Advertising Group Urges Companies: Give Customers a Reason to Share Data
Even as privacy protections in browsers and new state laws threaten to ignite more of the existing ad business, many industry leaders are still taking a "This is fine" attitude, according to a new report from an online-advertising industry group.
The State of Data 2022(Opens in a new window), published Tuesday by the Interactive Advertising Bureau(Opens in a new window), suggests that IAB’s members need to accept those changes but can still preserve their business if they start making changes of their own.
To begin, ad firms should tell consumers just what data they want and the business rationale (and possible consumer upside) behind those requests instead of throwing up a generic cookie dialog and asking users to click “accept.” The report’s first recommendation: “Companies should provide users with a clear opportunity to select the types of data they are willing to allow for business purposes, including for advertising.”
IAB’s report also counsels advertisers against assuming they can use workarounds like consumers’ email and IP addresses after those tracking cookies get herded to extinction by the privacy controls in browsers like Safari and Firefox as well as state privacy laws like the California Consumer Privacy Act and others about to go into effect.
The report does, however, put in a cautious vote of confidence for “cohort” tracking solutions that would abstract away more personal data and allow advertisers to match only clouds of perceived interests or demographic data. IAB calls this “seller defined audiences”(Opens in a new window); Google has been working, behind schedule, to implement it in Chrome as a replacement for tracking cookies.
IAB’s report also urges much stricter fidelity to data-security
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