Here’s what AOL says it can do for marketers who want to target users [excerpt]:
You wouldn’t order pizza from a bank. So why would you try to sell a luxury travel package to a high school student?…
Behavioral targeting
Target consumers based on what they read – and where they click.
Audience behaviors:Hit your audience sweet spot. AOL Advertising observes consumer behavior (anonymously) across thousands of websites, then organizes people into groups based on their interests. Choose from over 350 pre-packaged audiences…With our LeadBack suite, you can retarget consumers who have… – Visited your website (Advertiser LeadBack)
– Seen or clicked on your ad creative (Creative LeadBack)
– Visited a webpage that you’re sponsoring (Sponsorship LeadBack)
– NOT visited your website – a great way to reach more unique visitors (Reverse LeadBack)…Demographic/Household:Target individuals, households or sites based on user registration data.
– Survey-Based: Target users based on their responses to consumer survey questions (e.g., MRI).
– Purchase-Based:Target users based on products they’ve purchased…Look-Alike Modeling: Target users who exhibit similar characteristics to your customers (or other valuable audiences).
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and AOL Advertising also says that “we live and breathe data…AOL’s new content management system, Seed, uses advanced algorithms to measure consumer demand and determine the next hot topics.”
At a discussion on social media in London last week on “Understanding Social Graph Optimisation,” [meaning how to better target and monetize users], one of the topics was whether users should be financially compensated when their data is harvested for commercial exploit (such as for marketing). What did Facebook’s executive on the panel say? According to one post covering the event, ” Trevor Johnson, Head of Strategy and Planning, EMEA at Facebook made it clear that Facebook users get enough value back simply from the user experience gained by being on Facebook. He described how users gain “egotistical value”.
In a recent post, Microsoft extolled the virtues of using its behavioral targeting service profiling mobile phone users. It explained that “campaigns can target individuals based on their online behaviour, including the sites that they visit, the actions they take and the terms they enter into search engines. In the US behavioural targeting on mobiles has already delivered increases in click-through rate of 215% for the fashion and beauty sector, 97% for airlines and 76% for auto advertisers.”
Google and other major companies want help from the NSA to help it better defend against cyberattacks and commercial spying. But is also illustrates a real problem: companies such as Google that gather extensive information on citizens everywhere, including in the US, are partnering with government agencies that have engaged in domestic spying. Google really needs to create something more than a “Chinese wall” between itself and governments–including the US. Another real problem is Google is working to curry favor with the NSA, CIA, DoD and others in order to sell its services and make greater profits. Take a look at the current job openings at Google’s DC office focused on selling its services to both the intelligence community and Department of Defense. It raises questions about the dimensions of its relationship with NSA, given that they are also looking to develop marketing opportunities.
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excerpt: Enterprise Federal Inside Sales Representative for Intelligence Community - Washington D.C.
This position is based in Washington D.C.
The area: Enterprise
The Enterprise team focuses on integrating Google’s products and services into small and large businesses, educational institutions and government agencies. Consisting of high-achieving engineering, sales and marketing professionals, we work with a vast array of partners and customers to advance the company’s mission of organizing the world’s information to make it universally accessible and useful.
The role: Enterprise Federal Inside Sales Representative for Intelligence Community
This position is responsible for selling Google Enterprise Solutions including the Google search appliance and Geospatial products, including Google Earth and Google Maps to Federal Clients. The Google Search Appliance is a hardware and software product designed to offer large businesses the productivity enhancing power of Google search.
You must be comfortable making dozens of cold calls a day, working closely with the Federal Enterprise Sales Managers to generate and close sales to the Intelligence Community. [our bold]. Candidates must have demonstrated experience prospecting and growing an account list, as well as a successful track record of closing sales to the Federal government. Candidates should be willing to do some travel, to attend and work tradeshows and conferences, as well as to attend customer meetings.
Responsibilities:
Be responsible for the entire sales process from Prospecting to Close.
Lead Generation/outbound calling and warm lead follow up.
Understand Customer Needs and requirements.
Present and articulate advanced product features and benefits of Google Enterprise solutions. Provide on-line demonstrations.
Close Sales and achieve sales quotas. Be able to sell and differentiate in a competitive environment.
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Enterprise Federal, DOD Sales Manager - Washington D.C.
This position is located in Washington D.C.
The area: Enterprise
As the emerging leader in cloud computing, Google’s Enterprise division delivers cloud services and other IT products to small and large businesses, educational institutions and government agencies. Our team of high-achieving engineers, product managers, and sales and marketing professionals works with a vast array of partners and customers to advance the company’s mission to organize the world’s information to make it universally accessible and useful. The Enterprise team is among a handful of rapidly emerging new businesses that are becoming front-and-center for Google as it enters its second decade as a company.
The role: Enterprise Federal, DOD Sales Manager
In this position, you will generate and close sales of the Google Search Appliance and Google Geospatial products among U.S. Dept. of Defense government agencies. The main duties of this position will include making cold calls on new prospects and following up on marketing and sales leads. You will be delivering quarterly quotas and building an existing region into a more fruitful territory. Most importantly, you will be developing business strategies to capture long term programs and opportunities.
Responsibilities:
Achieve annual sales quota, with emphasis on strong quarterly attainment.
Build business strategy to generate short and long-term opportunities for all Google Enterprise products.
Increase awareness of Google Federal and strengthen customer relationships in the Department of Defense.
Develop current and new Google partners focused on DoD customers.
Provide accurate quarterly sales projections on a weekly basis and keep thorough records of customer interactions.
