This week the Digital Advertising Alliance announced a new study that determined the value the advertising industry places on targeted ads. As the headline of Katy Bachman’s article suggests - Advertisers Pay 3 Times More for Cookie-Based Ads – targeted ads come with a significant premium. And perhaps rightly so, as Lou Mastria, managing director of the DAA, points out in the story, “Interest-based advertising is the workhorse for subsidizing content on the Internet.” But Bachman speculates that consumer privacy legislation might change this equation at some point.
At Semcasting, we certainly hope new legislation isn’t the solution. We already operate under “Do Not Track” and our Smart Zones audience targeting platform utilizes tools that are 100% privacy-friendly and don’t rely on cookies or any other hard identifier. Not only does this enhance consumer privacy, it also guarantees more accurate reach and data integrity.
When it comes to the issue of consumer privacy, we take a fairly hard line here at Semcasting and hope others in the industry will as well. From our perspective, there are four very clear concepts those engaged in digital marketing ought to support:
1. No first-party data can be brokered or resold
2. Tracking is by default opt-out
3. That demographic or purchase data can only be information that is publicly available and applied in aggregated form
4. That the user always has access and editorial control at the browser level of what is transmitted into any tracking tool.
We believe that online advertising can remain the “financial engine” of the Internet, without the threat to consumer privacy that cookies represent. But only if the industry takes its role seriously and stops paying lip service to privacy.
Semcasting : Jan 29, 2015 4:47:01 PM
