http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/technology/30adstalk.html

I wonder whether you assume a bit more trust than exists between the browser and the targeted advertiser. I would think many would wish to select, “get lost, leave me alone, I’ll sign up for targeted advertising if I want but otherwise this is a creepy violation of my privacy.”. Otherwise, saying maybe later is suggesting that this creepyness is okay.

Just because cookies have been around for a while doesn’t mean discovering in such an explicit manner that your tastes are being communicated over the web more palatable. That they’ve been around for so long is more of an inside baseball thing unless people fully understand their implications and I doubt they do though with such experiences as those profiled and the WSJ pieces, awareness will increase. I mean, what percentage of users appreciate, John, your brilliant insight of so long ago of the “database of intentions” or how easily they could be identified along with all the illicit searches from their Google searches?

Its not that advertisers are bad but that that except through certain configurations, their interests and the consumers interests aren’t necessarily the same and violating trust is far from out of the question for so many of them.

What I would argue is if the advertisers want to avoid a big backlash, they should place the equivalent of an unsubscribe that should be present in any permission-based email message on the offending page. Instead of requiring the consumer to click a link and get off a list, why not have the list exit (not temporary) on the page displaying the item?

I know advertisers are likely not to go for this even though from the consumer’s point of view its preferable. However it might behoove Google at long last to address some of the privacy concerns you’ve raised for so long. If they explained the value of the tracking info in bettering individual’s lives and asked for their signoff maybe they could transition people into thinking differently? And they are the logical leader on this sort of thing.

BTW, you refer to the “Time” article at one point .

I wonder whether you assume a bit more trust than exists between the browser and the targeted advertiser. I would think many would wish to select, “get lost, leave me alone, I’ll sign up for targeted advertising if I want but otherwise this is a creepy violation of my privacy.”. Otherwise, saying maybe later is suggesting that this creepyness is okay.

Just because cookies have been around for a while doesn’t mean discovering in such an explicit manner that your tastes are being communicated over the web more palatable. That they’ve been around for so long is more of an inside baseball thing unless people fully understand their implications and I doubt they do though with such experiences as those profiled and the WSJ pieces, awareness will increase. I mean, what percentage of users appreciate, John, your brilliant insight of so long ago of the “database of intentions” or how easily they could be identified along with all the illicit searches from their Google searches?

Its not that advertisers are bad but that that except through certain configurations, their interests and the consumers interests aren’t necessarily the same and violating trust is far from out of the question for so many of them.

What I would argue is if the advertisers want to avoid a big backlash, they should place the equivalent of an unsubscribe that should be present in any permission-based email message on the offending page. Instead of requiring the consumer to click a link and get off a list, why not have the list exit (not temporary) on the page displaying the item?

I know advertisers are likely not to go for this even though from the consumer’s point of view its preferable. However it might behoove Google at long last to address some of the privacy concerns you’ve raised for so long. If they explained the value of the tracking info in bettering individual’s lives and asked for their signoff maybe they could transition people into thinking differently? And they are the logical leader on this sort of thing.

BTW, you refer to the “Time” article at one point .

1) Great idea on the “X” to turn-off that particular advertiser… some networks such as Google’s allow advertisers to use a “negative” cookie so as to prevent the targeted ad from showing. I believe you’ll see something similar develop out of the ongoing NAI efforts.

Of course this (and the suggestion from Chris to not show ads for products already purchased) applies only to a small fraction of users who interact/buy; for the rest of the world, the ads need to continue to improve, period.

2) Pursuant to that point, the real issue with the Zappos ads is not one of precision (the exact product you were looking at) but rather the fact that you are bombarded by hundreds of impressions over and over for days (weeks?) on end by their display ads provider. That alone is annoying and egregious.

At TellApart, we believe that we can make ads that are actually useful and that this sort of displeasure can be mitigated by commitment to one idea: respect for the consumer. A big part of that is delivering an elegant experience with as few impressions as necessary to yield a click and a conversion.

More here, for those interested: http://bit.ly/a0nPJD

a) making no distinction whatsoever in their targeting between people who’ve looked at a product & bought it vs people who looked & didn’t buy. Of course people are going to be annoyed when they see ads following them around the web for the product they just bought. A good retargeting system should be able to understand consumer intent & pick in real-time which product to show, yet most systems simply uses custom Javascript to scrape the product(s) you view and store them in your cookie, with no thought given to buyers vs non-buyers. Here’s a wild thought: perhaps the user didn’t convert because they didn’t like the offer on merchant’s site – so another one would be better, and perhaps one that’s not already stored in user’s cookie.

b) have no sense of frequency capping, leading to the annoying phenomenon of the consumer being shown the same ad 10 times, literally following them everywhere they go. Frequency capping is the most basic of display ad concepts, but perhaps when vendors charge on a CPC basis it results in a level of frequency that annoys customers (but makes the vendor lots of money).