Last week, international data and privacy government regulators gathered at the 33rd International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners in Mexico City, Silicon Valley Mercury News reports. The goal of their conference was to discuss the growing level of concerns surrounding the issue of online privacy.
Regulators were joined by nonprofit organizations and businesses looking to make their case for continuing the current behavioral targeting practices for anonymous consumer tracking in order to more effectively market their goods and services.
Marketers continue the push for a self-regulatory approach for the online advertising industry believing that the current tracking devices such as cookies or beacons can be managed through best-practices and opt-in industry compliance standards. A self-regulatory approach to the anonymous tagging of an online user's browsers to learn about their interests and behavior is troubling on two fronts. Managing the compliance of an entire industry is on the face of it an impossible task - especially one that is profit driven. With any profit motive there will be violators foreign and domestic and the systemic unsustainability of this policy stands as a significant risk to industry who could well find itself liable when rules are broken.
The second risk is more troubling. It is widely acknowledged by online advertising industry analysts that the behavioral targeting and cookies are increasingly less effective as a means to reach a qualified audience. It is an inventory problem. There is less coverage and insufficient reach to qualified cookie-based audiences for many local and regional campaigns. The largest national advertisers and ad networks are increasingly cornering all the qualified behavioral targeted inventory at the expense of the mid-tier, regional and small business advertiser. At the end of the day online advertising is still an emerging technology and any self-regulatory policy could easily codify the current behavioral targeting methods in favor of the largest players in the industry and suppress or restrict innovation.
"We need to move from focus on compliance and being reactive towards being more strategic and analytical," New Zealand Privacy Commissioner Marie Shroff told the news source. "Regulators have been in negative mode and need to be more positive [in finding ways to address the growing concern]."
Rather than prematurely endorsing a self-regulatory policy or waiting to deal with the disruption of prohibitive legislation, savvy marketers would do well to investigate other means of online advertising and audience targetingthat are more agreeable to consumers and economically viable over the long term. A technological solution that allows advertisers to access the full complement of online users in a privacy friendly manner will help the economics of the online advertising business model and ultimately help advertisers and users alike.
IP Audience Zones by Semcasting is one new approach designed to help marketers reach out to the most qualified online audience without violating their personal browsing habits. Rather than relying on cookies and pixels, IP Audience Zones uses information that's publicly available to help connect consumers with ads that are more tailored to their personal interests. IP Audience Zones uses demographic and psychographic data to target users down to the sub-zip code level, allowing marketers more insight. Best of all, the platform allows companies to reach up to 3 times more online consumers, because IP Zones doesn’t use cookies. One hundred percent of the online audience is available as qualified audience clusters of 120 demographic attributes. IP Zones demographic values help advertisers qualify audiences more while still preserving the privacy of online users.