There has been a lot of talk lately about privacy and advertising lately. Some of it has been about what happens to collected data – a la Facebook and Apple products. Occasionally, someone crosses the line and confuses targeted advertising with a breach of privacy. There is a clear difference between knowing what might interest me and knowing everything about me.
This week, I received a tweet about an old article blasting AnchorFree for not protecting privacy because it is advertising supported. A comment to the article accused the company’s products of being spyware, one of the things it promises to protect against.
If you aren’t familiar with AnchorFree, it sells a product called Hotspot Shield. This is used by people who want privacy while online such as for shopping. It is also used by people in regions that regularly censor communications and access to the internet. My understanding of how it works is because Hotspot Shield uses a double-blind approach to communications, you cannot link back to the end user. As you can imagine, what could be an added protection against fraud in the US, can literally be a lifesaver in other parts of the world.
The complaint, and misinterpretation I believe, comes from a wrong assumption that it is a violation of privacy to target advertising. If everyone in advertising went along with this line of thinking, companies would experience significantly lower sales because their messages would not hit the right audience, and consumers would miss offers that are relevant to them. Frankly, I would rather see something I might be interested in purchasing than an approach of spraying advertising wildly and hoping something will stick. Case in point, no matter how many times I see a Viagra commercial, I am not the target audience and will never purchase it.
In addition to a growing number of Freemium services that have some level of advertising, whether it be banners or pop-ups, there are also companies which are delivering advertising with your expressed permission. Although seen less in the US, in Europe where countries such as the Netherlands require opt-in only for email marketing, this is much more the norm.
In March, the British mobile telecommunications company O2 announced more than two million people had already subscribed to O2 More, the company’s opt-in advertising platform. There are thousands of advertisers lined up to take advantage of direct and approved communications with O2 More subscribers.
In the European Union, tracking on your own website and across others is a sticky situation at best, opt-in advertising better targets advertising to visitors about whom there is relatively limited information. When customers care about the advertising they are seeing, the response rates can be incredible.
The next phase is opt-in advertising with consumer preferences. Simply said, if I tell you what is of interest to me and you present relevant advertising, I’m more likely to buy. This also implies I’m less likely to see advertising that doesn’t interest me. I don’t know if I will ever totally lose those annoying Viagra ads, but maybe I can overlook them if I see a few more ads that seem to have a clue I’m a professional woman.
