Sandlines

It’s a delight to see well-thought out and well-reasoned arguments being put forward about online marketing.

I should declare an interest here – I’m VP International for wunderloop, who offer behavioural and other forms of targeting, wrapped in the Connect ad exchange… so I’m not exactly impartial.

However, a dozen or so years in online marketing have shown that success of placing campaigns is rarely single-dimensional. In fact I’d tend to draw it as a compass, with the main axes pointing to geographic, timing (e.g. day and day part), socio-demographic and behaviour/interest based. In the centre of the compass I’d put context – because that is always a factor, regardless of the other targeting elements.

How much of a factor depends (at least in part) on the aims of the campaign – for example: is it the influence of brand associations or is it purely direct response?

Again, this is not a binary question – there are definite shades of grey.

Either way, what the industry is seeing – and accelerated by the current economic conditions – is a shift in buying patterns from premium to discretionary advertising inventory. This is a trend that was happening in any case, but which a softer buying market is accelerating.

Targeting (BT or otherwise) offers benefits on both sides of the media buying/selling equation: buyers can get better placed campaigns to drive whatever measurable benefits the campaign is aimed at; sellers can get a better price for the inventory they select by making sure that they put the right inventory into the mix for their customers.

And what do the audience get?

Content, in one shape or form or another – and mostly free of charge.

When I started in the online business a dozen or so years ago, my dad would always ask “yes, but who PAYS for it?” In the late ’90s, that was a rare question to ask.

Most forms of payment, other than ad-funding, have been gradually debunked: subscriptions models have not really taken off; micro-payments exist but don’t provide the currency to compensate for the development of web systems or creating content; fees from ISPs have been stripped away, packaged or reduced to commodity pricing. So ad-funding is (for most online content) an inevitability – as well as very competitive.

Which means that attempts to add value to discretionary inventory are here to stay too.

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Forgive the radio silence from Sandlines. I’ve been head down doing things in the real world a bit – though still twittering @sandlines fairly often.

One of the things I’ve been discussing a lot has been the brou-ha-ha that’s kicked off over the past couple of weeks in the UK and the US around questions of privacy… something of a hot topic it seems.

A couple of separate but linked things that have contributed to this:

• the FTC talking (in the US) about its attitude to (and likely approach to) the sticky question of balancing the privacy of consumers against a desire not to constrict fair conduct of business in the online advertising community
• the IAB (UK) announcing their guidelines for ‘good’ practice in privacy against the backdrop of behavioural targeting
• Google’s announcements about the launch of it’s Google Interest programme.

And then there was the call from a journalist for a respected news source asking me if I thought the online industry was operating in an unregulated ‘wild west’ environment.

Now let’s just hold on a moment. There is a perfectly valid legal structure in place (European Convention of Human Rights (1950)/Data Processing Act (1998)/PECR/EC Directive…). All the principles are there.

What’s in question is how do we apply this to our current – and rapidly changing world, both online and otherwise.

What’s also in question is how much people understand this. If we are finding it so hard as an industry to get to grips with what we can/should/will do, how on earth do we expect to be able to convey this intelligently to consumers? Suggesting that it’s all ok because consumers will benefit from more relevant advertising is an argument that simply won’t wash: witness the furore in response to the IAB’s pronouncement a couple of weeks back.

If you want to find a model of how this can be done, I can’t think of a better one than Tesco Clubcard. There is so much information gathered about personal shopping habits – and then used to target marketing messages (amongst other things) that the current world of behavioural targeting online is still a long, long way from matching. And how do consumers react? With an almost visceral sense of attachment to the reward programme attached to the Clubcard.

That precise approach won’t work online; but it proves a point: people will exchange observed behavioural data if the benefits are right.

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