Thursday, August 17, 2006
Marketing of Cookies Half-Baked
The Web Analytics Association is going on a campaign to clear up consumer concern about cookies (according to MarketingVox, and this is a good idea. Marketing firms and technology companies need to partner to make the placement and use of cookies more transparent.Behavioral advertising companies such as Seevast (formerly Kanoodle) place cookies to track user behavior so that they can deliver ads that are more relevant. We can all agree that more relevancy is good for everyone (enough with the dating ads, I'm married!), and the message has to be made clear that cookies that don't identify the user do not invade one's privacy.
Since many people do not want all of their online adventures to be tracked (even anonymously), the browser should make it easy to turn cookies on and off, and to block individual sites from adding cookies. Firefox allows you to prohibit specific sites from placing cookies (see Options), while IE has more generic cookie blocking tools. Turning off cookies could be made through a key command, or even a small icon on the toolbar.
To gain user trust, publishers should make their cookie-placing actions more obvious. Most of the cookies you receive list only the IP addresses from ad networks, making it a chore to figure who put them there and for what end. By associating each cookie with the website destination and adding a link to the website's cookie policy publishers would remove much of the FUD.
Finally, wouldn't it be useful to add a page's tags or keywords to the cookie information so that marketers could see how the content of a pages are related? Analyzing the words on a page is more of a chore than parsing a brief list of tags, and would be a boost to behavioral marketers.
Posted By John Gartner at 09:52 AM
Permanent Link: Marketing of Cookies Half-Baked
| Comments (1)
Subscribe to The MarketingShift Feed