Re: [projectvrm] This Student Project Could Kill Digital Ad Targeting - Ad Age Mobile

[Mary Hodder < >]

See comments below:

On Jul 8, 2013, at 11:37 AM, Don Marti wrote:

> begin Liz Coker quotation of Mon, Jul 08, 2013 at 03:59:54PM +0000:
> 
>> Yes.  Had read this.  As you can see in this article, if you push the ad 
>> industry they push back.  They will simply find another way to preserve 
>> their businesses.  (the highlights/emphasis below are mine).
>> 
>> http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/203956/iab-one-in-five-users-send-do-not-track-request.html
> 
> The email spammers pushed back, too.  They made the
> mistake of assuming that the early, vocal anti-spam
> users were atypical hackers/greybeards/radicals,
> and that all the regular users were eagerly awaiting
> email spam.
> 
> "If we just make enough noise about all the great
> deals we're offering, the regular users will demand
> that their elitist mail administrators take the
> filters down!"
> 
> That failed.
> 
> Today, we're seeing a similar pattern with targeted
> ads.  "If those weird radicals will just get out of
> the way, regular users want to be tracked!"

There was some other research done in 2003-4 that showed two things:

for every $ spent on privacy or personal data control by a site, there was an 
$8 return,
AND
if sites and services satisfied the 2% of "weird radicals" they would 
"approve" the sites
and services to the other 98%. (I'm trying to track down this stat.. and will 
forward when I have it --
but it was quoted on stage at BlogOn 2004 at UCBerkeley -- the first place to 
use the term "social media"
and it stuck.. obviously).

That's the way privacy and personal data controls worked then.. and it works 
that way now - per more recent
research.

Basically... the people who want privacy and personal data control (and at 
Customer Commons
we showed that it was 92% of the population in our recent research this 
spring, 2013) ask 
the "weird radicals" and then do whatever they say.  Regular people don't 
want to know that
much, but given the option, they do want privacy / data control.

mary

> 
> But 20-25% of users are setting DNT, but more than
> double that are "not okay with" tracking.
> 
> http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2012/Search-Engine-Use-2012/Main-findings/Targeted-advertising.aspx
> 
> The more you know about cold calls, the less likely
> you are to take one.  The more you know about email
> spam the less likely you are to answer it.  And the
> more you learn about targeted ads...
> 
>> "Zaneis says that the high numbers of people with active do-not-track 
>> signals means that “it is no longer tenable” for the ad industry to allow 
>> consumers to opt out of online behavioral advertising by setting a 
>> do-not-track signal. Instead, the ad industry appears to be proposing to 
>> “de-link” or “de-identify” data about users who activate do-not-track 
>> headers. Such measures potentially could make it harder to determine 
>> people's names based solely on data about the Web sites they visit, but 
>> that depends on the methods used to “de-identify” the data."
>> 
>> That being said – this approach does not build trust and transparency into 
>> anything.  It just creates more chaos.  If a site detected you were from 
>> Narnia, then it could resort to other methods to try to ascertain your 
>> 'true identity".  And will users remember to "turn it off" every time they 
>> want to transact in VRM mode? Likely not – too much hassle. I'm sure most 
>> of us understand why she did this, but, IMO, for VRM to succeed we need a 
>> a system based upon accuracy and respect, not obfuscation.
> 
> Accuracy has to work both ways.  As advertising
> intermediaries introduce a loss of accuracy in the
> information flowing from advertiser to user, the
> users are less and less confortable with having too
> much information go the other way.
> 
> -- 
> Don Marti                      +1-510-332-1587 (mobile)
> http://zgp.org/~dmarti/        Alameda, California, USA
>