Mediaboss Marketing

The ad-tech sector of the media industry has, whether fair or not, a reputation for creepiness. And in light of seismic changes that affect their businesses (like Google eliminating third-party ad targeting and federal and state data privacy legislation), these companies are now piecing together an education campaign to explain the benefits they bring to the public.

This will include taking up ad space on consumer-facing websites to show how ad tech is undergoing a reboot, putting the consumer back in control. Perhaps more importantly, the campaign will tell readers how the data they collect subsequently funds online content.

The initiative forms part of the IAB Tech Labs last-ditch efforts to reform the online advertising industry, now that all of the industrys major internet browser providers have called time on the cookie, the software at the core of ad tech.

Although no timeline for the education campaign has been laid out, the campaign is part of the trade orgs plans to overhaul the very DNA of ad tech since Google planned to phase-out third-party cookies in its market-leading Chrome browser by 2022.

An outline of the planned campaign was laid out this week at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting where executives discussed efforts to use first-party publisher data, such as hashed email addresses, as the core tool for online audience targeting.

Speaking at a town hall session at this weeks IAB conference conducted under the Chatham House Rule, executives described plans to articulate themselves to the public, including how the new proposals will put consumers at the center of control.

We have to work on the narrative as much as the solution, one executive leading these efforts said. Right now, as an industry, theres a little bit of demonization going on and its going to get worse.

The executives who have envisaged the campaign want to downplay notions of ad-tech players invading privacy and stealing data. Instead, they want to articulate the benefits they bring to the public, especially how they help fund quality journalism.

Right now, as an industry, we have a branding problem, continued the aforementioned executive.

The public education campaign is at the latter phase of a multi-tiered strategy to convince the public as well as key industry stakeholders such as Apple, Google and Firefox-provider-Mozilla that the new means of ad targeting are user-friendly.

At this point, those involved in the plans want to assemble a global coalition of companies with aligned interest (i.e. those outside of the walled gardens) to jointly fund research and developmentplus ad inventory for the planned public education campaignthat will result in a privacy-first version of the open web.

Up until now, cookies (both first- and third-party) have been the nexus that helped interconnect the multitude of players involved in online audience targeting.

However, now that the internets largest names are clamping down on practices that lawmakers deem dubious (such as fingerprinting plus certain data transfers used in online ad auctions), seismic changes are afoot. This means ad tech must reform itself. Leading voices in the space want to go public with how they operate, and the crucial role they play in funding online content.

Another executive said: Our plan is to talk to about 1,000 companies around the world in 90 days globally and get them to sign-up and support this in the form of real inventory and audience, and real dollars.

This effort to court support from the industry could come in the guise of open web players such as publishers donating media inventory, which could then be used to articulate the value exchange involved in audience profiling in exchange for free content.

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The IAB Tech Lab Has a Campaign Strategy to Educate the Public About Ad Tech - Adweek