IAB: 'Advertising Is Creepy'

Faced with increasing pressure from Washington, the Interactive Advertising Bureau launched a public service campaign on Thursday aimed at educating consumers about behavioral targeting.

The online campaign, created pro bono by WPP's Schematic, features rich media banner ads with copy like "Advertising is creepy" and "Hey, this banner can tell where you live. Mind if we come over and sell you stuff?"

More than one dozen publishers -- including Microsoft, Google's YouTube, and AOL -- have committed to donate a combined 500 million impressions for the initiative.

The campaign comes as policymakers are questioning whether data collection by marketers violates consumers' privacy. Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) has said he plans to introduce a bill that could require Web companies to notify users about online ad targeting, and in some circumstances, obtain their explicit consent.

In addition, the Federal Trade Commission has criticized the industry for using dense privacy policies to inform people about behavioral targeting, or tracking people online and sending them ads based on sites visited.

In a meeting with reporters Thursday morning, IAB President and CEO Randall Rothenberg said one goal of the campaign is to address regulators' concerns that consumers don't understand behavioral advertising.

The ad units themselves offer information about online ad techniques. For instance, users who mouse over the "creepy" banner can pull down copy stating that companies don't use "personally identifiable information" to determine which ads to serve.

Users who click through land on the IAB's Privacy Matters page, which includes a description of various forms of online advertising, information about cookies (including Flash cookies) and links to opt-out pages.

The portion of the landing page devoted to cookies says they "contain data that allow a Web site to customize content and advertising to your interests but generally do not contain personally identifiable information." A section with information about geotargeting states that an IP address "reveals nothing personal about you to marketers and websites."

But privacy advocate Jeff Chester immediately raised questions about such statements. "They are ignoring the growing consensus that cookies and IP addresses are personally identifiable," says Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy.

Cathy Dwyer, a privacy expert and professor of information systems at Pace University, also questions whether the banners' headlines are too sophisticated to draw in users. "Even 'creepy' itself is a technical term," she says, adding that it's mainly industry insiders and observers who use that word in discussions about behavioral advertising.

The FTC said this year in its report about online behavioral targeting that non-personally identifiable information could be used to identify specific users.

In the past, industry groups and observers defined personally identifiable information as names, addresses, phone numbers or other information that could be used to contact an individual directly.

Critics recently moved away from that definition, in part because Web users have been identified based on supposedly anonymous data. The most famous example occurred in 2006, when AOL publicly released search logs showing users' queries and "anonymized" IP addresses for more than 600,000 users, Within days, one "anonymized" user, Thelma Arnold, was profiled in The New York Times after reporters identified her based on her search queries.

Schematic CEO Trevor Kaufman told reporters Thursday that a test of the campaign in late October and early November yielded a click-through rate of 0.5%. The trial involved 7 million impressions, mainly served on Microsoft's Hotmail.

Separately, the digital rights group Center for Democracy & Technology also launched a privacy campaign on Thursday -- although with a different goal. The CDT is hoping to persuade users to lobby Congress for online privacy legislation. The Web site for the CDT's "Take Back Your Privacy" campaign enables users to submit concerns directly to the FTC and to send emails to their lawmakers.