The No. 1 issue for marketers in the next 12 months will be behavioral targeting – and if it’s not on the CMO’s agenda, it should be.
You only need to look at the FTC chairman’s comments last week that seemed to add urgency to the possible establishment of a “do-not-track” online list reminiscent of the do-not-call list that severely wounded the telemarketing industry to understand the importance of this issue. While marketers frequently say that consumers prefer relevant marketing (over, say spam) and thus they ought to accept online tracking that is after all anonymous and not attached to your actual name, there’s evidence that consumers don’t feel the same way, which means Washington probably doesn’t feel the same way either.
The issue of tracking has come under scrutiny nearly since the birth of the Internet when people worried over “cookies.” Now the tools have gotten more sophisticated and the tone more skeptical. The Wall Street Journal launched a series over the weekend with the first piece carrying the ominous title of “The Web’s New Gold Mine: Your Secrets.” If that tone isn’t obvious enough, the country’s other prominent national newspaper, The New York Times, issued a similarly menacing piece a couple weeks back called “The Web Means An End to Forgetting.”
Lest you think it’s just the media doing all the worrying, several studies have shown that consumers overwhelmingly resent having their movements tracked online.
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