Future of Media Summit Blog

Will advertisers' and publishers' desire for highly targeted advertising be thwarted by the desire for privacy?

Targeted advertising: Where are we today and where are we going?
- Changing from push to pull model of advertising
- Holy Grail of marketing - deliver the right ad to the right person at the right time
- Most of the marketers out there are subscribing to the same tennants that traditional direct marketers have been for years (using consumer data to deliver advertising)
- Ask Clients - what is the state of your database? Always problems. The issue is how much time & money do they want to spend on making their database healthy
- Lack of innovation or room for innovation at the ad delivery level because everyone is too busy trying to sort out their data. Everyone is worried about how much personal information companies like Google have, but the thing is they actually have no idea how to use that information!
- Search is your experience (you're choosing to search for something) - targeting makes sense
- Social advertising - Mistake a lot of sites are making today is trying to target too hyper-optimised. Users are creating content and participating in converations about content. There is room for non-targeted advertising where the advertisers participate in a social community and inform the social context - targeting doesn't always make sense

Who controls or owns data?

Key points to clarify when talking about data ownership and privacy
- The word privacy has a number of negative connotations, very vague. Can't implement privacy, privacy is a biproduct
- Data is personal and should be owned by the user. The problem is not one of ownership, what is missing today is control
- Dataportability project is advocating tools to control personal data

- When a person discloses data to a particular company/party they might feel comfortable doing so. Starts to become scary for an individual when data is collated through merges of companies, etc
- Usually some sort of incident leads to public outcry and the government steps into to mandate privacy laws
- Need to develop techniques and mechanism to protect ourselves before someone else tells us how to do it
- Put control in the users' hands to revoke permission to use it

Who are the players in this world of highly targeted advertising?

From a consumers' perspective, if you are using a service you have a relationship with that particular service. But at the moment it's relatively easy for a third party to get
- How to avoid getting individual data sent around?

Goods and services that provide utility in exchange for data (e.g. Users know there is a trade off between getting free Gmail and seeing ads)

Users are the main players. Personal digital assistant - program to receive any of the information you're looking for and serve as a data repository

Vendor relationship management - customer collects as much data about themselves and then provides access to vendors

Important to remember that not all advertising leads to an immediate transaction

Trust is missing - how do we gain trust?

Marketing is the process of having a dialogue with the people you're targeting. Puts Facebook and other social networking platforms ahead because they create converstaions. However, Facebook may have made the mistake of trying to monetise word-of-mouth