Looking after the fabric of the Internet

Burst Media is active with a number of industry organizations in an effort to make sure the debate over online privacy has the benefit of all points of view and that, in particular, it keeps in mind the welfare of the countless independent web publishers who are the very basis of the Internet’s rich tapestry.

Dave Stein, co-founder and CTO of Burst, and author of one of the Internet’s first ad serving platforms, offers thoughts on the impact of potential privacy laws to publishers at Sitepoint.

As one commenter on the article says:

“Great article, my legislators will be hearing about this. Repeatedly.”

Be heard.

Rep. Boucher promises to cast a wider net on the issue of consumer privacy

As reported in the Wall Street Journal, we should be encouraged that privacy hearings today in front of the House Subcommittee on Communications, Technology and the Internet will take into account the uses of consumer data not just online, but offline. According to the report by Emily Steel, Subcommittee Chairman, Rep. Rick Boucher (D., VA) has promised a broader inquiry. “A number of parties have suggested it would be appropriate to extend these privacy rights as a consumer protection to the offline side as well,” The Journal quotes him saying.

Hear, hear.

Aside from the fairness issues that get addressed by casting a wider net, it will certainly invite many more voices into the fray that might have been standing back in the shadows half hoping (who are we kidding – fully hoping) that the Internet would get cut-off at the knees. Better competition through regulation. The Internet fell silent on the issue of privacy after the Internet bubble in 2001/2002 and now it struggles to sound credible when it opens its mouth. Some of the other voices that have been using, say, in-store purchase data over the years might help bring much needed weight and perspective to the discussion.

Politics and issue advocacy groups, charitable organizations, and the like, should also be folded into the conversation. I go back to my evening call from Mitt Romney during the Presidential race last year. The need for advocates and candidates to reach voters with their messages is an honest requirement of a free and open society, even if voters don’t want to listen (like me, hanging-up the telephone on poor Mitt). What separates this truth from the commerical interests of marketers, likewise at work in a free and open society? Money? It all runs on money. If privacy counts it ought to count, period.  

Privacy is for all. One and all.

The Rise of the Audience Marketplace

The high-level disconnect in our conversation about online media and advertising – now in its 14th or 15th year – remains the notion that positioning matters to consumer brands but not consumer media.

Eric Picard’s thoughtful piece in iMedia today puts this on display again in his recounting of a panel discussion titled, “The Rise of the Audience Marketplace,” at ad:tech in New York a week ago. During the panel, participant Quentin George, Chief Digital Officer at Mediabrands, reportedly observed:

 ”In a world with such massive overcapacity, the only way for companies to differentiate and capture a disproportionate share of dollars is through building a brand.”

This was a very sensible assertion. Hold that thought.

The panel discussion then veered into talk about media planning and buying online with a great deal said about the rise of new buying solutions such as IPG’s Cadreon and Publicis Groupe’s VivaKi. These fall under the heading of demand-side buying systems, discussed in a recent post to this space.

Demand-side buying systems are energizing media buying companies with a renewed sense of empowerment. There is no harm in this. It represents a transfer of power from certain horizontal networks that have been conducting business this way online for a few years, and keeping the money. Now, the media agencies get to keep the money. The industry needs media agencies (all ad agencies) to feel energized and empowered, so to the extent that certain amounts of planning and buying can be conducted through demand-side agencies, there is no harm in this. Perhaps it will serve as a catalyst to help fix agency comp so that life can continue on a transparent basis ultimately favorable and necessary to marketers.

I digress.

In the midst of the panel’s enthusiasm it sounds like Bill Demas of Turn got up the nerve to suggest that most of the inventory wafting through the demand-side buying systems is non-premium inventory (much as it has always been through the horizontal networks) and that premium inventory is still making it to market thanks to human sales forces and their interactions with human media planners and buyers.

From Eric Picard’s recounting it then sounds like Bill Demas’s observations disappeared quickly under a pile of demand-side enthusiasts. Fellow panelists pointed-out that the idea of premium inventory is a relative concept. Brands care about quality content, but the quality of the audience is not measured by this alone. Basically, quality does not depend upon context.

This is the important question of our day: is the quality of an audience shaped by the context of its media environment.

Back to Quentin George who was on the panel. As he did, marketers will insist - with every justification – that brands matter, and the more complex the environment, the more imperative the need for brand. Brands differentiate.

What does that mean? It means context. Context is the differentiating agent. Context determines meaning. It is everything to brands. It says so clearly in the dictionary (from Answers.com):

con-text

 

n.

[Middle English, composition, from Latin contextus, from past participle of contexere, to join together : com-, com- + texere, to weave.]

1. The part of a text or statement that surrounds a particular word or passage and determines its meaning.
2. The circumstances in which an event occurs; a setting.

Brands are about meaning and circumstance. If they are not, then soap is soap. A car need only be black, as Mr. Ford would have had it, and get a traveler from point A to point B.  One smoke would be as good as another. Brands need positioning.

Yes, brands can certainly exist out of context for periods of time, like I can swim under water or a fish can flap on the ground. I use brands all the time unconsciously. But there are no unconscious brand champions and brand loyalists and there are no automated brands. In my house you will get one kind of vodka, which is an otherwise orderless, tasteless, neutral spirit with one purpose that can be met by any run-of-network vodka that will be (fall-down-drunk, for fall-down-drunk) cheaper. Yet, I am loyal to one brand. Go figure. 

Let’s be frank: really, the question is about money. The world is trying to impose cheap on marketing and context is not cheap. Neither are brands. Our world is hung-up on this problem and we know it. It is a dis-connect if ever there were one.

Truthfully, if there were enough great advertising creative in the world brands might be able to survive out of context. If every ad were brilliant, touching, funny, compelling – even simply polite – advertising could, perhaps, live and breath outside of a naturally supportive, media environment. We are not so fortunate. Advertising is hard. Great advertising is really hard. 

As we continue to bang around the miriad opportunities with which the Internet presents us in order to target our best customers let’s remember the obvious one, present from the beginning, the one that aligns us most with consumers, the one that made Google particularly rich: context. I don’t notice anyone else getting as rich as Google (or Google as rich from anything else).

The only thing I notice is the European Union and the FTC getting ready to drop a safe on our head. Then what?

The EU has its finger on the Internet privacy button, which threatens to turn out the lights on European web publishers

In case it has escaped anyone’s attention, the European Union is dangling the online advertising industry outside a window and threatening to drop it on its head over the issue of privacy (ClickZ, 11-06-09; Ad Age, 11-05-09.)

Incited by bad behavior at Phorm and BT, which evidently collaborated on unannounced ad targeting tests relying on the more detailed user data available through BT’s ISP business (not very helpful), the EU is taking legal action against the UK in order to compel it to impose tougher privacy standards. In the meantime, the EU is advancing legislation through its parliament that amounts to an opt-in requirement for all tracking cookies, which are the things that make the world go around for advertisers and publishers online. If the EU succeeds with that legislation the world will end at the English Channel and European web publishers will find it hard to attract the advertising that is important to sustaining their web sites.

That should be a matter of some concern to the EU parliament. Are not the voices of probably hundreds of thousands of European web publishers meaningful to the debate? Not all of those publishers – perhaps very few of them – are in it to make beaucoup amounts of money. But the money doesn’t hurt when there are provider bills to pay, and family objections to overcome that result from many hours at the computer composing thoughtful web sites and blogs. An evening or two out for dinner, a new automobile, a school tuition paid, always help to quell dissent among an artist’s inner circle of dependents and care-givers.

Never mind the taxes and the votes that go missing when commerce is affected. We recognize this is the EU we’re talking about and that taxes and votes might not be the drivers they are in the rest of the Western world. Still, there is the matter of the artistic freedom and the ability of a huge segment of the Internet’s publishing fabric to survive that should be considered. What will happen to all those voices? How will Europe be represented in a post-apocalyptic, post-cookie world of its own making? What of our Global Village, which benefits from so many connections online and seems especially relevant to the very notion of a “European Union” in the world?

Online advertising in the U.S. is targeted to the U.S. and it represents most of the advertising in the world. If the EU goes dark online tomorrow many global marketers will be affected, but in those EU places only. North American web publishers will prosper. Global web providers such as Google and Yahoo! will be inconvenienced, but they can choose over the years whether to pass or play in the EU depending on whether they can make a living.

The fastest growing markets in the world are in the east. So far, China is not proposing to choke web publishers in that part of the world with draconian privacy measures. It has different problems, the solutions to which – involving more publishing freedom – work towards a positive future for marketers and publishers. Not so EU policies, which work against the future of publishers.

