ADOTAS

2012 Prediction: From Social to Spatial

It’s no longer just “what are you doing?,” but “where are you going?” and “when will you be there?” that the social universe cares about. While Facebook’s Timeline allows us to answer, for all our friends and followers, those age-old “where were you when …” questions, Foursquare’s Radar functionality tells you when you’re near people or places that you like, just in case you’re up for a bit of a diversion in the future (even if that future is only five minutes from now). As more people transition from using social media to record what we’ve done to using it to help us plan what we will do, advertising and marketing efforts can become increasingly local — even hyperlocal — to reach an engaged nearby audience eager for interaction with companies and brands. Fjord sees a bright future for organizations that are able to harness the power of location and time — categories that, unlike social and search, are still up for grabs.

2012 Prediction: An S.O.S. from the Disconnected Living Room

2012 will see even more “clutter” in the living room. Yahoo’s IntoNow app can determine what we’re watching on TV and share that with our friends via Twitter. Hulu feeds our watching habits to our Facbook Timelines. The Xbox, more than just a gaming console, allows us to access film and video without having to leave the house, or even the sofa. Disney encouraged viewers of its Christmas Day parade to use the Shazam app to get behind-the-scenes content. Americans spend an average of four hours per day watching television, and delivering a more full-integrated experience (or at  least companion experiences) — whether through interactivity, social networking, or simple convenience — can ensure that those are four hours are enhanced. But be careful, 2012 is also the year in which the struggle for sofa supremacy could finally start to see some winners and losers.

2012 Prediction: Your Identity Is Your Currency

There’s something truly remarkable about modern society’s willingness to share so much of themselves with their friends and acquaintances. Modern stoicism is giving way to post-modern openness — but with that openness are risks. The more we share, the greater the odds that what we post can someday be used against us: in job interviews ,relationships, even financial transactions. So in 2012, we anticipate an increased sensitivity to how we value the information that we post — and how we value our ability to keep it at least somewhat private. For every service like OpenID that allows us to safely log into multiple sites and control our information, there will also be an uptick in trends like “Pay with a Tweet,” in which no money changes hands, but the whole Twitterverse can see what you’ve just “purchased.” 2012 may be the year of social media privacy trade-offs; it remains to be seen whether more secrecy or more openness will ultimately win. 2012 will see a host of services that will push the boundaries of privacy — some of these will prevail as “cool;” others are doomed to be creepy. This is the tipping point we call the social dilemma, because nobody knows exactly where it lies. 2012 could be the first year of the Social Dilemma.

2012 Prediction: Say Hello to 24/7 Wearables

One of the most tedious parts of sticking to a workout regimen? Pausing between each set to write down how many reps you’ve done. Wouldn’t it be nice if something could just do it for you? For the cost of a few sessions with a personal trainer, you can get a wearable device that will track your activity over the course of the day — not just at the gym, but on your bike, or even walking around the city. Not into fitness? What about a sensor that tracks your sleeping habits and feeds it to a smart alarm clock to calculate the ideal time to wake up in the morning? Or a pair of earrings that allows you to listen to your iPod wirelessly, without anyone even noticing? We might still be a long way off from having microchips implanted in our brains, but devices that can help us do the things we already do more quickly and easily will be increasingly in demand this year — so brands willing to give that to their consumers will have quite an edge over their competitors. The challenge for wearable electronics is to understand what users will want to do with them, and to take advantage of the growing concept of  ”glanceability.” There will be a battle for people’s “glance.”

• AOL is re-organizing into four units, CEO Tim Armstrong announced yesterday: advertising, local services (which includes Patch and MapQuest), the Huffington Post group, and one that brings together dial-up access and web services (Instant Messenger, email and video, for example). Ideally, by pulling internet services together under one umbrella, the company will be able to provide a web experience more closely tailored to an individual.

• Digiday published a piece summarizing a panel discussion that took place at the Digiday Agency Conference, and in which Evolve Media CEO Aaron Broder said that “agencies are addicted to retargeting” and “people that click on ads are losers.” — not the customers you’d want, in other words. Check out Broder’s comments and the responses of others panelists. And what do you think? Does the industry need to get over measuring clicks, or are they a worthwhile measurement? Let us know in the comments.

