OMMA Agency Roundtable Turns to Privacy Issues

February 27, 2010 by Colin O'Malley

OMMA Behavioral hosted a buyer’s roundtable on thursday morning with agency reps, and the agenda quickly turned to the importance of bringing transparency to data practices to resolve the market’s privacy concerns. Agencies are hearing this consistently now from clients, and while the importance of self-regulation is a near term driver, the most important audience is not Washington DC; it’s the consumer.

Alan Chapell moderated the panel and the agency reps included Mike Venables (NEO@Ogilvy, a Better Advertising Design Partner), Adam Kasper (Media Contacts, Havas, also a Better Advertising Design Partner), Michael Andrew (Mediasmith), and Melissa Adams (Organic). There was broad consensus across the panel on the importance of addressing privacy issues for the continued growth of the behavioral data market, with Adam Kasper adding:

A ‘watershed moment’ is coming for behavioral targeting when consumers gain greater awareness of the extent to which their online activity can be tracked and targeted, triggering a backlash.’

Melissa Adams highlighted the push that clients are making on privacy issues:

Clients are already asking more questions about behavioral targeting even as they are drawn to its promise of more effective Web campaigns … Clients are more interested in the details of where data is coming from than in the past .. it’s positive if we can educate clients about the anonymity of it all and how it’s used to their benefit, but it’s a big bridge to cross to get them to understand there are safeguards in place.

It’s a big bridge, but with commitment and technology, we’ll get there. Better Advertising is leading a charge with a coalition of leading agencies and technology providers to address these privacy concerns head on, bring true transparency and choice options directly to the consumer, and to assure marketing brands that the waters are safe. Look for our beta launch in Q2 of this year.

MediaPost summary of the panel: Media Buyers Fear Backlash To BT, Warn ‘Watershed’ Moment Is Coming.

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Why We’re “Better Advertising”

February 21, 2010 by Scott

There’s a lot in a name.  In our first few months together, we went through three other names before settling on Better Advertising. We chose Better Advertising because we felt it communicated what we stand for.

Better Advertising is working to create something totally new–a trusted intermediary between advertisers and consumers.  We will help consumers better understand and control how online ads are targeted to them based on their behaviors. In the process, Better Advertising will power self-regulatory programs that will satisfy the government’s demands on advertisers.  Ultimately, this can help advertisers increase the amount of money they dedicate to online advertising, thus keeping much Internet content free.

There’s no direct analog to what we’re doing.  So in some ways, it can be confusing to explain. We’ve found out just how hard that is since we acquired Ghostery a few weeks ago.  Fortunately, that experience has led us to make some changes to our website that we hope will more clearly define what we do and how it’s a huge benefit for consumers.

To be clear–we are not an advertising agency, advertising network, advertising data collector, advertising exchange or any other type of company that collects and uses online consumer behavior for advertising purposes.  Any data that we collect is never transferred to any other party or used for any advertising-related purpose.

As we’ve discussed previously, Ghostery is a very powerful browser add-on.  It shows every company that is collecting data through script-based web bugs on more than 4.9 million websites.  Ghostery users can find out more information and individually, or entirely, block these companies from collecting data.  A large number of the 2 million people who have downloaded Ghostery have opted-in to anonymously, and in aggregate, share data on the trackers they encounter so that Ghostery can continually improve.

Ghostery now has engineers and customer service people dedicated to building out great product improvements and expand the types and number of trackers that we identify for consumers.  We had assumed that Ghostery users would recognize our commitment to protecting the data that Ghostery collects.  So, we appreciate comments from Ghostery users that point out parts of our website that are confusing.

As a result, we’ve made some key changes to our site.  We’ve added a new “For Consumers” link on our home page.  This page links to more detailed information about what we do and clarifies other changes on our site. We’ve also created an FAQ for Ghostery that we hope will illustrate that our mission has only the best interests of Ghostery users at heart.  They’re our interests too, after all.

We look forward to hearing your comments on this post.

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New Ghostery Release

February 16, 2010 by Colin O'Malley

Our crack development team has put together its first new release of Ghostery, fixing a performance issue and updating brand and legal materials. This is big news for us, as it represents a formal baton passing of the product roadmap from David Cancel to Better Advertising. Ghostery users should be excited, as we’re finalizing a roadmap with substantial new features and additional browsers over the coming months. Stay tuned to the Ghostery blog for the latest! Details on the new release here.

