Dive Brief:
- Julie Brill, the commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, gave digital advertisers a warning during an Ad Exchanger conference last week about overly aggressive tracking tactics across multiple platforms, and also reaffirmed the FTC’s stance on labeling for sponsored content.
- Brill’s message for marketers addressed consumer privacy concerns as well as placed the blame on the proliferation of ad-blocking tech on intrusive digital advertising.
- Brill challenged marketers, vendors and agencies to create "usable tools" that allow people to manage their online privacy.
Dive Insight:
In the speech Brill said, “Not to find ways to work around consumer choice, but to provide consumers with something they clearly want: to see advertising that respects their privacy and that they can trust. Until that happens, more and more consumers will continue to take advantage of ad-blocking services.”
Outlining the scope of the problem as the FTC sees things, Brill explained they reviewed the top 20 sites spanning five popular consumer categories to see how tracking was being spelled out to consumers in situations where they were being tracked cross-device.
"We are still analyzing the data from our survey, but suffice it to say that we detected the presence of many third parties that engage in cross-device tracking, and yet we didn’t see many disclosures about the practice," she said.
The digital ad industry overall understands the importance of the user experience and how online ads are failing in that regard. According to research from PageFair and Adobe, global use of ad-blocking tech was up 41% as of June 2015, with a projected cost of more than $41 billion this year.
In November, Scott Cunningham, senior VP-technology and ad operations at the IAB, said in a statement, "As technologist, tasked with delivering content and services to users, we lost track of the user experience. We messed up. Looking back now, our scraping of dimes may have cost us dollars in consumer loyalty."