Category: behavioral targeting watch

AT&T Positions itself for its (hoped for) Digital Ad & Data Collection-driven Era [Attention: Future of Privacy Forum group]

AT&T, like other companies, understands that online advertising is an intrinsic part of the broadband era business model (along with subscriber charges, transaction fees, etc.). A number of reporters, charming cynics as they may be, are convinced that AT&T’s recent calls for some type of opt-in is merely a form of Google bashing (it’s really Google envy!). But, as this trade story describes below, AT&T wants to better cash in on online ad revenues). It underscores why Congress must enact opt-in rules and other safeguards to govern ISP data collection, profiling, and targeting–especially across platforms. It also suggests a flaw in how the new AT&T supported Future of Privacy Forum envisions safeguards. They are quoted in The New York Times saying they want “to move the debate beyond opt-in versus opt-out,”–meaning self-regulation would rule–or ruin–the data driven day. Here’s an excerpt from CED magazine on AT&T’s new restructuring plan so Internet ads can play a more prominent role:

“AT&T’s Advertising & Publishing business unit has been renamed AT&T Advertising Solutions and is responsible for all of AT&T’s advertising sales, according to the company, to take advantage of advertising opportunities that cut across print, Internet, TV and wireless. Meanwhile, AT&T’s Yellowpages.com business unit has been renamed AT&T Interactive. That operation gets expanded responsibility for the development, management and delivery of online and mobile advertising products across all of AT&T’s media platforms. AT&T Interactive is responsible for online and mobile advertising inventory and offerings.”

source: “AT&T realigns ad operations.” Brian Santo. CEDMagazine.com November 20, 2008.

Why Google Can’t Say a Word that Starts With “P”—Privacy

The senior execs and DC lobbying team at Google really have a major problem addressing one of the company’s gravest problems–its lack of leadership protecting consumer/citizen privacy. While Google claims to reporters and others it’s been proactively strengthening its privacy policies, most of the changes have come as a result of pressure from policymakers and privacy advocates.

This week, Google released a booklet which “spelled out…2009 policy priorities” for the new Administration and Congress, including several Internet related issues. The booklet’s release coincided with a speech Google CEO Eric Schmidt gave at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. Missing from the booklet’s agenda was any discussion of privacy or the role and structure of online advertising (You would never know, for example, that Google was just forced by the Department of Justice’s antitrust division to drop its proposed deal with leading rival Yahoo!).

Google should be playing a leadership role supporting the enactment of serious privacy rights for the public–including “opt-in,” real transparency, user control, limits on retention, etc. If Google believes its golden digital goose will be baked once consumers better understand and control how they are being profiled and targeted, they should examine how it defines corporate social responsibility. But Google’s current approach—we can’t admit we are collecting your data for interactive marketing and cannot even say the word privacy in public-– will ultimately have consequences for Google’s future–including its share price.

New AT&T-funded “Future of Privacy” Group: Will it Support Real Privacy Protection or Serve as a Surrogate for Self-regulation and Data Collection?

A new group co-directed by former DoubleClick and AOL chief privacy officer Jules Polonetsky, called the “Future of Privacy Forum,” has been announced. It is connected to the law firm representing AT&T–Proskauer Rose–which has a considerable practice in the online marketing and data collection area. Other backers include Intel, General Electric, IBM and Wal-Mart.

We are concerned, however, that the role of the Forum is to help discourage Congress from enacting an opt-in regime for data collection. Both ISPs–such as AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner–as well as online advertising companies such as Google/DoubleClick, Yahoo, and Microsoft must be governed by privacy laws which empower and protect consumers. The role of ISPs in any data collection for targeted online marketing, in particular, requires serious analysis and stringent safeguards. AT&T, Google, Microsoft, Comcast, the online ad networks, and social media marketers (to name a few) must be required to provide meaningful disclosure, transparency, accountability and user control (with special rules governing health, financial and data involving children and youth). Self-regulation has failed. If the Future of Privacy group is to have any legitimacy, it will work to support serious federal rules. But if it trots out some sort of voluntary code of conduct as a way to undermine the growing call for real privacy safeguards, this new group may soon be viewed as beholden to its funders and backers.

Project Canoe: Data-mining and Viewer Monitoring for Ad Targeting—-for banks, dog food, and your Cable Company

The cable TV industry’s interactive advertising consortium called Project Canoe is steadily moving ahead with plans that will harness more cable viewer data for profiling and targeting. Here’s some excerpts from a Hewlett-Packard blog:

“…Canoe’s first national go-to-market product is called Creative Versioning Platform which marries the cable industry’s ad zones with demographic databases, and this will offer national advertisers more targeted, relevant and effective advertising with commercials that run simultaneously across the national market with different messages and tags…

So who might this impact… How about consumer banking? Although there is a major consolidation in recent weeks with consumer banks, they still have specific audiences they are trying to target with their diverse banking products. Imagine Bank of America’s Private Wealth Management group only targeting household income over $150k with one specific message and another message for free checking account for households less than $75k. Or how about Purina dog food for only dog owners? Did you know that 40% of all U.S. TV households own a dog? The opportunities are endless.

