Improving Behavioral Targeting for Consumers

Emily Riley | November 21, 2007, 03:52 PM

MoveOn.org is collecting signatures to require Facebook’s new Beacon advertising platform to be opt-in for all purchase notifications (currently it’s opt-out.) Purchase behavior is pretty personal, so that makes sense to me. I don’t agree that all behaviors on Beacon should be opt-in, however.
In related news, not much seems to be coming out of the FTC talks around behavioral targeting, although Google’s battle for Doubleclick may increase the momentum. After recently talking to Steve Smith at OMMA about the privacy issues surrounding behavioral targeting, it became evident to me that in order to be effective over the long term, marketers will need to come to some sort of agreement with consumers sooner rather than later. While consumers today are not necessarily worried about behavioral targeting (only about 4 percent are worried about websites spying on them,) as targeting becomes more accurate, and therefore more intrusive, users may begin to take note. Facebook’s Beacon is an example; reporting purchase behavior to other friends as a way of advertising might be crossing the line of helpful and intrusive. Similarly, targeting users based on their own posted content regarding personal financial or health issues seems to be pretty intrusive. I’m not an advocate of 100 percent opt-in. Not only would the pool of data shrink, perhaps to extremely small levels, but users would probably be opting out of an overall better advertising mix. Instead, I think that in matters of money, health (including sex and dating), and family, users should be prompted to opt in, while all other product research and general content browsing behavior should be automatically used with a potential opt-out that’s located at the level of the website or network. Just as importantly, I think the issue of clutter needs to be addressed. One reason why marketers are so eager to use new forms of behavioral targeting is to counteract the terribly low response rates on the banner ads across social sites. If we could reduce clutter due to high impression levels, a lot of the problem might be solved on its own.