Representatives of the ad industry, public interest groups and the Internet community squared off in one of the final sessions at this year’s Ad:Tech New York meeting to debate the question of browser cookies, small data files that let Web operators offer personalized content and ad networks serve up potentially more relevant ads. But while the discussion produced lots of heat, there was little light shed on the future of a technology that is crucial to the online ad industry.
Cookies—small data files embedded in Web pages and downloaded automatically to visitors’ browsers—are used for a number of tasks, from personalizing Internet content and enabling Web shopping carts to delivering ads based on browser behavior. They also help marketers measure the number of ad impressions and control their frequency.
Research over the last eight months suggests that consumers are blocking cookie downloads at a higher rate than previously expected, either out of concern for their privacy on the Web or because they’re using anti-spyware applications that lump cookies in with more actively malicious software.
That’s a major problem for advertisers, said Tom Hespos, president of Underscore Marketing. If cookies are no longer usable, “all the accountability that as an advertising guy I’ve sold to my clients goes away,” he said. “I don’t get to see how many people saw my ad how many times. There’s a lot wrapped up in cookie technology about control of the ad campaign, including frequency and profiling. We’d be back in the Internet stone age.”
Ari Schwartz, associate director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, told an Ad:Tech New York audience that browser cookies may have outlived their usefulness as a Web metrics tool, and that their high deletion rates should lead internet engineers to look for new measurement and ad placement technologies that might be less objectionable to consumers concerned about their privacy on the Web.
But Trevor Hughes, executive director of the Network Advertising Initiative, said consumers already have a great deal of control over cookie downloads ,thanks to settings in their browsers—most of which they don’t use. And he worried that if cookie deletion continues at its present rate, other measurement technologies might come along that would be “more surreptitious, less transparent, less managed technologies” such as persistent identifiable elements (PIE), which can restore deleted cookies and can’t be easily removed.
Hughes maintained that requesting consumer consent before downloaded any cookie was “neither appropriate nor helpful to the consumer.” Consumers don’t want to make a decision about each of the 17 cookies that is downloaded when they visit the New York Times home page, he said. “If they want to know, we should provide them with tools to get that information and control it. But we shouldn’t confront them every time they come to a Web site.”
Esther Dyson, editor of Release 1.0, said that the Internet industries with the most to lose if cookies disappear are “doing a rotten job” of explaining their value to consumers. That give the anti-spyware manufacturers—none of whom were represented on the panel—an opportunity to fill the information vacuum with fear-mongering self-promotion.
“Just the way advertisers use product placement, I think maybe we ought to consider ‘concept placement’—perhaps have the ‘Desperate Housewives’ do something with cookies,” she said.
Dyson added that fuller disclosures on ads and more identifiable links to the cookies that serve them could make consumers more comfortable with cookies. “We need to make this technology disclosed and boring rather than hidden and scary,” she said.
