on cell phones compared to the market average of 48%. In addition, Hispanics tend to notice and respond well to ads on cell phones. Nielsen’s recent “Mobile Advertising Report” highlighted that Hispanic data users are more likely to recall seeing ads on mobile phones (41% compared with 30% of non-Hispanics) and more likely to have responded (22% vs. 13%).”
One mobile marketing company that is now also focused on the Hispanic market promises potential advertisers that it “utilizes advanced profiling capabilities that are inherent to the platform’s automated learning engine – meaning that the platform learns from previous customer interactions to automatically and organically build up profiles of users and their individual preferences. Each subsequent campaign is then automatically optimized (no human interaction is required!) in order to deliver the most personalized message possible that is based 100% on the user’s profile.”
We are not opposed to mobile marketing. But systems of data collection, profiling, and targeting must be transparent, disclosed, and controllable (a real opt-in) by the users.
Columbia U computer professor Steven M. Bellovin has an important post on the privacy issues raised by YouTube’s new House and Senate channels. He writes [excerpt, our emphasis] that:
“I opened a fresh web browser, with no cookies stored, and went directly to the House site. Just from that page, I ended up with cookies from YouTube, Google, and DoubleClick, another Google subsidiary. Why should Google know which members of Congress I’m interested in? Do they plan to correlate political viewing preferences with, say, searches I do on guns, hybrid cars, religion, privacy, etc.?
The incoming executive branch has made the same mistake: President-Elect Obama’s videos on Change.gov are also hosted on (among others) YouTube. Nor does the privacy policy say anything at all about 3rd-party cookies.”
Video channels providing the public access to members of Congress and the new Administration should be in the forefront of privacy protection-and not serve as a data collection shill for any company. Nor should one company be permitted to shape broadband video access to federal officials.
Google is taking a lobbying tactic developed in part by CSPAN years ago–offer members of Congress a free service so they can be seen by the public. That kind of electronic or digital campaign contribution helps insure that Congress will think twice about biting (or regulating) the video hand that feeds. Google’s new YouTube Senate and House Hub channels raise a number of concerns and policy questions.
For example, what happens to the user data as people click on the Congressional YouTube channels? Does Google get to collect, analyze and use such data for its growing political online advertising business? Beyond privacy, should Congress be endorsing a private for-profit venture as the principal access point voters and constituents need to use? Does the use of YouTube create a potential conflict of interest for members of Congress who will need to regulate Google–on such things as competition (the DoJ recently described Google as a monopoly); privacy, consumer protection, etc (remember, Google sells all kinds of ads for mortgages, credit cards, junk food, health remedies, etc.).
It’s not a coincidence perhaps that Google’s YouTube congressional channel announcement comes at the same time the company is expanding its online ad business for politics. As Ad Age reports this week,“The end of an election season usually means dismantling the campaign apparatus until the next cycle. But not at Google; not this year…Rather than packing it all away until 2010, it’s hoping to build a year-round political-advertising business one House seat and hot-button issue at a time. “There are 500,000 elected officials in the U.S. With the advances we’ve made in geo-targeting, we think this will be part of every political campaign in the country, as well as issue campaigns,” said Peter Greenberger, Google’s director of election and issue advocacy…Google doesn’t yet offer targeting based on congressional districts, but with ZIP code and city targeting, politicians and advocacy groups can cobble together a reasonable approximation of a congressional district.”
The in-coming Obama Administration has had the support of Google’s CEO, and company officials have played a role in the transition. But the new administration should develop a digital outreach approach to the public which is public–and non-commercial–in nature. It shouldn’t show any favoritism, even if Google is the leading search and video service. It should be a change.org--not a government via dot com.
see: “Election is Over, but Google Still Chasing Political Spending.” Michael Learmonth. Advertising Age. January 12, 2009.
