Beating the Behavioral Privacy Issue Blues
As soon as Charter Communications voiced concerns about the controversial behavioral targeting issues, two other internet service providers (ISP) immediately distanced themselves from behavioral. It has become the “hot potato” issue around targeting for internet advertising. The privacy issues surrounding behavioral targeting are nothing new either and go back as far as 2005 or even earlier. What I don’t understand is why organizations would even try to tackle this subject when there are great contextual targeting solutions out there that perform as well (or even better) than behavioral when it comes to performance lift for both direct response (DR) and brand advertisers. Now don’t get me wrong, I am not anti-behavioral—far from it—but if the privacy issues rear their ugly head there is definitely a safe harbor from them in contextual. Marketing Sherpa’s 2008 Online Advertising Handbook surveyed 577 online advertisers from a range of companies and found that 40.5% of the advertisers surveyed felt that contextual targeting yielded a higher ROI while only 36.7% preferred behavioral. So while I’d prefer the industry found multiple ways to target for efficiency and performance, including unintrusive behavioral methods, which we certainly are doing, there has long been targeting solutions that completely side-step the subject of privacy. Contextual is sublimely elegant in this aspect as it draws its relevance directly from the impression in real-time (at least our ClickSense approach does) to match the perfect ad to the user based on what they happen to be reading at the time. This avoids saving any bits from the user’s historical actions yet serves up an even more relevant ad at a time when they are interested in learning more about the subject and they are most receptive to your message. So if behavioral is got you down why not check out the contextual advertising solutions on the market today. You won’t be sorry you did.
Tags: advertising, behavioral, contextual, privacy, targeting
