InsightIQ Blog

Privacy & Web Prosperity

Mar 26 2009

The behavioral targeting and online advertising industry is keenly watching the online consumer privacy debate unfold. As consumer groups and experts on both sides debate the privacy guidelines, it is expected to have far reaching consequences to online advertising and could drive a fundamental shift from behavioral and contextual targeting to analytic driven segmentation and targeting.

Consumers are largely expecting the same privacy guidelines as email and direct marketing practices. This will force a lot of behavioral targeting software vendors to comply with explicit opt-in guidelines and will require them to change their approach in data collection and execution. If the explicit opt-in guidelines are established, then there will be a distinct shift from behavioral targeting to audience segmentation, and analytic-driven online marketing & advertising, which has also known to provide higher business value in the long run but is more involved than an out-of-the-box Behavioral targeting engine.

The below post from mediapost indicates how nervous the BT and online advertising industry is with respect to privacy. http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=101148

This article is filed under: