Thinking Out Loud: Relevant or Wrong

MARKETERS WANT TO GET THE BIGGEST BANG FOR THEIR ADVERTISING BUCK IN TODAY'S ECONOMY, AND NOT SURPRISINGLY, MANY ARE TURNING TO BEHAVIORAL TARGETING TO DO JUST THAT. BUT IS IT A WAY TO GET THE RIGHT MESSAGE TO THE RIGHT CONSUMER — OR A STEP DOWN A MORALLY QUESTIONABLE ADVERTISING PATH? JAFFER ALI AND MATT WISE DEBATE THE ISSUE.

We stand on the precipice of a new age of advertising that is being threatened by a misguided debate on privacy. For the past 200 years, advertising has been purchased under the same paradigm — buyers forced to buy entire readerships of magazines or newspapers, knowing full well a large segment of the audience wasn't the desired target of their ads. A media buyer's job was to attempt to mitigate this waste.

The digital age makes it technically feasible to reach only the audience you wish. No longer must Pampers buy an entire edition of O, The Oprah Magazine. Now Pampers can buy only women with children from birth to age three. And now Orvis can advertise its $750 carbon fiber fly fishing rod, the Helios, in The Washington Post, to people who have both the financial wherewithal and a history of viewing and buying fly fishing equipment.

Such technology democratizes advertising, allowing smaller niche advertisers to reach their target audiences on stages, such as The New York Times, that historically have been the exclusive territory of only the most powerful marketers. For these ailing print publishers and producers of professional content, this would seem a boon to retaining high CPMs in the digital age. And for consumers, more advertising will be relevant to their needs and desires. Additionally, to the U.S. economy, improving the effectiveness of advertising can inject billions of dollars back into more productive uses.

MISPLACED CONCERNS

So what stands in the way of this new age of intelligence in ad-vertising? What stands in the way of saving billions of dollars in wasted advertising spend? A well-intended but misguided debate about privacy.

Some argue that consumers should have to opt in to let online publishers target ads using their data. But asking them to do this in the offline world would be absurd. Is Walmart not able to optimize product displays by watching shoppers walking through its stores? Moreover, in the online environment hundreds of small innovating companies enable online targeting. It's not reasonable for an average consumer to investigate all of these companies to make an informed decision about what to opt into; they need to rely on publishers like The New York Times to vet these companies.

Others argue that information should be kept for a limited amount of time, such as a day or for six months. But data on gender or age and many life milestones are timeless — why delete this information and dumb down our advertising? If you know a mother has a baby in 2009, then you can target her four years later as her child becomes a toddler. For car purchases, the consumer cycle is every three years, and every seven years for homes.

Others argue that behavioral data should not be matched to an individual's name. Such limitations are not practical. For Orvis to reach that well-off consumer of fly fishing rods, data sources from offline and online sources need to be combined with registration data from The Washington Post to make the connection possible.

There are reasonable concerns about how data should be used. No one wants a person to be discriminated against due to ethnicity while attempting to secure a mortgage. No one wants a person to be denied health insurance because he or she researched a disease. People don't want criminals to gain access to information that could enable identity theft. Americans don't want their every action to be reviewed by the government.

The collection of data should not be the debate. The protection of consumers by providing transparency on the use of data, empowerment of consumers to control this data, and encryption standards to protect the access and use of the data are excellent issues to be agreed upon by all parties. Fear, coupled with a desire to hold back the progress of advertising, is not the path to the future.

Got a topic you'd like to suggest for a “Thinking Out Loud” debate? E-mail beth.negus@penton.com or brian.quinton@penton.com

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