Category: annals of behavioral targeting

A Venture Funder Calls for Opposition to Privacy Rules Online–Cites the Need to Collect Financial, Pharma, and Youth Data


“Lightspeed Venture Partners is a leading global venture capital firm that manages over $2 billion of capital commitments.” Jeremey Liew is a managing director of the fund, with “a particular interest in social media, commerce, gaming and methods for increasing monetization.” Lightspeed is a backer of many high tech concerns, including online ad and data collection/targeting companies.   Writing in the company’s blog, Mr. Liew cites the recent call for online privacy safeguards.  He then writes [our emphasis]:

 

 “While it is always hard to argue against privacy, the impact of this level of restriction would be enormous for companies relying on online advertising. Financial services and pharma/health are two of the leading categories for online advertising; the youth demographic is highly attractive to many advertisers, and limiting behavioral targeting to one day without an opt in severely restricts the usefulness of the data.

 

I’ve spoken to a number of people at venture backed ad networks, and it is clear to me that more needs to be done to organize feedback to the FTC and congress about the proposed rule changes and legislation.”

 

I think Mr. Liew has helped underscore our concern.  Sensitive data involving a person’s finances, health, and their children, require serious consumer safeguards.

 

“a behavioral targeting platform…, allowing advertisers to identify and track their desired audience on an unprecedented level”

excerpt:

interCLICK’s innovative behavioral targeting filters allow you to target the right individual users at the right time, increasing the effectiveness of your campaigns. With over 350 behavioral categories, interCLICK can get as precise as you want.

We segment users based on observed behaviors into 3 interest levels: slightly, moderately and very. Furthermore we use frequency and recency to classify these interest as short, mid, or long term interests. As the user navigates throughout our network of sites, we continually adjust their profile based on anonymous observations, assuring the accuracy of our profiles.

Leverage interCLICK’s massive data warehouses to effectively target users who have been determined to exhibit certain behaviors throughout interCLICK’s network. interCLICK offers over 350 different Behavioral Targeting categories/sub-categories… [including]
FINANCIAL:    Personal Banking Seekers
Credit Card Seekers
Retirement Investing
see also:   interClick Improves Scalability of Data Targeting with Latest Platform Upgrade

Online Ad Lobby: A Failure of Vision and Ethical Responsibility

Online ad and other marketing industry lobbyists, in responding to the recent call for Congress to enact privacy safeguards, have failed to seriously address the central public interest issues.  One lobbyist even went so far as to suggest that people want to be tracked, profiled and targeted through their ethnic/racial and political online behaviors.  Others have claimed that providing the public control over what information about them is collected and how it’s used would somehow lead to the erosion of online publishing.  Beyond the absurdity and short-sightedness of such claims, what these online ad leaders fail to address are the civil liberties and consumer protection concerns at the core of the debate.

A democratic society in the digital era–given the current and prospective power of the global online data collection and targeting system–requires serious limits on both commercial and governmental surveillance.  The development of digital dossiers on citizens and others is the realm of dictatorships and autocrats–not a democracy.  That’s why it’s in the interest of responsible advertisers as our fellow citizens to help ensure there are limits on data collection, analysis, use.  By providing individuals greater control and autonomy over the digital marketing process–through federal rules requiring transparency, accountability, and meaningful limits to data collection–we can help protect our civil liberties and provide needed consumer protections.  Everyone recognizes that we are using online to engage in very personal transactions, including health, finance, and politics.  We will be, needless to say, writing more on all this.

Our new Journal of Adolescent Health article on the Youth Obesity Epidemic and Digital Marketing

Prof. Kathryn Montgomery and I just published an article in the Journal of Adolescent Health [JAH] on the the role interactive marketing plays in the current youth obesity epidemic.  It is part of a special JAH issue focused on the obesity issue.  It’s a very good introduction to the current digital marketing landscape, and is one of a series of reports we have done on the issue.

Microsoft Pushes a “Behavioral Targeting Product Roadmap” and it is “Betting” on Increased Consumer Targeting, inc. “Retargeting.” Company Wants to “Live the Data”

The potential combination of the behavioral targeting technologies of both Microsoft and Yahoo! should be one of the key areas investigated by antitrust authorities.  Privacy issues are also important for regulators to address with the proposed deal.  So these current behavioral targeting job openings at Microsoft provide a glimpse into these issues.

