Uneasy Truce Over Web Ads Makes for Rough Surfing
By TIM HANRAHAN AND JASON FRY
Wall Street Journal
July 18, 2005
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB112074210728879482,00.html?mod=technology%5Ffeatured%5Fstories%5Fhs
Sometimes it seems people love to hate online ads, lustily complaining
about everything from animated banner ads that distract the eye to pop-ups
and hard-to-find "close" buttons. To say nothing of the anger over adware
and spyware, sleazy cousins whose misdeeds often get conflated in people's
minds with run-of-the-mill advertising annoyances.
People like to complain about offline ads too, of course, but there's a
difference: The online world offers a host of tools for suppressing ads and
the technical infrastructure that supports them. The adoption of
ad-blocking tools has led to tumult in the online world, as even a cursory
tour of recent headlines will show. Consider marketers' efforts to get
antispyware-program makers to stop identifying tracking cookies as
potential threats in sweeps of consumers' machines, as discussed by our
WSJ.com colleague David Kesmodel last month. Or our print colleague Walt
Mossberg's most-recent Personal Technology column, challenging the idea
that tracking cookies aren't a form of spyware. Or the Journal's report
about the internal debate at Microsoft over acquiring Claria, an adware
maker which became infamous in its days as Gator Corp.
There's nothing new about a technological arms race between Internet users
who don't want to be reached and those trying to reach them, except for
this: The implicit bargain underlying the free Internet is that consumers
get access to content because they're looking at ads. "You get to see
things and experience things that you might not have otherwise because of
the revenue derived from the advertising experience," as Bennie Smith,
chief privacy officer for third-party ad server DoubleClick Inc., puts it.
(In an earlier version of this column we incorrectly referred to
DoubleClick as an online ad network.)
Look, pop-ups drive us crazy too we never leave our corporate home page
without having ours armed and corner-Xing overly aggressive ads makes us
homicidal. (Same goes for the electronics-store inserts that slide out of
our Sunday papers and straight into the recycling bin.) But that said, we
have trouble criticizing ad makers for pushing the envelope. Advertisers
naturally want to craft the most eye-catching ads, in the hardest-to-ignore
formats, and it behooves them to know as much as they can about the people
seeing those ads. The whole idea of ads is to get your attention;
unfortunately, it can be a fine line between catching someone's eye and
annoying that person. Of course, supplying relevant ads is one key to
getting someone's attention, and Google and others have succeeded by
offering ads that are relevant because they analyze what someone's looking
at now, as opposed to what sites they've visited before. There's huge
promise here, but it's hard to expect advertisers to abandon
attention-getting tactics honed for generations in other media, or to give
up any advantage they might be able to exploit. This is their job, after
all: Are they supposed to do them poorly?
From a consumer perspective, at least one can fight back immediately and
effectively. Pop-up blockers are now ubiquitous, and now there's a certain
buzz around tools that block "in-line" ads embedded in Web pages, such as
AdBlock, which can block ads based on certain criteria (such as
"doubleclick") by simply right-clicking on the ad. Consumers have every
right to install whatever they want on their machines, of course, but we
can't stop thinking about that implicit bargain. (The folks at Firefox
creators Mozilla have thought about this too: Their download page for
AdBlock reminds users that "many websites are supported by revenue from
ads.
Perhaps just blocking intrusive ads like popups and flash ads with
sound is enough?") That lends the push-and-pull between consumers and
advertisers a certain queasiness, as it at least raises the prospect of a
widespread consumer revolt that could undermine the free-Internet model.
To be sure, that's very unlikely. But we do wonder if we wouldn't all be
better off if the ads-for-content model were a little more stable a
concern we discussed with DoubleClick's Mr. Smith and Greg Stuart,
president and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, a trade group
representing online advertisers.
Neither seems particularly concerned with what consumers will do. Mr.
Stuart says he thinks most consumers do understand the ads-for-content
deal, but certain forms of advertising cause them to rethink things. "There
are times they say, 'That doesn't work for me,' " he says. Pop-ups and
pop-unders are the obvious examples: Mr. Smith says that consumers have
demonstrated "very clearly and consistently that pop-ups and pop-unders
don't work," and as a result many companies have pulled back from using them.
Instead, both appear more concerned with what middlemen, such as
Internet-service providers and software makers, might do on consumers'
behalf. It's "perfectly fine" if the ads-for-content model changes because
of consumers' actions, Mr. Smith says: "The industry will change along with
that. What I would say isn't quite appropriate is forcing that change, or
the potential for that change, on consumers without their full knowledge
and awareness."
Two potential flashpoints: tracking cookies and in-line ads.
"If you introduce a tool into the marketplace designed to combat spyware
which is clearly a threat you need to be clear in an objective way about
your treatment of cookies," Mr. Smith says. "Because I don't think using
interchangeable terminology
serves the consumer." (Anyone who's swept
their PC for spyware and malware, turned up a large number of cookies and
wondered whether to give them the Roman emperor's thumbs-up or down will
know exactly what Mr. Smith is talking about.)
Mr. Smith says that "it's not apparent to me that consumers have expressed
the same level of discomfort with in-line ads. To extend that particular
feeling about pop-ups to online ads on behalf of consumers is, I think, a
step that's inappropriately taken." (For more of Mr. Smith's thoughts on ad
blockers, see this ZDNet story, which got us thinking about the issue.)
Tools that block in-line ads aren't being widely used: Mr. Stuart says less
than 1% of consumers have used one. But numbers can change quickly,
particularly if ISPs or software makers start rolling out such tools or
adding them to software suites. Symantec Inc. already does this: Its Norton
AntiSpam product includes the ability to block banner ads. Asked about the
uptake of such tools, Mr. Stuart says "we're watching it."
Then there's the peril of bad actors tarring all advertisers with the
spyware brush. While the debate about how tracking cookies should be used
is a healthy one, it's also an old one. It's obvious to us that the
intensity of that debate is a direct result of PC users' anxiety about
adware that sleazy marketers use to turn PCs into ever-changing forests of
billboards and spyware that tracks them across the Net. To some consumers,
that makes any ads or talk of tracking frightening and they have the
tools to do something about it, just as many of them did with pop-ups.
So what's the ad industry to do? Mr. Smith says it's important for
advertisers and publishers to recognize consumer sensitivities not to an
advertisement's message, but to the medium that delivers that message. In
his view, learning, testing and customer feedback will improve that
understanding, and let advertisers and publishers educate consumers about
the value proposition of online ads and the source of ads they see, "so I
know I'm on a site that I trust."
When it comes to trust, Mr. Stuart says the IAB will continue to take "an
ever-increasing, aggressive stance" against practices that could hurt
online advertisers, while discussing online-ad issues with the makers of
software tools and those who employ them: Mr. Stuart notes that established
companies are often also advertisers, and are concerned about the overall
"ecosystem" of the free Net.
Mr. Smith agrees. "We're after the same thing creating an environment
where consumers feel they have a safe, secure positive online experience,"
he says, adding that "to the extent [tools] are coming from companies,
we'll knock on their door and say, 'We need to talk.' I think we have
common ground to talk.
There's a lot we can do together here. We don't
need to be working at cross-purposes."
================================
George Antunes, Political Science Dept
University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204
Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927
antunes at uh dot edu
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