Response to “Americans Reject Tailored Advertising”
The digital world is abuzz about the new UPenn / Berkeley study showing that 2/3 of consumers polled don’t want targeted advertising. For those unfamiliar, I urge you to read the study and methodology (and pursue the questions themselves) to make your own judgment. Below is mine.
Questions ranged from “Tell me whether or not you want websites you visit to show ads that are tailored to your interests / give you discounts that are tailored to your interests / show you news that is tailored to your interests” to “Would it be OK / not OK if these ads were tailored based on the following [targeting methods]“ and defines these targeting methods as tracking what you do on/off websites you’re visiting, and even offline.
This survey was missing some very important questions to establish a baseline, and with that I take issue. Namely, participants were not asked:
“Tell me whether or not you want websites you visit to show ads”
Let me save us some guesswork. An overwhelming majority of us do not want to see ads and would respond as such. The current study’s results should be no more surprising than our intuition on this one, folks. Of the set of people who do not want to be shown ads at all, I imagine most of those would also reject targeted advertising. So what have we revealed here?
The trouble is there’s going to be a law, and if consumers had their way, they’d support a law that would make it illegal to target advertising to them.
How about, then, we ask this:
“How much would you pay to access your favorite news site if it meant no ads were ever shown to you? $5/month, $10/month, $15/month”
…because the free service we all enjoy simply won’t survive (and is already faltering pretty hard).
Yes, ads are annoying. But, given the fact that ads are simply here to stay (they are), would you prefer an ad that has something to do with your interests or an ad for teeth whitening / male virility / MySpace themes?
Another question that was not asked.
I implore our US litigators and the FTC to consider the context of our browsing experience and that, given the choice, none of us would prefer ads. But that shouldn’t make better ads illegal when they legitimately do not collect personal information or any such information that can be linked to a human being (which, by the way, a majority of users polled in a recent TRUSTe study approved of).
Oh, and how many of us like receiving unsolicited mail based on our shopping behavior, credit scores (yes, credit scores), income, and other cues we seem to ignore? How many of us like getting disturbed at dinnertime by an unsolicited phone call? Both of these activities are opt-out, as should behavioral advertising.
Comments welcome!