Stupid Media Watch: Needlessly Muddying the Debate

Is it too much to ask that consumer reporters who write about online advertising and privacy have an inkling of how Internet ads work?

Judging by a recent piece in the New York Times, the answer is “yes.”

After setting the stage with two anecdotes that have nothing to do with online advertising’s privacy implications and then claiming the real issue people have concerning their privacy online one of control, writer Eric Pfanner slides effortlessly into the real subject of his piece:

“The subtle relationship between privacy and control has complicated things for marketers, too,” Pfanner wrote. “Advertisers talk about having to move away from analog-era ‘push’ tactics and embracing digital-age ‘pull’ strategies, in which consumers are enticed into seeking information about a product or brand, rather than having ads foisted on them.”

That’s funny, in the 13 years I’ve been covering online advertising, I can’t remember a single discussion about so-called push or pull marketing.

Pfanner continued: “To try to improve the effectiveness of online ads, agencies and Internet companies have been working on ways to tailor them for individual Web users. But that has raised fears of a loss of privacy or control, or both.

“A recent Microsoft-sponsored study found that so-called behavioral targeting can lift advertising ‘click-through’ rates more than sixfold. But the results are often imprecise: No, I’m not interested in buying a house in Sydney or acquiring a U.S. green card, two targeted offers that have just come my way.”

Is he kidding with this? Two anecdotal, off-target ads are evidence online ad profiling is often imprecise? He has no idea what was behind the serving of those ads and whether or not they were targeted on a behavioral basis.

He also can’t possibly know if behaviorally targeted ads work or not unless he’s privy to the results. My wife is a media director for a unit of one of the world’s most well-known ad agencies.

She buys behavioral-based ads from online ad networks all the time. Why? Because she gets results with them.

However, claiming online ad profiles as currently implemented don’t work was the only way Pfanner could lead into his next three paragraphs.

“Internet service providers thought they might have found a way to improve online advertising — using systems that track consumers’ actual Web browsing histories and other Internet data, rather than the sketchy profiles they currently rely on. Though these services promise to ‘anonymize’ the data, they have run afoul of the complicated interplay between privacy and control,” Pfanner wrote.

“Last week, the British telecommunications company BT said it had set aside plans to employ one of these technologies, from a company called Phorm. BT said it was too busy with other projects, but privacy advocates, who have compared the technology with malicious spyware, claimed victory.

“A U.S. company called NebuAd recently went out of business after its tests of similar technology alarmed privacy groups.”

First, ad-network profiles aren’t sketchy. They work. Second, Phorm and NubuAd didn’t run afoul of some “complicated interplay between privacy and control.” Their business model was/is based on a technique called “deep packet inspection,” which targets ads based on Web-surfing information from consumers’ ISPs.

So unlike the ad networks, which place cookies on people’s computers and track their visits only on the finite number of publishers’ sites within their networks—which don’t include porn sites—these two firms could potentially track people everywhere they go online.

They could also potentially read people’s e-mail, see every post they write, read every instant message they send, know about every comment they make on social networks, know their buying habits, their searches, the videos they watch and the music they listen to.

Though the companies claim the information is rendered anonymous, their business model is a public-relations disaster waiting to happen and there’s no readily discernable value proposition for publishers in it.

But to Pfanner, these two troubled firms represent a chance to damn the entire idea of behaviorally target advertising.

“[B]ehavioral targeting is, in some ways, ‘push’ marketing carried to its extreme, with the advertiser controlling not just the content of its message but also the audience for it,” he wrote. “Even if privacy concerns are overcome, can targeting work once consumers realize they are being ‘pushed’?”

There’s that “push” marketing discussion no one’s having again.

Marketers have been trying to control the content of their pitches and the audiences they reach for more than 100 years. Hint: It’s called cataloging.

There is no question that behaviorally targeted pitches work, and there’s a serious debate to be had about how far marketers should go in delivering ads based on people’s behavior online. But meandering, sloppily reasoned articles like Pfanner’s in high-profile publications like the New York Times do nothing but hinder that debate’s progress.