UK ISPs Sign Joint Targeted Ads Deal
Three of the UK’s largest ISPs made a major joint announcement yesterday that didn’t seem to cause as many ripples as I expected, as I thought more sites would pick up on the potential privacy issues.
BT, Virgin Media and Talk Talk announced that they had signed exclusive deals with advertising technology company Phorm to use its Open Internet Exchange (OIX) service. OIX monitors every website that customers of those ISPs visit, and is sent to a central advertising hub. This data is then used to help ad agencies and websites that have directly signed up with Phorm to serve better targeted ads to those users.
The service will allow advertisers to serve relevant ads to customers wherever they go on the web. So, for instance if you are a car manufacturer at the moment the best place to book ads is on a car website. However, with OIX participating ISPs will be able to identify which customers have been visiting car websites or researching a new car purchase. Armed with this information, rather than paying top dollar to place an ad on www.whatcar.com to reach those users, the car manufacturer could buy ads on cheaper sites confident that the only people viewing the ads are those interested in buying a car, even if the content on the page isn’t about cars e.g flowers.
By serving ads that are more relevant to what a customer is interested in, rather than necessarily just ads that are relevant to what the customer is viewing on that particular page, should allow publishers to make more money from their traffic and advertisers should be able to spend their budgets more effectively.
The ISPs benefit as they will maximise the value of the data they are effectively sharing with Phorm to enable the targeting. The data is anonymised, so no user can be uniquely identified and certain behaviour such as looking at porn sites isn’t used for profiling purposes.
Even though the data isn’t anonymised, I was expecting some commentators to be still concerned about privacy. What came through for me in the customer focus groups that I sat in on last year where Phorm’s OIX solution was researched, was how customers now see ads as a ‘necessary evil’ on the internet and how they welcomed the OIX solution, as it would serve them more interesting and relevant ads that they would be interested in.
‘If it serves me an ad I might actually want to click on, then I don’t mind it tracking my surfing’
It was amazing to see how user’s were more tolerant of advertising, compared to how ads were hated univerally by everyone 3-5 years ago.
Does the idea that your ISP is selling your data concern you? Or, given that internet advertising is here to stay, do you like the customers that I witnessed, welcome more relevant advertising that you might actually click on?
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Comment by Anon on 25 February 2008:
As far as I can see, the news slipped out as a Reuters piece. Those in the mainstream media charged with rehashing that material didn’t seem to grasp the technical issues. The ball is now starting to roll.
The Register
Techdirt
The Melon Farmers
Digital Spy
I expect the mainstream media to be revisiting this, and I’m sure the BBC will pick up on it soon.
Comment by Joe Soap on 10 March 2008:
Because the Media did not properly report what Phorm & the ISPs were doing!!!