It may come to pass, therefore, that web publishers in three-quarters of the world will eventually speak for all of it, including the one quarter left out in Europe. Any government’s instinct to protect its people is understandable and desirable – including on the matter of Internet privacy – but the EU should carefully consider the extent to which such uncompromising privacy legislation will deprive its constituents of a voice in the New Information era by depriving its enablers, the web publishers, the commercial means to make it heard.

Living in the real world

The Wall Street Journal ran a story yesterday about a certain kind of advertising fraud online wherein rogue publishers will fabricate impressions by launching numerous, invisible web pages in the background of a browser session that consumers will never see but that can translate into inflated costs to advertisers. Burst was mentioned in the story as being one of the ad representative firms giving shelter to one such rogue publisher, MyToursInfo.com. Obviously, we hate it when that happens, on every level. As small consolation we booted the offending publisher back in January about the time, it would appear, that Ben Edelman, the source for the Journal story, tied into them. [Not a coincidence, I was reminded since making this post, as it was Ben, in fact, who brought the MyToursInfo fraud to our attention.]

iMedia Connection picked up the Wall Street Journal story today with the headline “Publishers Duping advertisers with invisible ads”. Not far away was another story titled, “World’s largest click fraud ring shut down,” which met its end thanks to the efforts of the people at Anchor Intelligence, a traffic analytics firm used by companies, including Burst, to combat fraud.

We are reminded every day that the world can be a dangerous place. The advertising world is no exception. As reporter, Emily Steel, points out in the Wall Street Journal story, verification has been a problem for advertisers forever. Online, she notes, the universe of web publishers is so enormous it can be hard to keep track of every ad position in order to authenticate the number of impressions served. Offline, authenticating the size of an audience - print or broadcast - relies on third-party measurement services such as the Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) or Neilsen or Arbitron.

I used to explain to people when arguing in support of the increased accountability of the Internet versus traditional media how advertisers must take it on faith that so many trucks left the loading docks of so many printing plants to deliver so many copies of, say, the Wall Street Journal to so many hundreds of thousands of distribution outlets across an entire country by 6:00 a.m. Online, we just count impressions. I’ve made those earlier morning newspaper runs in the past while working at USA Today. It’s an immense proposition, I can tell you, with a mind-boggling number of moving parts. But, the world has lived with it long-enough to know that, on balance, it works. I’d say the same is true about counting impressions.

Except when fraud happens, as it did several years ago when executives at various newspaper companies were caught inflating circulation numbers, with severe consequences for many. Or, as it happened with a dorm-room full of Chinese college students perpetrating $3 million of click fraud. All bad, unhelpful stuff.

I could, perhaps, end this post now with a message to always be cautious and look both ways before crossing the street because the world can be a dangerous place.

But, I can’t. Sorry. The news that Chinese students have “wasted” $3 million, or that other unscrupulous types have launched  up to 40 invisible pages impressions, while a sad reminder of the corruption in the world, leaves me feeling that more needs to get reported. The truth is not entirely out.

The problems in our world do not come down to a room full of Chinese students, and/or others with a talent for writing nefarious Internet code. The problems in the newspaper world do not come down to circulation fraud.

Always there are conditions that lead to the crime. Frankly, verifying what gets delivered has only been a part of our problem, and perhaps the small part. Of greater importance has always been that media - old and new - has never been good at being able to verify who, exactly, is viewing or listening or reading or seeing an ad. Likewise, advertisers have never been especially good at explaining to each other what happened as a result of the advertising.

From this were conditions made ripe over the years for the Internet to lead the entire marketing industry astray with false promises of one-to-one, risk-free advertising – a bit of fiction that won’t go away and that continues to lead advertising, on and offline, in directions that consumers have been told to fear, now, jeopardizes their rights to privacy.

We should despair over every act of corruption and drum-out the perpetrators. In a side-by-side comparison with a dorm-room full of Chinese college students perpetrating click fraud, however, the notion that the advertising business can be one-to-one and risk-free is the greater treachery. The fakes, the common criminals, the joy-riders, the conscientious advertising banner-blocking objectors, are small potatoes to the mantle of denial that drapes over the broader marketing business today. It drives media buying agencies into the very ad network business they are suppose to fear as a way to make a decent buck. It drives CMOs out of office on average every 18 months. It reasons that consumers should “accept” advertising as a necessary evil (as if that will ever be a bargain worth accepting). It wastes billions of dollars in missed opportunities. And it places a premium on counting clicks and actions and other measures that are so easily pilfered.