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In Support of The New Behavioral Advertising (OBA) Icon

January 28, 2010 by Scott

Our friends over at the Future of Privacy Forum just announced that the cross-industry Coalition adopted their icon, known as the “Power I”, as a standard way for companies to disclose to consumers that an ad is using behavioral data.

As I mentioned in our first post, this is the completion of the second of the three pieces of the puzzle in making self-regulation work.  The third is the outcome of the RFP process that is being led by NARC.  We hope to play a significant  role in an effective accountability program that makes self-regulation a success.

As Future of Privacy Forum Advisory Board members, we’ve been involved and are fully supportive of this effort.

We’re going to serve these icons on behalf of our clients and deliver the information that comes when a user interacts with them.  We’ve created a robust experience to deliver transparency into how a consumer got a particular ad, and to give consumers choice as to whether they receive targeted ads.  That’s important because the icons do not give  notice and choice by themselves.

The New York Times article has a quote from Maneesha Mithal, the associate director for the division of privacy and identity protection at the Federal Trade Commission that highlights one of the many ways Better Advertising will support making self-regulation a success.

“We support industry efforts to develop a consistent symbol and message that would help educate consumers about online advertising,” Ms. Mithal said in an e-mail message. “We hope they will share data, such as click-through and opt-out rates, that will inform the debate.”

Clients who use Better Advertising’s Assurance Platform will have access to exactly this type of data.  And, Better Advertising will be able to share that data in aggregate to illustrate how well consumers are engaging with forms of advanced notice like the Icon.  We’re looking forward to playing a leading role in sharing best practices to continually make behavioral advertising more transparent and valuable to consumers.

We’d love to get your comments or hear from you on Twitter @betterads or leave us a comment.

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Behavioral Insider on BA as ‘Privacy RoboCop’

January 26, 2010 by Colin O'Malley

Better Advertising got some great press from Steve Smith in yesterday’s Behavioral Insider. The piece focuses on the industry effort to self-regulate, its progress to date, and the dangers of a fragmented solution. He addresses our role in the ecosystem as well as our value proposition to advertisers, agencies, and publishers.

And just to clarify: we think of ourselves as a white glove service provider for your compliance needs, helping advertisers to extend their brands and build trust. Robocop was badass in a pre-dial up kinda way, but he’s not our model.

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Better Advertising Acquires Ghostery

January 19, 2010 by Colin O'Malley

Today I’m very happy to announce that Better Advertising has acquired Ghostery from its founder, David Cancel. Ghostery and Better Advertising came together for one reason: a shared mission. We are both committed to giving people transparency into how they are tracked and targeted online, and providing them with the control over their privacy that they deserve. We are both proponents of privacy by design, and have agreed to keep the information that we collect private, never using it for advertising purposes.

In case you aren’t familiar with it, Ghostery is a free browser extension, currently designed as a Firefox Add-On, which identifies the companies who are tracking you on every site you visit. Ghostery is growing really fast. It averages over 17,000 new downloads per week, with a total of 2,000,000 downloads in less than a year.

It’s important to know that this kind of “3rd party tracking” is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, one of the first things you will realize after downloading Ghostery is that just about all of the most trustworthy sites you visit everyday rely on 3rd party tracking to improve the services they provide and deliver more relevant advertising. The point of Ghostery is to give consumers transparency into, and control over, who tracks them.

More about Ghostery here.

What this means for the Ghostery community:
In sum, the original principles of Ghostery will remain unchanged, but we are adding a more robust product roadmap. Ghostery has been wonderfully managed by David as a non-commercial information tool. That focus will continue. We will also be extending the power of Ghostery for current users (thank you for your feedback!) and expanding the reach of Ghostery to new platforms. But, again, the data will not be used for anything like targeting or advertising.

Why did we buy Ghostery?
Better Advertising will use data shared voluntarily by Ghostery users to understand the compliance and non-compliance of companies with the industry’s self regulatory principles. With Ghostery, Better Advertising can provide companies and industry associations with a complete view of OBA usage. This makes complying easier for companies, and furthers our mission of providing a more transparent, trusted environment for consumers and advertisers.

