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Privacy advocates these days are bringing out their pickets and baying for the blood of tech companies employing the use of cookies to track and better target audiences so that marketers can get a better ROI against their advertising spends.

Many people see the phrase tracking cookies, and immediately put up this brick wall and instantly shut down their laptops with a 10-inch stick for fear that physical contact will somehow enable that cookie to track them into real life.

A lot of people don’t even know what is being tracked before jumping on the bandwagon and going on about privacy.

LOOK. Whatever cookies track, we don’t know WHO you are. All we know is that browser A has recently been on to a lot of travel sites, accesses techcrunch, mashable and slashfilm daily, so we are going to make assumptions that the person using browser A is a techie who loves movies and may be contemplating some travel. That’s all.

Tracking the Trackers:

You may have seen a Ted Talk by Gary Kovacs about this cookie technology, and in the video he paints a picture of how companies like these are stalking him and his family, akin to a bunch of predators circling his child as she goes to school.

Come on.

I think he should know better, coming from a tech background himself.

No personally identifiable data is being collected.

He also spoke of a software to track the trackers called collusion. I installed it and surfed around for a day, collecting data on my trackers, and what I found didn’t alarm me.

In fact, a lot of these so-called “trackers” are essential web tools to enable us be better connected. So let’s see what these trackers really are.

Trackers

So I left collusion on, and went about my daily business. When I logged off at the end of the day, this was what I saw:

Looks intimidating. Let’s take a look when we filter into Techcrunch, one of the more popular tech sites that people go to.

What! That’s a lot of trackers tracking my visit to techcrunch! But when you take a closer look at each, and understand their usage, its not all that scary.

Facebook, Linkedin, Google and Twitter are on there because some scripts would have to be in place so you can tweet, like and +1 each article that you share with your friends.

Google Analytics is on there so techcrunch can see where their visitors are coming from.

WordPress is there cos duh! that’s the blogging platform they are using.

Adtechus is an adserver that serves you the ads you see on the site.

All these different sites have codes on Techcrunch because they are required to perform a certain task.

Some of them are “tracking” you only for the reason that you can share these articles when you want to, at the click of a button, instead of copying and pasting the link and then emailing them to your list of friends, like we used to do.

So please, don’t fan the flames of paranoia any further than its already gone.

Pro (advertising) Choice

Yesterday, Frédéric Filloux of The Guardian wrote an article on behaviorial advertising via tracking of audience, and he had this to say:

Your online behavior – queries you send, ads you click on – draws your marketing profile, enabling brands to deluge you with “targeted” ads. A shoe freak will be swamped by shoemakers ads, someone who intends to buy a car will be targeted by automakers and dealers.

I say what’s wrong with showing you car ads if you ARE indeed in the consideration phase of purchasing a car?

A webpage is going to have a certain number of ads no matter where you surf. Would you rather they show you an ad of a car you may or may not like, or they show you an ad for a sanitary pad  brand when you are a man?

Now, how many of you have experienced this? You’ve been planning a holiday trip to somewhere, and have been looking up tripadvisor and other travel sites for holiday ideas, and suddenly, on a daily basis, you’re being bombarded with banner ads offering airfares, accommodation and day trips?

Coincidence? Nope.

You’re actually being targeted by very smart ads, using data collected from your surfing habits over the past X days.

People are generally divided into 2 camps on this:

1) WTF?! They are watching my every move on the internet?!?!? No fucking way! Respect privacy blah blah Big Brother watching blah blah How can I surf porn in peace blah blah

2) Wow, does that mean I’ll get more relevant ads in future showing me what i’m actually looking out for? Great! Bring it!

The way we used to (and a lot are still doing it this way) buy media is that we’ll purchase a chunk of impressions on Yahoo or MSN or Google, and hope that of these 1,000,000 impressions bought, we’ll hit some of the people who will buy into the ad and convert.

Most times, we’ll add on some targeting filters like news, technology or entertainment category. But these are still purchases off the content and on sites.

There’s still too much wastage and uncertainty.

Real Time Buying/Bidding (RTB)

The current darling of display technology lies in RTB. The ability to assess, in real time, whether this “person” seeing this page, is who we’re targeting at, and whether he’s a possible fit, and if so, to show him the ad.

And we do this on an impression by impression level, and its done via an “auction” where different advertisers “bid” for the right to show their ad to this “person”.

For example, if you’ve been to sites like sgcarmart or searched for car brands in the last month, we assume you’re in the consideration phase for buying a car, and can serve you an ad for a car advertiser.

If you’ve recently bought an air ticket and hotel accommodation, we can assume you’re planning for a trip, and we can show you an ad for travel insurance.

In a nutshell, RTB is able to target and show you ads that are relevant to your current needs, and increase chances of you clicking and converting.

Higher efficiency, lowered wastage, better returns on investment. That’s the RTB proposition.

RTB has been around for a few years, but it has been ramping up on growth over the past 12 months, especially in APAC. So marketers, I suggest getting to know RTB on a deeper level, or at least set up a decent budget to trial and see the results for yourself.

Privacy concerns

Of course, there are upsides and downsides to every emerging technology. In order for us to serve you better and more relevant ads, we first need to know more about “you”.

That being said, no personable identifiable information is ever released, or tracked.

What’s being tracked are your cookies, and what we track from cookies are simply sites you been to, content you have been consuming, search terms you’ve been keying.

With this data, we then extrapolate and build an audience behavioral pool, and make certain assumptions based on those information.

For instance, this cookie visits sites like flowerpod, motherhood, parenting sites and constantly searches for Kim Kardashian, Survivor winner, Ivanka Trump and Desperate housewives.

We then make certain assumptions that this cookie belongs to a woman who’s probably married, and enjoys reality shows and is or could be thinking of having a kid. We then serve ads based on what this “cookie” may need in her life, like baby clothes, women’s fashion brands or DVD sets of certain shows.

I’ll talk about how users are being tracked online in the next post.