Pay Up or Shut Up

IT WAS THE END OF A TYPICAL airport-to-airport marathon. They were tearing up the remote lots at O’Hare, so it began with a Darwinian struggle for a parking space. Then three hours in a middle seat on the tarmac at O’Hare, for some unexplained delay in some unknown location between Chicago and New York. No food service on the plane, of course, since it was meant to be a short-hop flight. At the other end, LaGuardia’s dining options had closed for the night at 9 p.m.-30 minutes before I touched down. I had two Altoids for dinner.

So I was tired, hungry and in a foul mood when I checked into my midtown New York hotel, grabbed my room key and schlepped my wheelie to the elevator. The doors closed.

And a voice started telling me what to do to correct my “bikini-zone redness.”

Who the hell thought I needed “Headline News” piped into the elevator? And not just news content, the way you get it in airport lounges, but with all the commercials intact and ready to irritate? I learned more in that three-day New York stay about debt consolidation and natural male enhancement than I hope I ever will need to know.

It sure wasn’t done for the convenience or pleasure of the hotel guests. In fact, it seemed to indicate a complete indifference to their wishes. The picture was lousy and the sound from the tinny little speaker was both poor and loud enough to loosen fillings. I never saw anyone get into those elevators without wincing involuntarily.

Somebody somewhere thought it was a smart move to make a grab for a captive audience of floor surfers. They’re wrong, very wrong. About the only marketer benefiting from this invasion of yet another ad-free zone was the elevator company that installed the things.

I bring this up not simply to vent but because there’s a fringe movement on the Internet now to give users more “hand,” in the Seinfeld-ian sense, over the marketing messages they encounter online.

A nonprofit called AttentionTrust.org is urging Web users to band together and exercise their rights in the power equation with online marketers. According to the group’s Web site, the clickstream data that’s created when you look at something online (or when you don’t) is “a valuable resource that reflects your interests, your activities and your values,” and that you the user have the right to store, transfer and monetize.

It works like this: Users download a software extension called an Attention Recorder, which tracks their clickstream data from visits. If participants choose, the plug-in can forward that data to one of a handful of approved “Web vault” companies for storage and management. That data is thus short-circuited from being sent to the Web sites, Internet service providers, search marketers and third-party lead generators who get it now and use it for marketing.

If it sounds New Age-y and Web 2.0-ish, maybe even vaguely hippie in its idealism, well, it is. But that’s not a reason to dismiss the notion that power has to be more evenly distributed between those who create the clicks and those who want to exploit them. Permission-based marketing is making inroads everywhere from telemarketing to e-mail to TV advertising. There’s no de facto reason why consumers shouldn’t be able to turn off the tap on the flow of their Web information, too.

And there already are moves afoot to link this data to marketing uses in a way that users can still control the tap. Root Markets, one of the handful of approved data aggregators for AttentionTrust members, also operates Root Exchange, a start-up that’s trying to make a market in attention data by linking members to services they might be interested in. The initial effort is aimed at getting mortgage lenders to access prospects directly over the Web by letting members submit their interest in offers, along with portions of their click data indicating where they’ve been and what they’ve done on the Web, which might help lenders form a better picture of the user’s qualification as a lead.

Venture capital is also flowing to the Web vault companies: Root Markets closed a $12 million round in late May, some of it from The New York Times, which also has adopted its technology, as have Forbes.com and USAToday.com. In addition, Web publishers see themselves as having a claim to the clicks that happen on their sites.

As far as the consumer movement goes, who knows? The attention economy is still in its very early stages. The plug-in that tracks and stores click movements is only available for the Firefox browser. That fact alone virtually guarantees a high geek quotient among the membership.

But asserting control over one’s clickstream might gain grassroots traction from the revelations over the last six months about search engines’ storage of user data, and the news that AT&T has magically transformed the Internet usage data of its broadband customers into “proprietary business records” that it can use as it wishes.

The real problem is marketers’ almost total power to decide who will be marketed to and how — and their inability to be realistic about the impact of doing so. Even most marketers who agree that customers need to be able to zero out irrelevant or noxious messages are really not talking about their own efforts — just the other guy’s.

That assumption of a universal opt-in (we’ll message to you whenever and however we like, until you tell us you don’t want to get those messages) has a lot of sins to answer for, including the extreme prejudice represented by do-not-call registries, spam filters and cookie deletion.

If marketers want to avoid further restrictions on their actions (say it with me now: “do-not-spam lists”), they need to start thinking of the rights of Web users to control more of their attention and even charge for it. Find a way to target the segments that honestly do want to hear from you, and make sure to leave the rest alone.

There’s no such thing as a captive audience anymore. They’ve got the tools to escape, and the harder they have to struggle to turn off your unwanted marketing, the more pissed they’re going to be once they’ve tunneled under the fence.

Oh, and get the damn TV out of the elevator. My bikini zone is fine, thank you.