BTW — this blog entry also serves as an opportunity to introduce myself publicly as a Better Advertising team member. After nearly 7 years at TRUSTe, creating and managing self regulatory privacy programs on the internet, I couldn’t be more proud of my team and what we are working on here at Better Advertising. We are just getting started, but I can tell that this is going to be fun.

See David Cancel’s note about Ghostery and its new home.  Rafat Ali also covers the acquisition well in this post on PaidContent.org

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Better Advertising Joins Future of Privacy Forum Advisory Board

December 9, 2009 by Scott

Jules Polonetsky, who is playing a very influential role in the Behavioral Advertising Self Regulatory process, announced today that BetterAdvertising has officially joined his Advisory Board.

The Future of Privacy Forum (FPF) is a Washington, DC based think tank that seeks to advance responsible data practices. The forum is led by Internet privacy experts Jules Polonetsky and Christopher Wolf and includes an advisory board comprised of leading figures from industry, academia, law and advocacy groups. FPF was launched in November 2008, and is supported by AOL, AT&T, The Better Advertising Project, Deloitte, eBay, Facebook, Intel, Lockeed Martin, Microsoft, The Nielsen Company, Verizon and Yahoo.

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BetterAdvertising Design Partners Making the Case for Self-Regulation

December 8, 2009 by Scott

Our friend and Design Partner, Turn CTO Xuhui Shao made a nice announcement of their BetterAdvertising support yesterday that got picked up by AdExchanger.

Here’s his post:

Today is a big day for consumer privacy protection in online advertising. A number of companies in the space — Turn, Omnicom Media Group, Cadreon, Vivaki, Havas, GroupM, Netmining and Safecount — have joined forces with Better Advertising (betteradvertising.com) to design the next generation consumer privacy monitoring tool for online advertising.

The reason behind Turn becoming a partner in this  initiative is pretty simple: consumer privacy is an important issue for us.  Turn has been a member of the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI) since 2008 and has been very proactive in working with NAI on privacy self-regulation issues such as enhanced privacy policy, consumer opt-out and consumer educational campaigns on behavior targeting.  Because Turn is working with many of the best consumer brands today, we are extra sensitive to maintaining the safety of these brands in terms of quality of advertising and consumer privacy.

So we are excited about this opportunity to work with Better Advertising and all its partner companies. As the Turn platform continues to gain market traction, this is another small but important step in ensuring that Turn always has the interests of consumers and consumer brands at the heart of our product.

—————————-
Xuhui Shao
CTO

AdExchanger picked up the thread:

Better Advertising

It was Privacy Monday yesterday! Turn CTO Xuhui Shao announced that Turn has joined a consortium of agencies to create a privacy monitoring tool and establish trust with consumers (and more importantly, government officials) about behavioral targeting in online advertising. Visit the Turn blog. And, www.betteradvertising.com.

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BetterAdvertising’s Self-Regulatory Approach Complimented by CDT

December 7, 2009 by Scott

I’m here at the FTC’s Privacy Roundtable.  It’s a who’s who of the online privacy space.  A well-timed report from the CDT today gives BetterAdvertising a nice compliment:

There has been some encouraging work by companies in the compliance area to address some of these concerns. For example, see Better Advertising

It was in a footnote on page 17 of the report, and it was in the context of this paragraph:

“The FTC Principles only require advertisers to state that personal data is being collected and to state that consumers can opt-out of data collection.43 The Privacy Group Coalitionʼs disclosure requirement is similar; the Coalitionʼs Legislative Primer suggests that an entity engaged in behavioral targeting “must have a publicly available privacy policy that describes its practices and policies with respect to the collection, maintenance, use, and disclosure of information about an individual used for behavioral targeting.”44 The NAI and IAB both require that disclosures outline the type of data to be collected, how the data will be used or transferred, and a link to a mechanism for exercising control over data collection. The IAB disclosure also must list which PII is being collected,45 while the NAI requires that members list additional information on their Web sites, including the length of the data retention period and the types of PII and non-PII that will be merged.46 CDT is encouraged by the NAI and IABʼs disclosure requirements, but the key questions are whether they will be  comprehensively implemented by the end of the year deadline, and whether or not they will be interpreted by members as requiring the comprehensive disclosure of individual companies responsible for tracking. Multiple companies are typically involved in the targeting of a particular ad, including the advertiser in the case of retargeting, data aggregators providing data to the advertiser directly or through demand-side platforms or ad exchanges, and then downstream ad networks that use behavioral data to optimize audience as the ad is relayed to the consumer. Any solution that elects one of these constituents to be identified in notice to the exclusion of others should be viewed as inadequate.47“

