Privacy Legislation’s Potential Impact on Online Media

Although advertising industry groups are predictably resistant to any kind of regulation, their initial reactions to privacy legislations proposed by Sens John Kerry (D-MA) and John McCain (R-AZ) seem more muted than concerns they had prior to the bill’s introduction.

Big tech companies like Facebook, Microsoft, eBay, Hewlett-Packard and Intel expressed support for the bill. The trade groups are probably relieved about the absence of Do Not Track, which they fear encourages users to block all cookies and customization indiscriminately, and requires potentially costly support from ad servers, ad networks and sites. Apple is the latest browser maker to experiment with Do Not Track support, after Mozilla and Microsoft; Google favors an alternative approach that maintains user opt-outs.

Passage of the Kerry-McCain bill or something similar will have the following effects on the online media landscape:

• Online content sites: Don't call me a conspiracy theorist, but some traditional publishers like the Wall Street Journal might be perfectly happy without web-wide behavioral targeting. They could tout the value of their online/offline audience and promote contextual targeting and sponsorships. As noted, publishers would able to follow and target a user within their own site, which would benefit portals like Yahoo and AOL, which have huge audiences and broad variety of content.
• Online advertising ecosystem: The bill’s restrictive approach to behavioral targeting favors search advertising over display ad formats. It also weakens industry efforts to deliver attribution, i.e., understanding and valuing the longer-term effects of seeing brand advertising. The data sharing guidelines could force data miners (Experian, Audience Science, BlueKai) and ad networks (DoubleClick, ValueClick, 24/7 Real Media) to secure more formal contractual relationships with content sites that have registered users. And the legislation seems to leave room for third parties to take user info and create anonymized groups of targetable customer “types” based on demographics and behavior.
• Social targeting: Today, most third-party social targeters (Lotame, 33Across, Media6Degrees, Rapleaf) base their analysis on tracking user behavior with their own cookies, rather than getting access to API data from Facebook or Twitter. Legislation may make them pay for access, and even then, Facebook to-date has been stingy about data sharing. Likely it’s saving that targeting opportunity for itself.