• Back in the day, everyone dreamed of becoming famous. Now, instead, we all dream of going viral. The problem is, not everything we throw online deserves to go viral, and even less can go viral by virtue of its own design. So how does anyone manage to achieve the elusive, misunderstood quality of virality? ProBlogger has released and shared a detailed infographic explaining how virality works and looking into the qualities of truly viral marketing campaigns. It’s worth checking out if you need or want a refresher.

• Data protection provider Nasuni has been testing the internet’s 16 largest cloud storage providers since April 2009, and Amazon’s S3 Simple Storage Service beat out everyone else in the field when it came to performance (speed), stability and availability, and scalability (capacity). Only six of the 16 “passed” the test (Amazon, Microsoft, Nirvanix, Rackspace, AT&T Synaptic and Peer 1 Hosting). Microsoft Azure made a strong showing alongside Amazon (in fact, the study found Microsoft to be slightly faster than Amazon), but the victor had, according to Nasuni’s report, ”the fewest outages and best uptime, and was the only CSP to post a 0.0 percent error rate in both writing and reading objects during scalability testing.” Click here for the full report.

• On Friday, we reported the U.S. Justice Department was delaying its antitrust case against AT&T, further frustrating the company’s efforts to acquire T-Mobile, and today the two telecom companies have joined the Justice Department in requesting a federal judge make such a delay. This is perhaps unexpected, because AT&T had argued for a quick resolution up until Friday. The two telecoms are expected to file a report by Jan. 12 explaining their plans for any proposed acquisition, and they’ve asked for a conference to gauge any further legal proceedings on Jan. 18.

• Just as we’ve published Peter Koeppel’s analysis of how Netflix damaged its goodwill among subscribers (and lost valuable market share) in 2011, there are rumors from anonymous sources that Verizon might have expressed interest in acquiring the troubled video service. Verizon reportedly wants to launch a streaming video service and would rather pick up one that already exists than develop its own. The rumors, at the very least, boosted Netflix stock value.

• As part of a collection of predictions for 2012, AdExchanger quotes American Association of Advertising Agencies (4As) president Nancy Hill as speculating, “I think we will finally see agencies reaping the benefits of behaving more like Silicon Valley than Madison Avenue… We are seeing true partnerships form that gives everyone the ability to look at a problem from many points of view. Most of the start-up agencies over the last two years are built on this tenet and are flourishing nicely.”

This kind of instant access is becoming an asset to consumers, publishers and advertisers, providing unprecedented ways to communicate and interact with one another in ways no other medium can offer. Monetizing this viewership is an unparalleled opportunity. However, users are quickly becoming complacent to the onslaught of online advertising. No one has perfected a way to accurately target users to create a more personal advertising experience, which has alienated users and is causing a rift in customer loyalty due to fears of what this new level of access means for personal privacy.

Enter AdTruth™ – a company looking to tackle the concerns that cookie-based, location-based, behavioral and audience targeting has created by:

• Putting control back in the hands of the consumer
• Increasing customer loyalty
• Maintaining the ability for media to deliver quality, tailored advertisements across all web-enabled devices.

The company was started by Ori Eisen, founder and chief innovation officer of online fraud protection company 41st Parameter and former director of worldwide fraud at American Express. Ori has spent years and millions of dollars in research to develop DeviceInsight ™, a patented technology used by the top financial institutions, travel and e-commerce sites to battle online fraud. This research uncovered unsettling trends where customer challenge rates were increasing while the viability of cookies was rapidly decreasing. Indeed, the writing was on the proverbial wall: Cookies were beginning to crumble.

This discovery gave birth to the idea of using the DeviceInsight technology to provide increased transparency, adherence to privacy and cookie-less tracking/targeting in the online ad space. This potent and highly effective device recognition technology has proven excellent for finding and stopping the fraudulent “bad guys,” and should be repurposed to help the online ad industry, which has been plagued with HTTP and Flash cookie degradation, growing privacy legislation in both the U.S. and E.U. and tracking efficacy with mobile. Cookies were not the only solution and could not be depended on long-term; it was obvious that media had to evolve.

Building a team of ad industry professionals, a new version of the technology and a subsidiary company was created, and AdTruth embarked on presenting their solution to 67 key players within the industry landscape, receiving over 50 immediate requests to pilot the technology. The technology was then presented to lawyers in Germany, where cookies are opt-in only, and to the FTC, and both greeted the solution with wide acceptance and enthusiasm.