Data – will be a major emphasis in Canoe’s charter…In the very near future, Canoe will have the ability to measure and monitor viewing via their set top boxes, second by second data by each box. Look familiar? That’s right, the Internet! These boxes will have in-dept and granular data for programmers and advertisers alike…Request for Information (RFI) – another basic feature with high potential…Pretty powerful stuff – high level of tracking…

T-Commerce…What could be better – you buy it during your favorite show, have it billed to your cable bill, have it shipped to your house (as the cable co. has your address) and you pay for it at the end of the month.

So who might this impact….How about credit card companies to begin with! And if the cable company offered to finance the purchases, they could create their own finance companies – similar to auto dealers. That’s called “extra income.”

source: The Changing Face of Media. Oct 6, 2008.

Online Ad Privacy Watch: Google Adding DoubleClick to its AdSense System

Policymakers will need to closely examine the role DoubleClick will play in collecting, analyzing, and helping profile consumers (whether they are online, seeing a video, or using a mobile device, for example). Here’s an email Google is reported sending out this week. My bold:

“We understand that the recent economic turmoil has created a lot of uncertainty in the lives of AdSense publishers. During these difficult times, we’re continuing to invest in innovations that improve publisher monetization and advertiser value in the content network.

We’re focusing on further developing our product offerings and boosting ad performance for publishers. We recently announced advancements in AdSense for search and experiments to make ads more effective. We’re bringing DoubleClick technologies to AdSense publishers, and we’ll continue to launch new products and features. We’re also continuing to improve our offerings for AdWords advertisers, making it easier for them to target the Google content network. Features for advertisers, such as the new display ad builder, are designed to improve ad performance on AdSense publisher sites.

We’ll keep driving technological progress, but our best asset will always be our publisher partners. The strength of AdSense lies in the value of the content you bring to users and the quality of the sites you bring to advertisers. Our success is tied to yours. We look forward to partnering with you for the long term, and remain dedicated to helping you succeed.”

Google Using Brain Research to Hone its Online Ads

Google has joined the stampede of advertisers who have embraced the tools of neuroscience to help them create the emerging generation of interactive ads. In the new model for marketing, the goal is to bypass our conscious, more rational, decision-making. They want to reach deeply into our emotional, unconscious, self. Hence, the gaggle of companies helping marketers with brain research. Google, by the way, is using the same company that recently tested how junk food ads affected consumer brains during the recent Olympic games. Neurofocus, the Berkeley-based company partnering with Google, won a major ad award for its help harnessing neuroscience to sell Frito-Lay chips. The growing role of neuroscience research for advertising (especially digital marketing) must be addressed by policymakers, health professionals, and other responsible parties. Here’s the Mediaweek excerpt:

“Google is so confident that its InVideo Ads product—those semi-transparent/animated overlay ads it launched on YouTube last year—are game changers that the company is turning to brain wave researchers to prove their effectiveness.

The search giant–in conjunction with MediaVest–has partnered with NeuroFocus, a researcher that specializes in biometrics, to gauge both how users respond to InVideo ads and how well those ads complement traditional banner ads. NeuroFocus specializes in measuring individuals’ brain response—by literally placing sensors on their heads—as well as other factors like pupil dilation and skin response.

“We were really interested in looking at what we think of as a pretty innovative ad unit,” explained Leah Spalding, advertising research manager, Google, who emphasized that since InVideo ads are designed to be non-intrusive, they warrant an evaluation that goes beyond traditional measures like click-through rates. “Standard metrics don’t tell the whole story…Specifically, after fielding a study among 40 participants last May, InVideo ads scored above average on a scale of one to 10 for measures like “attention” (8.5), “emotional engagement” (7.3) and “effectiveness” (6.6). According to officials, a 6.6 score is considered strong.”

source: “Google, MediaVest Tap Biometrics for InVideo Ads Play.” Mike Shields. Mediaweek. October 23, 2008.

and more on the research via Mediapost: “…the NeuroFocus research conducted in May looked at the reactions of 40 people to YouTube InVideo overlay and companion banner ads from a cross-section of MediaVest advertising clients.

The firm used biometric measures such as brainwave activity, eye-tracking and skin response to gauge the impact of ads. Based on criteria including attention level, emotional engagement and memory retention, it then comes up with an overall “effectiveness” score for ads.”

“Google: This is your brain on advertising.” Mark Walsh. Mediapost. Oct. 23, 2008

PS: Google has been holding research discussions on such topics as “The Neuroscience of Emotions [Sept. 16, 2008]. Here’s the link to a presentation via YouTube.