Developments in advertising, data collection, consumer analysis and targeting must be transparent and accountable to the public. In a profile of Havas Digital, OMMA Magazine notes that [our emphasis]:
“Havas has created a dynamic online ad trading system that separates audiences from publishing content, and it makes user profile and unique cookie data king, rather than the inventory a publisher serves. The core of Havas Digital’s virtual brand network is its Artemis database management and reporting system, which has already profiled more than one-third of the world’s online population. That and the agency’s Adnetik system help deliver customized roi analytics for media buying.” “Artemis is the central piece of our media buying offering,†Kasper [Adam Kaspar, a senior VP] says. “Its importance has only grown as the technology has improved.â€Coupled with proprietary algorithms, that database has allowed the agency to develop systems that draw on data from third parties, including clients, publishers and networks, that helps it understand which audiences command the most value at a particular time for specific brands.”
Artemis is a “marketing data warehouse.” Yahoo is using the service, including for its already data-enabled Right Media Exchange. Havas describes Artemis as “our proprietary marketing decision support system – a secure warehouse for all your marketing data, plus reporting tools that help make sense of it all. Unlike some of the less sophisticated reports advertisers may receive from ad-servers, for instance, Artemis® provides detailed reporting right down to the user level.”
The FTC, EU, Congress and others will need to need to investigate the growing role consumer data plays in targeting us on and offline. We don’t need private ministries of information tracking the global public.
Google does many important things. But it’s an ad company, including helping these three companies build their direct selling online. Here’s an excerpt from the trade publication QSR:
“We’ve been working with the big three pizza companies over the last three to four years to develop online ordering, and it has become a significant sales engine for them,” says Sam Sebastian, director of local and business-to-business markets at search engine giant Google. “It’s such a competitive space.”
Online ordering typically accounts for anywhere from five to 20 percent of a national pizza chain’s business, Sebastian says. To entice customers to use their service over that of the competition, chains are turning to online search advertising, banner and click-through ads placed on Web sites, and social media sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and MySpace.
So far, online search advertising, whereby a company buys ad space that will appear when a user types a keyword or phrase (“New York City pizza”, for example) into a search engine, has made up the largest portion of media spending online.
…”It’s a direct connection, direct response,” Sebastian says….
Web sites across Google’s content network partner with the company to syndicate advertisements, and Google works with individual web sites and companies to broker advertising.
“If I know my customers are on … any web site where in the content there is a discussion about pizza, I can place my advertising there so it’s available contextually,” Sebastian says.
Papa John’s recently launched its first foray into advertising on the Google Content Network with a one-day blitz of display ads on various sites including MySpace, and restaurant and menu guide site MenuPages.com.
The flash display ads promoted an offer of one free medium cheese pizza with any online pizza purchase for customers who signed up to receive e-mail offers…
New Year, new Administration and Congress. Plus a growing global concern from policymakers, advocates and citizens about data collection online. Even the relatively feckless Federal Trade Commission will do more on the issue this year. Here’s a toast to hope for a honest discussion about the data collection and targeting system which embodies the online marketing apparatus. Look at this excerpt from a story on behavioral targeting and online publishing from this week’s Advertising Age. Note that everyone believes that can collect and use the data collected from observing an individuals’ behavior–and don’t even have to get permission from the actual person. Such online marketing practices, of course, raise important civil liberties issues, as far as I’m concerned.
Here’s the excerpt:Â “…Who created the customer and who owns the data generated by a visit or a sale? “Data is key; everybody wants to own it, everybody wants to use it. It’s not just ad networks — its portals, publishers and holding companies,” said Mike Cassidy, CEO of Undertone Networks. “The question to be answered is who owns the data, if anybody.” In the offline world, publishers market their own subscriber lists. But online that data is harvested by a host of third parties such as Google’s DoubleClick, Microsoft’s Atlas and vast ad networks such as Platform A’s Advertising.com. “People are stealing from the media companies who have lost control of their data,” said Operative CEO Mike Leo….Here’s how it works: A publisher decides to allow an ad network to sell some of its inventory. That network places a cookie on the publisher’s site. Now, when a user leaves that site, and goes somewhere else, the network can track that user.”
source: “As Tracking Proliferates, Web Publishers are Left Out: Behavioral Targeting Punishes Producers of Original Content.” Michael Learmouth. Advertising Age. January 5, 2009 [sub may be required].