AdTruth’s solution recognizes the DNT (Do Not Track) flag – a privacy solution presented by Mozilla (Firefox Browser) and recently adopted by all major browsers and Internet companies who are part of the W3i to allow for greater user choice in conjunction with other tools like the OBA (Online Behavioral Alliance) AdvertisingOption Icon offering. This allows the user’s privacy choices to truly be honored with this solution.

AdTruth is so unique because of its on-premise, server-side integration into a client’s existing data center infrastructure with no additional hardware requirements. This allows for increased speed while leaving no residue on the user’s device. With concentration on no latency or additional calls, those leveraging the growing valueof Real-Time Bidding (RTB) will find this extremely valuable. The solution augments the use of cookies for display advertising and provides substantially more visibility of mobile devices.

AdTruth announced their first client in November, Steelhouse Media, and has several ongoing pilots and new partnerships developing both in the US and EU. All in the mobile and display landscape are welcome to become a client of AdTruth, particularly mobile players and those in Europe struggling with opt-in only cookie use for 2012, as those sectors are just not making as much as they could if they used this technology. “Once the word gets around on the efficacy, it will spread like wildfire,” said Ori Eisen.” We’re doing the right thing. We do it differently than anyone else.” With over 50 requests to pilot the technology alone, AdTruth is sure to become an industry staple and a true game changer.

ADOTAS

Meanwhile, as Facebook has figuratively pulled down the window shades, Google Maps just walked in the front door. Android users can download Google Maps 6.0, which now offers floor plans of select airports and retailers, including some major shopping malls.

In other news, eXelate has analyzed the data from billions of online transactions, and it’s decided that while Cyber Monday was a bigger day for online shopping than Black Friday (by 17 percent), it might not have been quite the coup that recent proclamations of the cyberest of all possible Mondays suggests: For the rest of the month, Mondays were already 14 percent more profitable than Fridays for online retailers. Here’s an infographic breaking down where those dollars went (and here’s a link to the original PDF):

The office of the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP), who, it was originally reported, had shut down scam ads on Google, has now shut down scammers on Bing and Yahoo. SIGTARP said a criminal investigation is continuing.

John M. Simpson, director of Consumer Watchdog’s Privacy Project, stated, “Simply put, too many internet companies, including Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, under the guise of defending an open internet, allow and even encourage scam ads from which they make millions of dollars. It’s got to stop, and we are delighted SIGTARP is acting. Criminal charges should be filed against appropriate executives at these enabling companies. Illicit activity won’t end until real people are held accountable.”

SIGTARP is reporting Microsoft has suspended advertising relationships with over 400 advertisers and agents associated with the alleged online mortgage fraud schemes. Last week Google suspended advertising relationships with over 500 advertisers and agents as well.

“All these companies should never have published these ads, but their executives turned a blind eye to the fraudsters for far too long because of the substantial revenue such advertising generates,” said Simpson. “These internet company executives were active enablers of fraud against vulnerable homeowners. They cannot be allowed to benefit from these ill-gotten gains.”

This feature enables marketers and website owners to provide effective privacy regulations on a global basis. In conjunction with the BrightTag ONE platform, the new offering provides a privacy toolkit that enables brands to:

• Offer customers an opt-out choice that completely stops websites’ behavioral advertising partners from receiving data about those customers as they interact with the site

• Honor consumers’ “Do Not Track” browser settings

• Support current and future opt-in/opt-out regulations that vary by country and geography

• Provide connectivity between the brand and its online behavioral advertising partner

“In the current environment, marketers who don’t have firm control over the activities of the companies that interact with consumers visiting their site face significant privacy risks,” said Jules Polonetsky, director of the Future of Privacy Forum. “This challenge only becomes more complex when responsible companies try to respect consumers’ privacy decisions in a complex, interconnected environment. BrightTag’s new offering gives online marketers a flexible and transparent way to comply with various and changing global privacy regulations.”

BrightTag ONE-Click Privacy addresses challenges in existing opt-out methods, allowing brand marketers and site owners to provide a simple one-click option to enforce consumer data collection and privacy preferences. The product transparently displays a real-time list of behavioral advertising partners active on the site.

Mike Sands, BrightTag CEO, commented, “BrightTag ONE-Click Privacy allows our brand partners/clients to have a privacy discussion directly with their customers and preserve the trust brands have built painstakingly through engagement. Our unique BrightTag ONE server-direct integration platform enables BrightTag to let our clients extend an additional layer of consumer privacy protection that goes beyond browser-based solutions. BrightTag ONE-Click Privacy is designed to help our clients comply with privacy requirements that vary market by market.”