Here’s another on computational neuroscience by a researcher who works on online advertising.

Privacy Threats from Google/Yahoo Deal: “True Behavioral Targeting”

Via a interview in B to B magazine [excerpt, my bold]: “It seems that Yahoo is out to get two main things from a deal with Google: a proven alternative to its failing search-monetization effort and access to more data that enable better behavioral targeting, complementing its technological and differentiating assets… A Yahoo-Google joint venture would produce the only entity on the Internet with access to a critical mass to enable true behavioral targeting. That’s a lot of private information in one place and a significant limitation for others to compete in behavioral targeting and personalization of the Web.”

source: “What a Google-Yahoo advertising deal means. Christopher Hosford. B to B. October 22, 2008

The New York Times Offers Behavioral Targeting to its Advertisers [file under “failure to really disclose” department]

Excerpt from the New York Times “Audience Targeting” page for advertisers:

“Target your Ideal Audience

As the #1 reaching newspaper site on the Web, NYTimes.com has an extensive database of reader-supplied information. Through reader surveys and registration data analysis, we can offer you access to your ideal audience.

Main Types of Targeting on NYTimes.com:

  • Contextual
  • Behavioral
  • Registration Based/Demographic
  • IP-Based Company Information
  • Geographic…

  • Behavioral Targeting

    This offers you the ability to reach niche audiences based on readers’ demonstrated interest wherever they are on NYTimes.com. By utilizing this premium-targeting tool, you can exponentially increase the number of opportunities to reach your niche audience. Experience more efficient use of marketing budgets, expanded ad placement opportunities and increased media impact and effectiveness.

    How it works:
    NYTimes.com collects anonymous data on user behavior on the site. We can track broad behaviors – like visits to particular sections – and narrow ones – like reading about a particular topic or demonstrated interest in luxury real estate. With this data, interest segments are built…

    IP-Based Company Information

    Through information gleaned from visit IPs we can target against Industry and Fortune 500 or FTSE ranking. This allows for very narrow targeting of any visitor to the NYTimes.com site, whether that user is registered with us or not.”

Facebook ad targeting system is using the “keywords in people’s status messages”–Tales of Behavioral Targeting

Fresh proof that Congress has to prohibit behavioral targeting unless consumers opt-in appears in the new issue of Brandweek. Facebook is “experimenting” with the targeting by “keywords in people’s status messages,” according to “Tim Kendall, director of monetization at Facebook.” Here are some other choice excerpts from the article:

“Advertisers are extremely interested in all new developments in the behavioral targeting space,” said Emily Riley, senior analyst at Forrester Research, Cambridge, Mass. “We’re seeing a big uptick in the use of [these] tactics.” According to Forrester data, 24% of advertisers used behavioral targeting in 2008. Last year it was only 16%…Almost half of advertisers say, ‘Even if I didn’t use behavioral last year, I definitely want to this coming year…”…

“…said Jeff Berman, president of sales and marketing at MySpace. “… the more data you have, the smarter you can be with your media… but if you want to focus on . . . 25-40-year-old mom Nascar fans who love romantic comedies and live in 12 specific zip codes, we can do that.”

…”as BT becomes more invasive at social networking sites, the technology should improve and thus serve up more relevant ads based on our true site behavior…Revenue Science, one of the biggest independent BT networks, is using forward-to-friend behavior to allow advertisers to target virally oriented people. Bebo, the social networking site AOL bought earlier this year, works with Elkridge, Md.-based Lotame, an agency that helps brand advertisers target unique users, such as new moms, who spend a lot of time on social sites.”

source: Behavioral Targeting: A Tricky Issue for Marketers. Becky Ebenkamp. Brandweek. Oct. 21, 2008

MySpace, Social Networks, Massive Data-Mining, Privacy & Interactive Advertising

Policymakers–including state attorneys-general, the FTC and EU officials– are failing to examine how social networks such as MySpace are utilizing advanced data mining techniques to track, analyze, and target millions of unsuspecting users (including, likely, adolescents). For example, MySpace (and other Fox Interactive Media properties, FIM) are using data warehouse and parallel computing techniques that “is enabling a new set of applications and services that previously were simply neither possible nor practical at this scale.”

MySpace and other FIM entities are engaged in daily “real-time” analysis of massive data sets from its 190 million active users. Such data analysis is driving FIM’s “advanced targeted advertising systems.” So all the MySpace “user-generated content” becomes fodder for the analytical ad-targeting. Such data collection must be under the full control of the user–they need to know how and what is being collected, how its used, what inferences are made, the range of ad and marketing targeting linked to the data, etc. It’s time social media marketing, as the industry calls it, draws the attention of policymakers, including the U.S., Canada, and in the EU.