Striking the Consent Balance

Rachael Morris is an Account Analyst at Infectious Media working on campaigns for clients in the telecommunications, technology, retail and travel sectors. In her day-to-day role, Rachael analyses large amounts of data and ensures campaigns meet their targets. Here she discusses issues around data privacy, recently brought into focus by the EU ePrivacy directive.

Images of Big Brother spring easily into the minds of a generation brought up on endless dystopia novels. We feel surrounded by governments whose desire to know all about their people is exceeded only by their fiendish organisation and ability to sift through reams of data almost instantaneously. Stories of leaked data abound*, growing ever more worrying as we realise just how much information we routinely put out into the world. And, much as we might like to say otherwise, this isn’t entirely unjustified: 90% of people have shared information with at least one site**. There is a lot of information out there about all of us. On the other hand, the sheer volume of data floating around is one of the very things that makes this sort of nightmare scenario so unlikely – the difficulty already involved in getting meaningful information about any given individual is only increased by the amount of noise that is now out there. Equally important is the fact that none of the information being made available is personally identifiable. It sounds like a small point, but the difference between the knowledge that Susie Johnstone was recently looking at flights to Italy and bought a bikini and the knowledge that computer 856076815463 did the same is huge.

Interestingly, the more people know about how the information about them is collected and what it is used for, the happier they are about it – after hearing details about behavioural advertising, 74% of consumers felt more comfortable with their data being used**. This kind of data and the ability to tailor the advertising served to someone’s needs and wants is what differentiates digital advertising from other forms, so it is vital that we reach some kind of consensus on what is and isn’t acceptable. The only way to do this is going to be opening a dialogue with consumers, asking their opinions and ascertaining exactly where their limits lie as well as making as much information as possible freely and easily available. Until consumers feel comfortable with the information we hold about them and how it is used, we will not be able to move forward and exploit the full potential of online advertising.

The recent EU ePrivacy directive heralds a change in the industry’s attitude to privacy. The requirement to obtain informed consent for all non-essential cookies will force advertisers into clear disclosure of the implications of a visit to their website. The difficulty lies in striking the appropriate balance – we do not want to adhere to the regulations at the expense of user experience. Over the next year, we will all need to work to reach a consensus on acceptable forms of consent, which best achieve this balance. As members of the IAB, Infectious Media is actively involved in policy development and best practice data usage in advertising, and we see this as a real opportunity for positive change.

*http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/apr/27/playstation-users-identity-theft-data-leak

** Statistics from IAB’s September 2009 study, in partnership with Olswang.

The Third Channel

There’s something happening at Facebook.  Almost under the radar it seems that they have established one of the strongest online advertising platforms available which is disrupting the established digital media buying landscape.  A simplistic view of digital media buying is that there are two very clear disciplines, ‘search’ and ‘display.’  Search is 100% platform traded whilst a growing portion of display is now starting to be platform traded via real time bidding (RTB).  This certainly seems very neat and Google have been in pole position to offer an over arching digital advertising management platform, the acquisition of Invite Media being the latest display addition to the existing, ubiquitous Adwords search platform.

However somewhere in the middle of this neatly bisected landscape, Facebook have started to build their own advertising empire, ignoring this equilibrium, and fast creating what would appear to be a completely new channel. In 2008 this quiet revolution started with the release of their self service buying interface for ASU’s (Facebook’s proprietary ad unit) and to complement this came a buying API on which they have allowed a limited number of third parties to build out campaign management tools.  At the start of this year, the walled garden approach started to pick up pace with the removal of all third party banner advertising and the under reported but very significant release of the Facebook conversion pixel.  Add to this an unwillingness to accept third party view tracking (at least for self service buyers) and the platform becomes a hybrid of the existing search and display models that are already prevalent but powered by Facebook using micro-targeted demographic and interest data.  Walled advertising gardens are the preserve of the audience or perhaps more crucially the data rich, and Facebook has both in abundance.

Rumour has it that their standard ‘banner’ CPM’s were incredibly poor with response rates for advertisers to match.  With the new system, advertisers now have the opportunity to tap in to the vast (and bettered only by Google) data treasure trove that Facebook holds on its users and create highly targeted campaigns.  Our experience of advertising on Facebook via their self serve platform is that it performs incredibly well for advertisers and justifies the ‘channel’ label with an emerging trend (in the UK at least) being Facebook specific pitches separated out from the rest of digital media buying.   Revenues are growing exponentially as well, up to $700m in 2009 and predicted to be over $1bn in 2010.  It’s safe to say that with this type of revenue and growth that banner advertising will not be returning to Facebook any time soon and they will push on with new ways to mine user data for advertising purposes all within the confines of Facebook.

So an interesting dynamic is emerging with Paid search, RTB traded display and now Facebook all having bespoke buying systems that are needed to operate them.   A couple of platform companies from both the search and display space backed up by large amounts of VC money are trying to solve these interoperability problems with the vision being a universal buying platform.  However, the further down the walled garden route Google and Facebook go, the more difficult it will be for this to become a reality as data is not portable between these environments.

From a media buyers perspective this is frustrating, but then it’s only from this side of the fence that interoperability make sense.  After all, would you share your data, if you were sitting on the monopolisitic advertising goldmine that both Google and Facebook are or would you keep it behind closed doors? It’s a smart play and the early signs are that Facebook could well be here to stay as a channel in its own right.