Commentary
Bridging The Data Disconnect
- by Laurie Petersen , May 9, 2016
Marketing has never been more competitive. Today's consumers enjoy content across a variety of devices and channels. They browse social media on their smartphone, read articles on their laptop and stream shows on TV. No matter which option they choose, there's a good chance they'll run into multiple advertisements along …
I've been in marketing, or friendly to it as a business person and a journalist, for most of my adult life. But the last thing I want is for marketers to know a damn thing about what I'm doing when I'm not having a consenting first party relationship with them, in their domain.
I don't want them to know where I arrived from, what I've searched for, what devices I've used, or even any demographic data. I don't mind them knowing a few things if we have a genuine consenting relationship, but beyond that, nada. Because it's none of their damn business. Simple as that.
People don't like being spied on. The fact that marketers can do that in the digital world (and couldn't in the old analog one) doesn't make it right.
By the way, we don't "visit" websites or "arrive" at them. Literally, we make requests to them. That's what the HTTP headers in our browsers do. What we request is the valuable content of the site. In old print terms, the "editorial." We'll put up with the advertising, just as we did in the analog world, and we do know that ads help pay for the site's desired content. To some degree we even appreciate it. But we don't want to put up with being abused by uninvited spies, or by putting up with ads that can achieve levels of annoyance and intrusion that old-fashioned print and broadcast could never dream of. (Or, if they did, would be nightmares.)
That's why more of us every day install ad blockers and tracking protection. These are clear messages from the market to marketing. This post tells me they're still not getting it.
Don't necessarily disagree with Doc, but shouldn't he point out thet user behavior is being tracked offline to a greater extent than ever before from set top box data used in comjunction with offline data, to cameras in stores that watch how customers navigate isles, and even loyalty cards are a means of observing customer desire. Wonder how people feel about those kinds of tracking?
Good questions, George.
Some observation makes sense. I've worked in retail and know how important it is for stores to know how traffic flows, how to improve traffic patterns, and to employ closed-circuit cameras and one-way mirrors to fight shoplifting. None of that is personal, or intended to result in personal marketing messages. Little of it should creep customers out, or make them feel like they are being treated the way ants treat aphids, which is how surveillance-based adtech works online.
I also don't begrudge cable and satellite companies using set top box data to improve their services, or to provide anonymized and aggregated data to their distribution partners, although I would prefer it if that was all done by my grace and by my express permission rather than by passive acceptance. What I suggest there, by the way, is how Apple now does its Health app, which is a model for the rest of what it will be doing over the coming years, and modeling for other companies equally inclined to be respectful to their customers and users. (For more on that, see http://j.mp/3kyndz)
The problem online is that we don't have the elementary privacy technologies we call clothing and shelter in the offline world. We were naked there too, tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago. And we've had that much time to work out the norms that go with the simple signaling that buttoned clothing and closed doors communicate to others. But we've only had about two decades to do the same here in the digital world, and that's not enough.
The frontier here is on the personal side: giving individuals their own sovereign means for guarding their privacy and communicating welcoming or forbidding signals to others, with the same subtlety we've enjoyed for millennia in the offline world. Ad blocking and tracking protection are just the first step in that direction. We'll have more, and those tools will evolve as well. Fostering that work has been my job for the last nine years with ProjectVRM (http://projectvrm.org) and more recently with Customer Commons (http://customercommons.org). Laurie Peterson, who wrote the piece above, covered some of that work in The Campaign for Ads Not Based on Tracking (http://j.mp/0trking), posted here a few days ago.
The middle ground we need to build is a floor where customers and companies can dance, and either can lead. The Internet supports that. The old media only supported one-way shouting and targetting, whether the customers liked it or not. That's still obsolete, no matter how fancy the technology gets.