WFA participates in EU Commission roundtable on Interest Based Advertising (11/03/2011)
eMarketer: Mobile phone payments will total nearly $1 trillion by 2014 (28/02/2011)
A-B Inbev, Unilever, Lenovo, Revlon, Visa, Starbucks... WFA announces speaker line-up for Global Advertiser Conference 2011 (28/02/2011)
ISBA announces Annual Conference 2011 Agenda (27/02/2011)
ISBA publishes a new Social Media Guide (27/02/2011)
Marketers limit behavioral targeting due to privacy worries
Date: 04/05/2010
Marketers believe that behavioral targeting is effective but are holding back on the technique due to privacy issues, according to a new Ponemon Institute study.
The report, "Economic impact of privacy on online behavioral advertising," issued Friday, estimates that the proportion of online ad budgets devoted to behavioral targeting would quadruple if privacy concerned were alleviated.
For the study, Ponemon questioned 90 marketers about their attitudes toward behavioral targeting, or tracking people as they surf the Web and then sending them ads based on their presumed interests. More than 70% of the marketers said they believed such targeting was effective. At the same time, almost all of the marketers that participated in the study said they restricted their use of behavioral targeting due to privacy concerns.
Ponemon estimates that marketers currently spend 12% of their online ad budgets on behavioral targeting, but would boost that figure to 47% if privacy fears were addressed. (Ponemon's estimate of current spending is higher than some other industry estimates; eMarketer recently reported that behavioral targeting will account for just 4.8% of online ad budgets this year, up from 4.1% in 2009.)
The report comes at a time of increasing interest in Washington about online ad techniques and privacy. Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) is expected to soon introduce legislation that could require companies to obtain consumers' consent before tracking them for ad-serving purposes.
The ad industry hopes to address some privacy concerns by instituting a new self-regulatory program aimed at ensuring that consumers are notified about behavioral targeting and have the opportunity to opt out. As part of that initiative, new icons to tell Web users when they are receiving targeted ads are slated to debut this month.
Online ad companies often say that behavioral targeting poses no privacy threat because the information that's collected is "anonymous" -- meaning it's not tied to users' names, addresses, telephone numbers or other traditional identifiers. But in recent years, policymakers and consumer advocates have questioned whether it still makes sense to distinguish between "anonymous" data and so-called "personally identifiable information," in part because some Web users have been identified based on supposedly anonymous information.
Source: Ponemon Insitute study
WFA is actively working on setting out a self-regulatory industry response to digital privacy concerns. For more information please contact Malte Lohan.
