An international coalition, led by Norwegian consumer organisation NCC, wants to limit the use of personal data for online advertising. This would have considerable consequences for the marketing of many retailers and brands.
Everyone under commercial control
Nowadays, online advertising is highly personalised: companies will do everything they can to get their ads to the right places, to the right people at the right time. This is possible now more than ever, thanks to the data traces consumers leave just about everywhere.
However, in an open letter, several international consumer associations, academics and organisations denounce what they call extensive commercial surveillance. “To individualise and personalise digital advertising, we have seen the rise of a surveillance economy where everything consumers do, both online and offline, is tracked, aggregated and shared”, they wrote. It is virtually impossible not to be tracked, profiled and targeted online.
However, the majority of consumers do not want to be tracked at all, according to a survey by the Norwegian Consumers’ Association NCC. Only one in ten Norwegians have a positive attitude towards commercial players who collect personal information about them online. Just one in five finds advertisements based on personal information acceptable, according to a survey.
The results are a stark contrast to a survey by IAB Europe, the European trade association for digital advertising. According to them, three quarters of Europeans would prefer the internet as it is today to the internet without targeted advertising.
Back to traditional advertising?
The people behind the letter are calling for a ban in both the United States and Europe. It is the ideal moment for this because within the European Union talks are currently taking place concerning the Digital Services Act, a legal framework for electronic commerce and, therefore, also for online advertising. In the US, too, federal privacy legislation is being considered.
The letter’s authors are not only talking about data bought and sold by third parties, such as the data of who opens an online newspaper in order to swiftly place a suitable banner next to it, but also denounce first-party data use by Google or Facebook. Targeting consumers based on personal data will always be dangerous and intrusive, according to the NCC.
As alternatives, the NCC suggests a return to traditional ‘contextual’ advertising, as it existed in the pre-data era. For example, next to an article on healthy food in the newspaper, there could again be food advertisements or ads sold based on the website’s target audience. Another possibility would be to let consumers decide what kind of advertisements they wish to see, based on their personal preferences and interests.
Google says goodbye to cookies
For retailers and brands, such a ban would have a tremendous impact: especially for e-commerce players, targeted and personalised online ads are the foundation of their marketing strategy. Think of the banners from Zalando or Overstock that follow internet users everywhere. But also, for example, Carrefour just announced a large-scale data project to be able to offer better-personalised ads to suppliers.
In 2023, Google itself will end allowing ‘tracking cookies’, with which the online behaviour of consumers can be followed closely. In its browser, Google Chrome, a so-called ‘privacy sandbox’ will be introduced, which disturbs the effect of external cookies. Instead of advertising to (anonymised) individual users, Google wants companies to advertise to groups of consumers with similar online behaviour. The changeover has been delayed, however, as the end of cookies was initially planned for 2022.
