Behavioral Advertising: Wave of the Future? - Knowing Where They Surf

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In order to show advertising based on a web surfer's previous online history, you need to have some way to discover that previous history. In short, you need to collect data on individual users. There are a number of ways to do this, and some of them don't sit well with consumers.

Most of the companies that are involved in behavioral advertising have a participating network of websites which drops cookies on site visitors' computers. Some of them reward the publishers in their network when a site visitor acts on a behaviorally targeted ad. Some of the better known names in behavioral advertising include Tacoda, Advertising.com, Kanoodle, Claria, Direct Revenue, Revenue Science, and others.

You might recognize some of those names, Claria in particular. Claria is known for creating adware, some of which has found its way onto the computers of thousands of web surfers against their users' wills. It's been claimed that Claria has had a problem with rogue distributors, who violated the company's rules covering how its adware can be installed. Whether or not this is true, it's the kind of thing that can give behavioral advertising a bad name among consumers.

Adware and spyware are often installed automatically on a user's computer without his or her knowledge or consent. Once installed, they track online behavior -- which is a good thing from the point of view of behavioral targeting. But these little programs can also slow down a computer's performance to a ridiculous degree. Many antivirus programs also target adware and spyware now, and recommend its removal.

This doesn't even address the issue of ethics. If you wouldn't want someone to install something on your computer without your knowing about it and consenting to it, why would you want someone to do that to your customers? It certainly seems like a bad way to try to spread some good will. Indeed, privacy is one of the biggest concerns raised about behavioral advertising. Web surfers are much more suspicious these days than they used to be about anything that tracks their personal information, thanks to the number of high-profile reports of sensitive, personal data being captured by hackers and/or leaked onto the Internet.

Next: Benefits and Risks of Behavioral Marketing >>
 

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