…

[47] There has been some encouraging work by companies in the compliance area to address some of these concerns. For example, see Better Advertising

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Self-Regulation, Your Business and Your Privacy

December 7, 2009 by Scott

Fitting The Pieces of Self-Regulation Together

At Better Advertising, we believe that industry self-regulation is the key to more transparent ads that produce better results.  How our industry fits the pieces of Self-Regulation together will be a major topic of conversation at the FTC’s Exploring Privacy Roundtables.  The first is Monday, December 7th.   Better Advertising will be there, actively tweeting and blogging.  Keep an eye out for me, Colin O’Malley and Sim Simeonov.  And, Better Advertising will be filing a request to participate at the next one on January 28th in Berkley.

While Better Advertising lives this stuff every day, it can be fairly opaque to many.  Here’s the way Better Advertising sees the situation.

The Cross-Industry Self-Regulatory Program for Online Behavioral Advertising which rolled out in July of this year was a huge step.  The leading trade associations in the online advertising industry came together to document the rules of conduct they expect their members to follow.  If you haven’t read it yet, you should.   As the document states:

“The Self-Regulatory Program consists of seven Principles. These Principles, described below, correspond with the “Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising” proposed by the Federal Trade Commission in February 2009, and also address public education and industry accountability issues raised by the Commission.”

The seven self-regulatory principles are:  Education, Transparency, Consumer Control, Data Security, Material Changes to Existing Online Behavioral, Advertising Policies and Practices, Sensitive Data and Accountability.

The first to roll out was the IAB’s new Privacy Matters campaign to address the education principle.  More than 500 million impressions are being donated by major media outlets to get the point across.  WPP, a Better Advertising design partner, did a great job here on the creative.  Twenty leading publishers and ad networks donated ad inventory.  Stay tuned, there will a lot more information to educate consumers as to what is going on.  Better Advertising will be playing a major part of that effort.

The next step in self-regulation is “the icon.”  The icon will alert consumers that an ad is using or collecting behavioral data to target them.  It also gives consumers more information about behavioral advertising and provides a logical way to exercise the choice of whether or not to be targeted.  The Future of Privacy Forum (where Better Advertising is on the Advisory Board) working with important academics Mary Culnan and Manoj Hastak plus Better Advertising’s friends at WPP’s GroupM and Kantar have pulled together a very impressive set of choices.  They just announced it as their New Privacy and Personalization Symbols Finalists.  This is a project which Better Advertising enthusiastically supports.  It’s been incorporated into what Better Advertising will be delivering to clients.

So, that brings us to the last piece of the self-regulation puzzle.  How will companies be able to prove that they actually following all of these principles?  That’s where the Accountability Principle comes in, and that’s what Better Advertising does.  This will end up being the most complicated, and most important, part of successful self-regulation.  It requires processing billions of events per day and integrating with hundreds of companies across the online advertising ecosystem.  For that, you need a custom-built technology solution that is laser focused on Behavioral Advertising and complying with the Principles.

Better Advertising is actively engaged with all the key players in this effort as we roll out our platform.  And there is a lot of good work that’s going into this space.  The NAI’s new opt-out extension for Firefox is one example.  As is the Yahoo CLEAR notice protocol.  The Better Advertising platform supports, and is complementary to, these and alternative technologies that will be coming to market soon.

Behavioral advertising is here to stay.  It makes for a better consumer web experience.  It delivers better results for advertisers.  It will take a lot of continued hard work to deliver the kind of transparency that consumers, regulators and legislators are demanding.  And Better Advertising is committed to working with everyone to make this happen to ensure our industry stays self-regulated and keeps on growing.

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