The Federal Trade Commission announced late last year that it is investigating ways to protect consumers’ privacy, and suggested a “Do Not Track” option for every browser. This would give users the ability to opt out of online advertising – similar to the “Do Not Call” registry for phone solicitation.
In response, both Mozilla and Google have announced changes to their respective browsers, with the addition of “Do Not Track” features for Firefox and Chrome.
Google announced a Keep My Opt-Outs feature, which enables you to opt out permanently from ad tracking cookies. It’s available as an extension for download in Chrome.
When the feature is enabled in Mozilla’s Firefox, advertising networks will be told by Firefox that the user has asked to opt-out of behavioral advertising.
The multi-billion dollar data mining industry is taking target marketing into a New Frontier. Every time you swipe a rewards card at a store, that data goes somewhere to get analyzed. Marketplace’s Stacey Vanek-Smith takes a look and visits a data mining company.
Cluster analysis takes a statistical approach. Words are tracked in relation to other words. Your consumer habits define your marketing cluster.
The business of spying on Internet users so that the information can be sold to advertisers is one of the fastest-growing businesses today, explains Fresh Air.
Julia Angwin (twitter) recently led a team of reporters from The Wall Street Journal in analyzing the tracking software and discovered that nearly all of the most commonly visited websites gather information in real time about the behavior of online users. Visiting the top 50 internet websites resulted in more than 3,000 cookies embedded into a “clean” computer. Wikipedia had no cookies. Dictionary.com had the most, with over 250 attached to their computer on a single visit.
A USA Today editorial asserts that “most consumers haven’t a clue how much information about them is being gathered and stored for sale, nor do they have a reliable way to stop it.”
Here is a list of Behavioral Advertising companies that will let you opt out. Your tracking information is often gathered by 3rd parties, then sold on a stock market-like exchange to online advertisers. Some have been developed by Wall Street quants.
According to Google, every day, there are more ad calls on the DoubleClick Ad Exchange than there are trades on all the world’s stock exchanges combined.
Marketers will spend $150 million on Twitter in 2011 but the big money’s on Facebook.
U.S. mobile commerce sales grew 100% in 2010 to $2.4 billion from $1.2 billion in 2009, according to ABI Research. That’s following a 203% jump in 2009 from $396 million in 2008, the firm says.
Mobile display ad spending in the U.S. will nearly quadruple in the next 5 years to exceed $1.2 billion in 2015, according to ABI Research. There will be a battle for ad dollars on smartphones and tablet platforms, with the largest players expected to be Apple and Google.
ABI found that 28 percent of the mobile subscribers accessed the mobile Internet every day. People are accessing information about news and sports, and are consuming a lot of YouTube video from their smartphones.
In 2015, shoppers around the world are expected to spend about $119 billion on goods and services purchased via mobile phones. That number represents about 8% of the total e-commerce market. While the U.S. surpassed the $1 billion mark in 2009, Japan dwarfed the U.S. at $10 billion, ABI says. M-commerce is growing solidly in Europe, too, and was expected to outpace the U.S. by the end of 2010, the firm adds.
According to Wikipedia, mobile commerce was born in 1997 when the first two mobile phone enabled Coca Cola vending machines were installed in the Helsinki area in Finland. They used SMS text messages to send the payment to the vending machines.
Behavioral targeting uses information collected on an individual’s web-browsing behavior to select which advertisements to display. They use Cookies, which embed a unique ID on your computer so advertisers can track you, or web beacons, which run live on a website but are not embedded.
Behavioral advertising does not record your name, it gives you a unique ID number, that’s ostensibly anonymous. Wikipedia lists examples of Spyware, which might be defined as crossing the line.
Geoff Ramsey, CEO of eMarketer (above), gives his take for Mediascrape. In the next three- to five years, a website that isn’t tailored to a specific user’s interest will be an anachronism, according to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.
Currently, North America controls 36.6% of the worldwide advertising market, says eMarketer, compared to Asia-Pacific’s 28% share. But North America’s share will decline to an estimated 33.8% of the market by 2014, while Asia-Pacific’s slice will increase to 30.7%.
Newspapers, magazines and television now have a fundamentally new platform for delivering subscription services and display advertising. The Tablet.
An audience of billions. A demographic of one.
