Should Charities resist this new advertising development?
The NYTimes article "Retargeting Ads Follow Surfers to Other Sites" suggests that new Google and Microsoft technology that allows ads to follow you across the internet is "creepy", "disturbing" and akin to stalking - like "a commercial surveillance system in place online that is sweeping in scope and raises privacy and civil liberties issues, too."
While Google has long used information about the websites you peruse to suggest internet ads in which you may be interested, they are now offering it as a specific service to enable individual advertisers to "follow you" around the internet and keep throwing their ads at you.
This service for advertisers is called "remarketing" or "retargeting" and enables the advertiser - lets say a shoe store - to embed within their website a snippet of code which then gets saved to your browser cookies when you visit their website and look at their shoes.
When you later go to any other website that has Google ads, the snippet of code which has been saved to your cookies tells Google to show you the shoe store's advertisements again, and again, and again in the hopes that you will go back to their site and buy their shoes. (Let's hope it was just a harmless shoe store you visited!)
Does this take cyber stalking to a new level? If your charity uses this, could it give you a black eye? Or could it increase your hit rate and online donations?
Today I came across official information from Google which explains how they see it. The article "Now available: Reach the right audience through remarketing" gives us this scenario:
"Imagine you’re a travel company, and you’re trying to excite users during the holiday season about deals to tropical Caribbean destinations. Users may come to your website, browse the offers and think about booking a trip, but decide that the deal is still not cheap enough. Then, they continue to browse the web. If you later decide to offer discounted deals to the Carribean, how do you reach these users who have already expressed interest in travelling there?"
In other words, it makes the assumption that a person who visits your website is your potential customer and has (unwittingly and unwillingly) opted in to receive your advertisements anywhere they go.
This is where the privacy issue comes in - most countries with Privacy Laws stipulate that the consumer must consciously opt-in to a company's mailing list or make a purchase/donation before they can be sent marketing material by that company.
Remarketing or retargeting clearly violates this principle.
However, Google states that "we want to put users in control of the ads they see, so anyone can opt-out of remarketing by using the Ads Preferences Manager. Our remarketing product complies with industry standards developed by self-regulatory groups such as the NAI and IAB and IAB UK."
In other words - you can choose to opt out by going to http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/
In theory, you can also opt out by disabling cookies in your browser. However, anyone who has tried that in the last couple of years has learned the hard way that it is now almost impossible to use the internet without having cookies enabled.
What are your thoughts?
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