Advertising must live in the real world. Occasionally, that means dealing with the abuses of the unscrupulous. At some point, it also has to mean dealing with reality.

A “personal” invitation from Newt Gingrich

I just received a fax from Newt Gingrich inviting me to a private dinner at the National Republican Club of Capital Hill in Washington on October 7th. The fax is from Joe Gaylord, actually, whose political consulting company is obviously working to support Newt’s bid for the Presidency when the campaign season roles around next, which I guess is now.

Evidently, Joe Gaylord and I have met along the way because he uses my first name, Jarvis, in the fax. I don’t remember that meeting. I also don’t remember entering into an “established business relationship” (EBR) with Joe or his consulting company, Chesapeake Associates, or, for that matter, Newt, which is the requirement the FCC makes of anyone using a facsimile (fax) machine to send unsolicited emails. To wit (from the FCC web site):

Amended Fax Rules and Established Business Relationship Exemption

The rules provide that it is unlawful to send unsolicited advertisements to any fax machine, including those at both businesses and residences, without the recipient’s prior express invitation or permission. Fax advertisements, however, may be sent to recipients with whom the sender has an EBR, as long as the fax number was provided voluntarily by the recipient.

I did not provide the fax number voluntarily – that is, I don’t think so, unless I was drunk one night, in which case it’s possible Joe and I could have met then and that he asked me for my fax number at the end of the evening.

But, there’s more from the FCC site:

Specifically, a fax advertisement may be sent to an EBR customer if the sender also:

• obtains the fax number directly from the recipient, through, for example, an application, contact information form, or membership renewal form; or
• obtains the fax number from the recipient’s own directory, advertisement, or site on the Internet, unless the recipient has noted on such materials that it does not accept unsolicited advertisements at the fax number in question; or
• has taken reasonable steps to verify that the recipient consented to have the number listed, if obtained from a directory or other source of information compiled by a third party.
• If the sender had an EBR with the recipient and possessed the recipient’s fax number before July 9, 2005 (the date the Junk Fax Prevention Act became law), the sender may send the fax advertisements without demonstrating how the number was obtained.

That will be it then: I’m a registered Republican. By the FCC’s standards my declared party affiliation would constitute an EBR. But Joe Gaylord still had to connect a lot of dots to send me my personalized fax. He had to connect my name and party affiliation that I provide presumably where I vote (home) with a fax number at my company address. I’m not sure how he did that. I quick scan of our corporate web site and I can’t find our fax number. And I haven’t really been that drunk since, or before, 2005 when the regulations changed such that I wouldn’t remember a stranger asking me for my fax number.

Honestly, I’m not trying to make a big deal out of this. It’s fine, really. I understand everybody’s doing their job and Joe is not stalking me and Newt isn’t going to notice when I don’t show-up at the party in October and no hard feelings all the way around. It’s marketing. Presidential politics is big business.

But I work in the online advertising sector which has been the poster child for privacy advocates. That’s a miscalculation, I believe, that fails to recognize we remain far more vulnerable to invasions of personal space offline.

We have privacy rules offline. As we’ve just demonstrated, those rules are porous. I’m not sure I’d advocate changing them for the reasons that commerce – including Presidential commerce – might be severely disrupted, but I have never had the occasion to take personal offense to online advertising as much as I have to Joe Gaylord’s flippant fax invitation.

Shredding Joe’s invitation will take only a fraction longer than deleting unwanted emails, or navigating away from irritating online advertisements. I’ll still be left with the bad taste in my mouth that he called me Jarvis and treated me like an idiot, which is really the penalty of bad marketing, not poor privacy regulations. Mostly, however, I’ll be left with the feeling that comes from knowing you’re surrounded by pretense; that you are involved in a charade;  that when the email finally comes from the Cabinet Secretary of the Homeland Department of Privacy it will begin, “Dear Jarvis.”

Ad Agencies should be paying attention to potential opt-in legislation in Washington

Edward Barrera, Editor of Adotas, raises serious concerns that advertising agencies may be dozing through the privacy debate in Washington D.C. that is right now headed towards opt-in requirements for all advertising online. Opt-in means that any time a consumer is presented with an ad, that consumer will be required to accept or reject the cookies associated with that ad, which are there largely to provide the advertiser and their agents with the ability to manage the delivery of the message.

The truth is ad agencies are probably faking it. Their eyes are shut, but their eye-lids are twitching. They are awake and they are listening. As Edward suggests in his column, many are working on the assumption that privacy legislation is going to hurt them a lot less than many ad networks, with the result that they can recapture control over a great deal of media planning and buying online that they lost by treating most of the Internet as throw-away material. A blast at high altitude over the industry is just the thing, they think, to level the playing field.

Yes, perhaps. Agencies have a trump card which is the relationships they enjoy with the clients. In contrast, many purveyors of media space online, including many ad networks, enjoy relationships with advertisers or publishers that are only as deep as their last lunch and which can be easily swept away by the crosswinds of change, including, potentially, regulatory change.

But agencies should focus on what sort of world it might be once the smoke clears. As a consumer, it’s not a world I relish. I don’t even like the reminders Microsoft Windows pops to me each time I want to tinker with a document, let alone the opt-in intrusions that dooms-sayers suggest might attend every ad online. The freedoms that both consumer and advertiser enjoy online could be severely compromised by opt-in legislation that erects check-points every few yards. Doesn’t advertising have enough problems? People don’t like commercial interruptions. Now the potential exists to place an interruption in the way of the interruption?

There are fundamental advertising issues at stake here, the defense of which should be of paramount concern to ad agencies. They have been taunted relentlessly over the years by the digital upstart classes, and who can blame them for imagining a world where the taunters have been muzzled. Still, there is the question of an effective working relationship with consumers, which has been steadily eroding for years. Agencies should have no desire for an Internet experience that says “Kick Me!” every time consumers encounter advertising messages, something opt-in will surely contribute to the ”enjoyment” of an agency’s work each and every time.

Privacy comfort online

In the seat back pocket on one of the planes I was on this week was a discarded Time Magazine. Hmmm, I thought… something to look forward to after I finish reading my newspaper. I haven’t read an edition of Time Magazine in quite a while. When I finally pulled out the magazine I noted that the subscriber address printed on the bottom left of the front cover had been torn off. Interesting. Someone had finished reading through their edition of Time and desiring not to carry it any further had elected to leave it behind – appropriately sanitized for any personally identifiable information. It is, of course, exactly what I’d do. My wife, if she were there, would roll her eyes. I shred everything that comes into our house and goes back out again that has identifying marks that – I suppose- could be used to steal my identity. Many of those offers in the mail probably got there thanks to the magazine companies that re-marketed my subscription information. But, of course, throughout this week’s business trip I was passing around my credit card to strangers waiting on table at restaurants and bars, signing my name with no great concerns.

As arguments for privacy legislation continue to wend their way through Congress the santitized Time Magazine made me think how much nearer the edge of personal identification the outside media world lives and how, in comparison, online feels so much more private. There’s the irony, I suppose: that privacy online has the industry parading up and down the field in front of privacy advocates. Yet, online is not the privacy problem that disturbs me at home at night or makes me anxious about the things I leave on airplanes.

Who is Louie Volpe?

 

Who is Louie Volpe?

Type the word “holiday” into almost any search engine and “Holidays.net” emerges as the top return on a list of results 100,000,000 to 200,000,000 long. Founder Louie Volpe has been the owner and proprietor of Holidays.net for over 15 years and in that time the web site has paid the rent, put his children through college and employed people in addition to himself. It began as a simple side-line venture to his early web development business. Today, it’s what Louie does, and he has been supported by advertisers from all over the world keen to reach people when they are planning for the holidays – something people do, yes, all over the world.

This week the IAB released the results of a study by two Harvard Business School professors showing the deep roots the Internet has sunk into the U.S. economy and the contribution it now makes to not only users, but thousands of small business people. As a Company with deep roots of our own going back to the commercial beginnings of the Internet, we can confirm that the lives of countless people, like Louie Volpe, have been supported by the growth of this remarkable media industry, thanks largely to revenues derived from advertising.

Once upon a time it was mostly a pipe dream for most of the publishers that Burst, and others, support to leave their day jobs and pursue a small business career that might be attached to their personal interests and passions. Today, many publishers have done just that, like Louie Volpe.

The IAB’s research is aimed, in part, at interest groups trying to prevail on government to regulate the Internet economy with privacy legislation that would knee-cap online advertising. The closer we get to the issues as an industry the more we realize that there is a gross misunderstanding of how online advertising works among the people setting the tone of the discussion.

Online advertising is anonymous, anonymous in the way that newspaper and cable subscriptions are not. No names. No addresses. No people at the other end that can be recognized.