Microsoft is now seeking a “Product Marketing Manager of Behavioral Targeting on the Audience Select team…The Product Marketing Manager will establish the requirements and go to market strategy for Microsoft’s Behavioral Targeting product. S/he will partner with a team of world-class engineers, client service, business operations, legal, privacy and other product marketers to envision and design the industry’s best targeting technology to connect advertisers with their audience. The candidate chosen for this position will be responsible for creating the product GTM roadmap, developing and prioritizing segment requirements and designing GTM models to support the sale and delivery of behaviorally targeted advertising. S/he will be Microsoft’s resident expert on Behavioral Targeting and will be the first person to explain and communicate business metrics – particularly sell-thru – to field, business, and engineering…Articulate the behavioral targeting product roadmap to key customers and partners, and aggregate industry feedback in a form that is actionable for development…Influence long-range, multi-release planning for behavioral targeting…Someone with a deep passion for advertising technology and a deep knowledge of the targeted industry…”

Then look at this position for a “Taxonomist/Audience Intelligence.”  Note that they include the fiction that Microsoft will compete with Yahoo!!!

Online advertising is the biggest growth opportunity for Microsoft. This business currently generates about $2B in revenue for Microsoft with tremendous opportunity ahead, given how the industry wide advertising is shifting to digital media. Join and help take our digital advertising to the next level to compete against Google and Yahoo with our initiatives in Audience Intelligence. Our group is chartered to develop an industry leading targeting system for all our ad products and services. Effective targeting helps an advertiser reach their core audience and will drive high value propositions to the end customers. We as a company is betting on this initiative to differentiate our advertising offerings to our customers and to further grow our advertising revenue.

We are seeking an experienced taxonomist to provide thought leadership in taxonomy, classification, and metadata management. Audience Intelligence enables the discovery and inference of user profiles, intent and interaction while respecting privacy and trust, with the ultimate goal of maximizing benefits for users, advertisers and publishers. Our focus spans all types of digital advertising such as search, display and emerging media including mobile, gaming, video on demand, and IPTV.

And they also want someone to help its behavioral retargeting initiatives (which it calls remessaging!)

The Search & Media Network Group within Microsoft Advertising is looking for a rock star product manager to deliver against revenue goals for Microsoft Advertising’s Re-Messaging product, by driving global business planning and execution, product marketing and competitive strategy…We work to seamlessly combine a range of individual online advertising products that span search, display and audience targeting, into solutions that address advertisers’ core campaign objectives.
Your core mission will be driving business revenue and field sales engagement with the Re-Messaging ad product (also known in the industry as Re-Targeting)… Live the data, by building a deep understanding of the key metrics associated with the Re-Messaging business, and driving analysis into trends and emerging opportunities…Specific partners will include product planning, trade / field marketing, sales, yield/monetization and more…

Database Games AOL May Play: “Database Matching” Subscribers Behavior Online and Off

We think it’s ironic that the same week AOL joins with several other leading digital marketers to kill-off a new online privacy law in Maine designed to protect adolescents, an article in Advertising Age reveals how much it covets–and hopes to financially harvest–data from its 5.8 million customers.  Here’s an excerpt on so-called database matching–in essence, a digital spy watching what you do offline and on AOL:

Valuable eyeballs
While many major ad-supported internet properties would kill to have as many paying users as AOL, it’s the users’ behavior that puts them in the company’s sweet spot. Subscribers are AOL’s uber-users — more valuable than average because they use more AOL properties and products than typical web visitors and, as a whole, are a large part of the traffic that sees ads and then converts, either by clicking through or making a purchase.

The company also sees subscribers as a valuable source of research and insights — a sort of panel it can use to understand online behavior and ad receptivity.

“There are other ways they can bring value, ways we can use the data and understand how they interact with content,” Mr. Levick said [AOL’s president for global advertising and strategy]. “If we can look at them in the aggregate and see how they interact with certain advertising, it could bring us closer to the last mile of online research.”

How it would do that isn’t exactly clear, but like other web properties, AOL has databases of users who have registered for services and can work with marketers to “database match.”

“[Database matching] is interesting in terms of connecting online exposure to offline sales,” said Carrie Frolich, managing director-digital at Mediaedge:cia. “If I have a client that directly sells their product, be it a pizza-delivery or phone company, they know names and addresses, and AOL knows that. With the assistance of a third party, they can match up our database and their database and come up with a matched set that you can load into ad server and measure exposures and measure the lift.”

source:  Why once-dispensable access biz is central to AOL’s strategy.  Abbey Klaassen.  Ad Age.  August 24, 2009

The Battle to Protect Adolescent Privacy Online–Maine’s new law and beyond

Online marketers–including Time Warner’s AOL–are up in arms over a new state of Maine law that is designed to protect adolescent privacy online.  We won’t get into the specifics of Maine’s new law at the moment (but heard some online advertisers are especially fearful of the “private right of action” in the law, which could bring citizen lawsuits).  But we know its sponsors are among the growing number of advocates, health professionals, consumer groups and parents that want to see teenage privacy respected.  Digital marketing techniques are being used to target teens, including the gathering of data for behavioral profiling.   Groups have already asked the FTC and Congress to address this problem.