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• EdgeRank has released a study finding that, on average, each comment posted to Facebook generates a little over four times the number of clicks as a “like” does. Wednesdays, for one reason or another, generated the highest ratio of clicks over the course of an average week.

• A week ago today, Google announced the arrival of the long-awaited Google+ Pages. The company announced another notching-up in the process today, as social media management companies Buddy Media, HootSuite, Context Optional, Hearsay Social, Involver and Vitrue will now have access to pages. They’ll be working with a limited number of clients, and the features available to those companies will be limited at the moment as well, in a Google-sanctioned test drive, presumably to perfect the pages feature before turning loose the public at large.

• In other Google news, if you don’t want your AP saved in Google’s Location Server (the database of global access points that the company says is used not to identify, but to locate users of mobile devices), you can opt out now, simply by adding “_nomap” to the end of your mobile SSID. It’s a gesture of transparency worth noting in light of Google’s recent grapplings with European authorities regarding privacy laws.

Tags, cookies, data collection and sharing are at the heart of the privacy problem. The solution? Use a system that allows advertisers and agencies to control all data-driven vendors in one place, thereby ensuring that best practices are met across the board.

Equally critical is to use a vendor-agnostic platform. That way, should any one vendor — retargeting, social widgets, data collection, tracking, affiliates, analytics — misbehave or fall afoul of policies outlined by the client, it won’t matter. A client should be empowered to remove or replace errant vendors instantaneously with another vendor with no interruption to day-to-day business. This is specifically important for those who recommend vendors to clients.

Implementing tags through a proper tag management system provides marketers with the flexibility to live up to the tracking opt-out promises that various laws and regulations around the world require. The optimal approach enables site visitors to actively opt-out of being tracked by certain types of tags — and allows the marketer to decide, for each of its partner/vendor tags, whether they are of a type that the opt-out should be applied to.

For example, a marketer may decide to activate the opt-out for third party behavioral targeting tags, and cease to deliver those particular tags to opted-out visitors, but to continue serving tags for their first party site analytics system.

Various “do-not-track”-style legislation is pending both in the United States and in Europe, and there are several online industry self-regulation best practice compliance initiatives on-going. While no one can say for certain exactly what new data tracking laws and mechanisms will emerge, it’s more than safe to assume that legislation will be introduced that allows consumers to universally opt-out of tracking by marketers and e-commerce sites.

At TagMan, we’ve baked do-not-track compliance directly into our tag management solution. This has been done in a way that not only works now, but has inherent flexibility to enable compliance with future regulations or legislation.

TagMan has a uniquely powerful position within the “stack” of data collection and tracking devices that operate on our clients’ websites. We are, effectively, a single layer that sits between the Internet user’s browser and the tags and cookies that are “fired” and “dropped” when the user visits a website running our system. This enables us to help manage when and how that user will be tracked by the other systems operating on the website, according to the wishes of the user and of the site owner.

We’ve always allowed users to actively opt-out of being tracked by our company, and at the same time to also opt-out of being served whichever tags our clients may determine to be appropriate to honor this opt-out. As well as the opt-out feature a user may directly select by clicking a link on our clients’ websites or at TagMan.com, we of course engage the opt-out for any user who has the “do-not-track” option set in their web browser. This feature is a part of most of the latest generation browsers, and is certainly a technical key component for the online marketing industry seeking to comply with various cookie-tracking rules in markets worldwide.

In other words, our client gets to decide, on a case-by-case basis, which of their tags to allow their site visitors to opt-out from receiving. The decision lies with the client, their company and audience locations, their industry, their tracking/tagging activities, their interpretation of the relevant laws/regulations/guidelines, and of course their privacy policy and the “contract” they are making with their users when they present the opt-out link to them.

Flash forward to summer 2011 and Soltani’s crew released another report, this time reporting on the same old Flash Cookies practices but also discovering the use of ETags in tracking and respawning. On cue, Scott A. Kamber and his law firm filed a complaint against Hulu and analytics operation KISSmetrics for their respawning games.

Name sound familiar? Scott Kamber was also on the plantiffs’ bench for the suits against Quantcast, Clearspring and Specific. Kamber Law was also responsible for the class action suit against Facebook over its Beacon advertising services that resulted in a $9.6 million settlement. His law firm has filed suits against Interclick for demographic profiling, Google over its toolbar and Apple over mobile apps sending advertisers unique device IDs. He’s all over data privacy issues like butter on toast, the biggest gun in this niche legal town. Ad tech companies have suggested he’s a suit-happy shyster, but his track record isn’t bad  – check out this interview with Kamber by PaidContent.