Except Louie Volpe and many thousands more like him who create the rich fabric of the Internet on which people have come to depend, all over the world. These people need to be recognized by everyone in this discussion.

Here is the release announcing the IAB’s report:

WASHINGTON, D.C. (June 10, 2009) – Interactive advertising is responsible for $300 billion of economic activity in the U.S., according to a new study released today by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). The advertising-supported Internet represents 2.1% of the total U.S. gross domestic product (GDP). It directly employs more than 1.2 million Americans with above-average wages in jobs that did not exist two decades ago, and another 1.9 million people work to support those with directly Internet-related jobs. A total of 3.1 million Americans are employed thanks to the interactive ecosystem. These are the key findings of the first-ever research to analyze the economic importance, as well as the social benefits, of the Internet.

The study, commissioned by the IAB was produced by Harvard Business School professors John Deighton and John Quelch, along with Cambridge, MA-based Hamilton Consultants. The study was designed to provide an impartial and comprehensive review of the entire Internet economy and answer questions about its size, what comprises it, and the economic and social benefits Americans derive from it.

“This is the first time anyone has undertaken a comprehensive analysis of the size and scope of the Internet economy and measurement of its economic and social benefits,” said Professor Deighton, the Harold M. Brierley Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, and an author of the study. “I am convinced the results of this study will prove useful for business leaders, legislators and the educational community.”

“This study underscores that the Internet ecosystem is generating an increasing level of economic activity in every corner of the nation,”said Professor Quelch, the Lincoln Filene Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and a co-author of the study.

The study looks at the entire interactive marketing ecosystem, which includes:

The ad-supported Internet, narrowly defined as the content and usage supported by an estimated $23.4 billion of Internet advertising in 2008

E-commerce

E-mail, the cornerstone of lead generation and customer care for many companies

Enterprise websites, the Web sites that businesses, large and small, develop and maintain for communication.

Among some of the other important findings:

Small businesses have thrived as a result of the Internet:

• There are more than 20,000 Internet-related small businesses in the U.S. that provide a variety of services such as web hosting, ISP services, web design, publishing, and Internet-based software consulting. Many of these businesses have 10 or fewer employees.

Internet-related employment is particularly important to certain areas of the country but exists in every one of the 435 U.S. Congressional Districts. Some Congressional Districts have more than 6,000 Internet-related employees.

Interactive advertising has substantially reduced what consumers have to pay for access to the Internet and for e-commerce products and services. In addition to its financial contribution to the U.S. economy, the Internet has produced large social consequences as an infrastructure and platform, providing American society comprehensive qualitative benefits that include:

•  Universal access to an almost unlimited source of information
• Increased productivity (output per unit of capital or labor, or increased consumer utility at a lower cost)
• Innovation in business practices, consumer behavior, commerce and media
• Empowerment of entrepreneurs to start small businesses, find customers and grow
• Environmental benefits derived from saving natural resources lowering pollution through the reduced use of petroleum-based fuels and paper

“The results of this study confirm the vast influence and driving importance of the ad-supported Internet to the overall economy,” said Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO, IAB. “By understanding the total contribution of the Internet to the U.S. economy, we can more accurately assess the impact of potential legislative changes on the Internet’s operations, particularly the consequences of any actions that would alter ad-supported business models.”

The research divided the Internet ecosystem into 14 different types of companies:

• Internet service providers (ISPs)
• Hardware providers
• IT consulting and solutions companies
• Software companies
• Web hosting and content management companies
• Search engines and portals
• Content sites
• Software as a Service (SaaS)
• Ad agencies and support services
• Ad networks
• E-mail marketing and support
• Enterprise staffs and subcontractors responsible for Internet advertising, marketing and web design
• E-commerce companies, including physical delivery
• B2B e-commerce

To read the full study, please go to www.iab.net

Privacy is better left to the private sector

Capitalist tool, Forbes magazine, has two pieces on the virtues of leaving the issue of privacy to the private sector. Lee Gomes sets it up by writing about the “Hidden Costs of Privacy”and editor William Baldwin follows-through by commenting that the free markets will ultimately provide a more secure and efficient privacy solution (“Privacy for Sale”). Baldwin has a great line:

“There’s another cost to legislated privacy solutions, even when they work. They impede, so to speak, the body’s natural defenses. They slow down the innovation that the marketplace could bring to bear on the problem.”

When one considers what the private sector did to fix (eradicate?) the problem of pop-ups and spy-ware, Baldwin’s comments make abundant sense.