Andrew FrankThe tension and speculation over Google’s anticipated entry into the hazardous world of behavioral targeting has been growing since its acquisition of DoubleClick, much of whose value lies in its visibility of consumer activity across a vast array of websites. Now, the curtain has been lifted, in characteristic Google style, in a blog post not-so-subtly titled, Making ads more interesting.
Google’s sensitivity to the volatility of privacy issues has prompted it to support its entrance into BT with actions that extend beyond public posturing to the deployment of a unique tool it calls Ads Preferences Manager, where users can control interest category membership and opt-outs, as well as a browser plug-in that addresses the principle limitation of current cookie-based opt-out systems, which is their vulnerability to cookie deletion. Google also indicates it will provide more transparent information around the ads themselves by including links that lead to details about the program. (The Wall Street Journal offers additional coverage.)
This is an important step, both for Google and the online advertising industry at large. Google’s actions clearly raise the bar on transparency and user-control over BT, and will likely force Yahoo!, Microsoft, and others to respond by offering similar more-granular control of ad preferences, which is likely to have an overall effect of drawing more attention to the practice in general. BT is already under growing scrutiny by the FTC (which recently stopped short of new regulations) although it has yet to penetrate public awareness in a meaningful way.
It’s hard to predict the magnitude of public response to innovations in targeted advertising and privacy issues in general, which is why Google needs to be so cautious here. On the one hand, Facebook has repeatedly drawn fire for perceived privacy issues practically every time it tries something new; on the other hand, when Yahoo! announced search retargeting two weeks ago, the response was much more muted than many – including myself – expected. The beauty of Google’s approach is, whatever happens, it looks like they can’t really lose.
If Google’s push into BT does force its competitors to offer similar transparency and control, and if this in turn raises the profile of BT and causes the public to take more notice and increase use of opt-outs while demanding more control, then the overall effect will be to weaken the effectiveness of BT as a targeting mechanism, just as increased cookie deletion and browser privacy settings have done in the past. Google wins because most of its advertising uses contextual targeting, rather than behavioral. True, there’s some vulnerability to a widespread backlash and a retreat would have costs, but ultimately Google has the least to lose if BT gets busted.
On the other hand, if consumers remain relatively indifferent, or even bother to improve and cultivate their Google-based interest profiles, then Google wins because it’s able to make good on the promised synergy with DoubleClick as a premier platform for display and cookies, along with its superior capabilities to analyze pages to correlate them not just with keyword targeting, but with highly valued behavioral categories as well. And it gets to offer a new one-stop shop through AdWords that leverages the promised ability to bring “the science of search to the art of display,” as Eric Schmidt recently put it.
While there will no doubt be critics who single out Google as a privacy risk whose scale puts it in its own class, they seem to have thought this one through.
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Category: Advertising Media Tags: Advertising, BT, Google, Privacy