Responsible marketers should support new safeguards that respect teen privacy. There are also a variety of consumer protection issues connected to online advertising that need to be addressed.  We expect this issue will be fought out at the state, federal and international level.  My CDD will be continuing its work bringing unfair marketing practices targeting adolescents before the FTC and other regulators.

Network Neutrality, a Narrowed Internet and Digital TV [Attention DoJ, FTC & FCC]

It appears that the network neutrality fight now also must be focused on how new TV sets are connected to the Internet.  A narrow, closed universe, of digital lite applications are to be part of the new high definition television universe, according to Variety.  For example, new TV’s connect to a version of the Internet but haven’t been “built for full-fledged Web browsing.”   But these sets “will come pre-installed with targeted applications for specific websites, somewhat like iPhone apps.” [our emphasis]  Some 50 million people are predicted to have these Net-lite sets by 2013.

Variety explains that:  Indeed, apps are seen as the keys to success with Web-enabled TV. There are no plans for a central app store, but analysts say they wouldn’t be surprised to see one. For now manufacturers can “push” new apps onto TVs but viewers can’t add any themselves.  This puts manufacturers in the new position of deciding which sites gain access to their customers’ screens, and there is already talk that they are contemplating selling such access via revenue-sharing deals. 

The Obama Administration has been a strong supporter of network neutrality.  It should challenge this threat to competition and new threat designed to narrow the Internet.  Beyond concerns on openness and content diversity, it’s worth noting that some in the TV industry see the deliver of Internet services via TV’s a way to expand the impact of commercials and ads (since online video ad can’t be fast-forwarded or easily skipped).  These Net-enabled devices also raise important privacy and consumer protection issues.  Notes Variety, “[T]he new technology also could add power to an advertiser’s message, with consumers able to click a link and instantly learn more about a product — and with ads being better targeted based on a person’s viewing and browsing history.”

source:  Television’s killer app: New HD TVs equipped with internet connection.  Chris Morris.  Variety. August 14, 2009.

Behavioral Targeting System Tracks Users, Collects Data, and then Creates Ad Just for You!

So-called “smart ads” and personalized advertising is part of the data collection for digital behavioral advertising paradigm.  Here’s an excerpt from a Audience Science press release on its new approach:

AudienceScience (formerly Revenue Science) announced today the availability of Audience Relevant Messaging (ARM), a new dynamic targeting offering that enables advertisers to deliver personalized messages to consumers based on their individual interests and/or intent to purchase. ARM offers advertisers the potential for unparalleled ROI with dynamic display ad generation and results comparable to search performance providing the exact offer to motivate a prospect to purchase…ARM enables advertisers to target consumers who have abandoned their shopping cart with a message or offer pertaining specifically to their browsing behavior and the items in their cart, as well as search behavior, online and offline shopping history, demographics, geography, and more…With ARM AudienceScience can now easily pull the right creative for the right consumer at the right time and can also test creative and alter campaigns in real-time based on individual behavior and response.

source:  AudienceScience Audience Relevant Messaging (ARM) Delivers Messaging Tailored to Individual Characteristics and Behaviors.  Press release.  30 July 2009.

Disney’s Bob Iger, Kids and Behavioral Tracking/Targeting: He Claims “Kids don’t care” about their Privacy

My friend the children’s TV activist Peggy Charren, back during the 1970’s and 1980’s, had a favorite expression when it came to dealing with self-serving media moguls who trampled on concerns about kids:  “I’d like to wash your mouth out with soap,” she would exclaim (given her tenacity, they knew she meant business).  Robert Iger, the head of Disney, is quoted in Reuters saying that: “If we could sell your behavior to an advertiser — I am actually pretty bullish about what technology is going to allow in terms of behavioral tracking. I think we are going to have information to sell to marketers.”

Unbelievably, Mr. Iger, when citing concerns over privacy, says that: “Kids don’t care,”…adding that when he talked to his adult children about their online privacy concerns “they can’t figure out what I’m talking about.”

Mr. Iger has just dramatically tarnished the Disney brand, by suggesting that it’s okay to engage in digital marketing and data collection to children and adolescents.  Not only is he thumbing his nose at the bipartisan Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, but the growing concern health, parenting and children’s groups have regarding youth privacy and consumer protection.  Instead of Disney being a youth industry leader when it comes to digital marketing, it appears the company is shirking what its role should be.  Peggy–I hope you still have one of those bars of soap!