Mobile Location Data and the Advertising Targeting Opportunity
So I’ve been getting a re-education recently on the latest and greatest in digital ad networks and targeting. Things like behavioral targeting and re-targeting have been around with us for ages, even before the Doubleclick & Abacus Direct controversies of the dot com boom years over a decade ago. But for whatever reason, the whole hyper targeting and re targeting seems to have been placed back on the front burner of the industry, thanks in large part to the availability of inventory via advertising exchanges and the success that ad networks have seen in recent years… both of which have attracted a new category of entrants, including advertisers and agencies alike, back to the space.
So to those not in that industry here is the best I can do in summarizing what’s going on here.
The amount of display ad inventory available online is absolutely massive… far more than the supply of advertising dollars chasing it… so the price someone is willing to pay to serve any old advertisement to a random Internet user is pretty negligible. Meanwhile, the internet advertising industry long ago went down the path of selling itself as a data intensive, highly measurable and result oriented medium… and for better or worse is generally stuck with that description.
So… the name of the game nowadays is to not just serve anyone on the Internet any old ad and call it a day, but to serve a very specific group of people, sometimes a very specific ad, and measure what happened afterwards to see if it ‘worked’ in terms of driving clicks or purchases… rinsing and repeating until one gets the desired result or gives up and tries for a new result instead. The more highly correlated a given piece of information is with some desired activity like a click or purchase, the more valuable it is. Read more
FTC on Behavioral Targeting Regulation and Location Data
I just read through (ok so I really just skimmed and searched) a couple of FTC documents, one regarding potential regulation of the online behavioral targeting industry issued yesterday and one about the mobile marketing industry, specifically a session related to Location Based Services from May 2008.
I am a little familiar with such things having worked for a leading cable network targeting kids and the various marketing to kids self regulation policies and the Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act (aka COPPA).
Kudos to our government for 1. being proactive in addressing such things and 2. opting to take the wait and see self-regulation route first before imposing some heavy handed and unnecessarily restrictive policies that would stop innovation dead in its tracks.
A quick Control F (search) on the newly released FTC Self Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising reveals that the commenters to the commission recommend putting
“precise geographic location” data in a “sensitive” information category that “deserves some form of heightened protection” which would put it in the same category as “information about children and adolescents, medical information, financial information and account numbers, Social Security numbers, sexual orientation information, government-issued identifiers”
The location awareness issues here are somewhat familiar from the years of online behavioral targeting (transparency, consumer control, express consent, how long to hold data), but more complex for mobile location awareness which includes issues related to location accuracy, real time data vs delayed data, device owner versus user rights, and the more muddled stack of understanding who controls and sees what on a mobile device (carrier, device, platform, application, business operator?).
In one of my more ambitious days I registered awhere.org for the purposes of addressing some of these issues for not just advertising but general LBS development… but I fell asleep shortly after starting.