And Kamber has just filed again — another class action suit (PDF) against KISSmetrics, with codefendants AOL, Spotify, GigaOm, Spokeo, SlideShare, Hasoffers.com, Kongregate.com, Livemocha.com, and even more. Since Soltani whispered (all right, he tweeted) to us the other day that his crew found more than 400 websites with KISSmetrics’ ETag tracking code, Kamber had the pick of the litter when it came to selecting media companies to sue. Other ad tech and analytics companies were also named in the suit, including SEOmoz, Conduit, Flite and visual.ly

Given that Hulu seems to have been caught red-handed using KISSmetrics’ technology to respawn HTTP cookies as well as Flash cookies (the same thing that Quantcast and Clearspring settled over), we’d put our money on a settlement. It’s the other class action suit that should be interesting, since Kamber claims KISSmetrics and defendants’ ”rogue tracking” with ETags and Flash Cookies is a violation of the Electronic Communications Act, the Computer Crime Law of the California Penal Code and the Unfair Competition Law in the California Business and Professional Code, as well as a trespass on personal property.

Respawning is a definite no-no because it goes directly against user wishes, but tracking outside of HTTP cookies is a murky area — perhaps the outcome of this case will present clearer borders.

Presenting the Arguments

At the heart of the suit is the argument that the defendants tracking efforts bypassed browser privacy efforts:

“While it is generally reasonable to expect a website to use cookies for tracking, the Website Defendants and Kissmetrics created numerous, alternative, ‘shadow’ mechanisms for tracking…. Kissmetrics and Website Defendants, however, repurposed the browser cache of Plaintiffs and Class Members’ browser software. They coordinated together so that Kissmetrics stored coded information, specific to each individual Plaintiff and Class Member, in the code used to display the Website Defendants’ web pages. The code had nothing to do with what the user viewed. Like cookies, the code contained tracking information.”

In a response to the Soltani report and the lawsuits, KISSmetrics CEO Hiten Shah claims that his company has never used ETags or other “persistent” technologies for tracking purposes and that its technology cannot track users across multiple websites — it’s just a small company (17 people!). He says that Soltani’s work is full of speculation and distortion of KISSmetrics’ business, while suggesting that Kamber’s firm (which isn’t named) has bullied settlements out of other ad tech companies.

Interestingly, Shah comments: “Mr. Soltani also claims that it is somehow improper to use any technology other than browser cookies to track website activity. In fact, countless online companies, including other major analytics providers, use a variety of different technologies to provide these services, including the persistent technologies Mr. Soltani targets in his paper.”

Alas, Wired’s Ryan Singel says that KISSmetrics reworded the “How It Works” page to make no reference to the ETag technology; according to the site, KISSmetrics only uses first-party cookies. Shah acknowledges that the company has added support for “Do Not Track” technology last weekend.

The Gap Between DNT and OBA Self-Reg

This class-action lawsuit basically sits right in the gap between “Do Not Track” advocacy and industry self-regulation initiatives regarding online behavioral advertising. The idea behind self-regulation is that users can opt out of behavioral targeting through tracking cookies. However, tracking cookies are still used for internal advertiser and publisher metrics, such as frequency capping and understanding visitor behavior. This was something the kids at the Stanford Security Lab didn’t understand when they accused companies signed up with the National Advertising Initiative of tracking despite an opt out.

You can doubt the validity of the claim that advertisers turn off the behavioral targeting functions when users click on the Ad Choice icon and opt out, but industry self-regulation initiatives do have enforcement mechanisms (though how “tough” they are regarding violations isn’t clear — feel free to illuminate the punishment for non-compliance).

Media companies and ad tech service providers claim they want to use Flash Cookies, ETags and other “persistent” tracking tools to have longer-lasting beacons for analytics purposes, not behavioral targeting. They would therefore claim it’s harmless tracking.

The privacy advocate argument is that there’s no nuance — tracking is tracking, and the use of Flash Cookies or ETags is especially heinous because they circumvent user privacy controls.

Who is right, who is wrong? That’s not my place to decide — we’ll see what the legal system says. But the decision will have ramifications for the data privacy landscape, offering a precedent on whether online tracking is a tiered system.