Publishers are worried about cookies, specifically talk of regulatory action on the privacy front. What’s the story here?
A Privacy Policy might typically say something like this:
“A ‘cookie’ is a small text file on your computer’s hard drive that our Web site uses to collect information about how you use our site. The cookie transmits this information back to our Web site each time you visit a page on our site, thus allowing us to identify our most popular pages, features and data.”
To someone not working for an ad agency or at a publisher or for, say, Google, reading these terms, what they might read could be summarized like this: “Software … embedded in my computer … I have no choice … it stays there forever and ever … it will watch my every move and report back to its masters and possibly the government … my wife might find out.”
Kind of makes one think of that great Far Side cartoon called “What the Dog Hears” (or something like that), with the first panel showing the human saying to her dog Wendell, “That’s a good boy, Wendell, you are such a smart dog, Wendell, why don’t you show everybody how you roll over, Wendell”. While the second panel shows what Wendell actually hears: “Blah blah blah, Wendell, blah blah blah, Wendell, blah blah blah blah blah, Wendell.”
Could be described as a bit of a marketing problem for an industry famous for … marketing. Ironic isn’t it? I wrote previously about the uniquely private culture of privacy in America, in this century (at least) drawing from the fount of Louis Brandeis’ wish for a simple right “to be let alone”. On the face of it, therefore, what could possibly be more instinctively offensive to that sense of privacy than a pitchman’s calming missive of “don’t worry about this little thing we’re putting into your home”?
So, agencies and advertisers squabble over who gets to keep that very valuable consumer data derived from online advertising campaigns and consumer activities. Meanwhile, Congress threatens to lay its blunt and heavy hand on the ability of publishers, agencies and ad networks to use cookies, beacons, profiling and other increasingly improving ad serving technologies to better match advertisements with readers.
Publishers will argue – perhaps justifiably – that cookies are essential to ad serving. (Which technically is not correct, since there are customizable techniques used across the industry with varying degrees of success.) But as one prominent Washington publisher told me, the standard for serving is Google-Doubleclick’s DART service – which requires use of cookies. And since the industry tends to rely heavily – and comfortably – on the reporting consistency of DART, use of cookies remains essential.
Put another way, DART is the standard for ad buyers, cookies are required by DART, and therefore cookies are essential. Not to mention the more structural problem with removing or restricting targeting from an advertising-dependent publishing medium, which would directly impact CPMs and the basic ability to publish.
Facebook was recently sued by Power.com over issues that could be distilled to who owns user personal information and usage data. This is a complicated dispute involving conflicting motivations of Facebook (depending on the legal question involved) to claim or disclaim ownership of user data. Facebook might plausibly argue that a certain amount of data ownership is necessary for Facebook to provide its service in the first place. They’d have a point to the extent content and ads are targeted to users, which of course they are all the time in a network that “suggests” and “recommends” and “connects”. Of course, Facebook’s user agreement (like, say, YouTube’s) doesn’t actually claim any right to a user’s data, instead essentially taking a license to the data for purposes of performing necessary site functions.
The data fights tend to pit advertisers, agencies, ad networks and publishers in a grudge match which ignores the very source of the data itself, people using the internet. Exhibit A is Power.com versus Facebook, and privacy advocates easily recognize that neither adversary has users’ interests at heart. Privacy might be passé, as Maureen Dowd writes in today’s New York Times, but that would argue that noone owns data, and noone can control it.
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