The Enterprise team focuses on integrating Google’s products and services into small and large businesses, educational institutions and government agencies. Consisting of high-achieving engineering, sales and marketing professionals, we work with a vast array of partners and customers to advance the company’s mission of organizing the world’s information to make it universally accessible and useful.
The role: Federal/Intelligence Community Account Manager, Enterprise
In this position, you will generate and close sales of the Google Search Appliance and Google Geospatial products among Intelligence community accounts. The main duties of this position include making cold calls on new prospects and following up on marketing and sales leads. You will be delivering quarterly quotas and building an existing region into a more fruitful territory. Most importantly, you will be developing business strategy to capture long term programs and opportunities.
Responsibilities:
Achieve quarterly sales quotas.
Generate and qualify all leads and sales opportunities.
Make outbound calls to targeted customers.
Respond to inbound inquiries from marketing and lead generation programs.
Serve as primary customer contact during bid submission, pilot test, legal review, and procurement.
We believe academics should pursue research that is independent–and not funded by vested interests. Here are some of the academics that just received “Google Focused Research Awards.“ The check also comes with a further relationship with Google [”These unrestricted grants are for two to three years, and the recipients will have the advantage of access to Google tools, technologies, and expertise.]
Privacy:
Ed Felten, Princeton
Lorrie Cranor, Alessandro Acquisti and Norman Sadeh, Carnegie Mellon University
Ryan Calo, Stanford CIS
Andy Hopper, Cambridge University Computing Laboratory
and: Use of mobile phones as data collection devices for public health and environment monitoring: Gaetano Borriello, University of Washington and Deborah Estrin, UCLA
We asked both Microsoft and Google, which serve on the executive committee of the Interactive Ad Bureau [IAB] trade lobbying group, whether they supported its recent letter opposing congressional action to strengthen the FTC. The letter was signed by IAB and other marketing and advertising organizations. Microsoft has just replied. We are glad they aren’t in lock-step with the ever so transparent–and terrified of consumer protection policy–IAB. Here’s what they emailed me today:
Jeff,
Thank you for your inquiry.
As a company, Microsoft has not taken a position on the Consumer Protection Financial Agency bill. As a whole, the bill is directed at other industry sectors. Nor has Microsoft taken a position on the expansion of the Federal Trade Commission’s regulatory authority as proposed in that legislation.
Microsoft has supported the expansion of FTC authority, including in our longtime support for comprehensive federal privacy legislation and in a recent legislative proposal on protecting consumers related to cloud computing, where we said that the FTC should play a key role. In the current environment, there ought to be better alternatives to guide the marketplace than de facto rulemaking through enforcement activity.
It is our view that there is merit to having FTC rulemaking authority mirror that of other agencies — we favor increased certainty and the ability for comment on proposed rules that will impact our industry. At the same time, the reasons the FTC’s existing mechanisms were put in place (as articulated in the industry letter you cited) should not be ignored. Perhaps there is room for a balanced approach.
We understand that the status of the financial reform bill may be uncertain, at least the status of the relevant provision in the Senate version of that legislation.
We are open to discussing these issues further with you and other interested stakeholders.
The top execs at Facebook claim that the social network giant ad targeting apparatus is well understood by its users, and that they have secured their consent. But I suggest few users understand the complexities of Facebook’s viral marketing and tracking system, let alone the new Facebook/Nielsen “Brandlift” initiative designed to demonstrate Facebook can deliver big for the biggest brands. According to New Media Age: More than 70 studies have been done in the US in the FMCG, retail, media and entertainment, telecoms, financial and automotive sectors. Nielsen and Facebook said 97% of these found a significant lift in at least one brand metric, while 85% reported an increase in at least two. “Starbucks is a heavy advertiser on Facebook,” said [Trevor Johnson, head of strategy and planning EMEA at Facebook] Johnson. “We ran a campaign to get people to buy a muffin on a certain day and measured a 94% uplift in purchase intent.”…Facebook will apply the demographic data it already collects from its users to deliver results tailored to brands’ needs.
Statement of Jeff Chester, executive director, Center for Digital Democracy, Washington, D.C. www.democraticmedia.org
A new self-regulatory scheme designed to head-off meaningful consumer privacy rules by Congress and the Federal Trade Commission is to be released today, according to several reports. In addition, the Council of Better Business Bureaus has issued a RFP asking for technology solutions to bolster its online advertising self-regulatory approach.
These efforts are trying to place a flimsy band-aid over a gushing consumer data privacy wound. Disclosure and more opportunities to opt-out is an online ad industry copout. Interactive marketers have created a data collection monster. What’s needed are Fair Information Principles for the digital age, enforced by regulators, which dramatically minimize how much data is collected, stored, sold and resold–and limit how it can be used. Instead we get fancy package relabeling fashioned by Madison Avenue.
Consumers face a bewildering, far-reaching, and complex system created by the online ad business that collects and harvests their information—including financial, health, and other personal details—that is non-transparent and unaccountable. These new self-regulatory initiatives are disingenuous, because they don’t address the real problem: that through a range of largely stealth online marketing techniques, digital media has been designed to ensure that consumers provide reams of their personal data.
As the FTC holds its second privacy hearing this Thursday, and as the House Commerce Committee finalizes its proposed legislation, policymakers must ask themselves: how can we do a better job protecting consumers–instead of enabling the same kind of self-regulatory approach that helped bring our economy to the brink of disaster. Consumers and lawmakers should especially be concerned that the approach backed by Truste and Future of Privacy Forum will permit monopolistic broadband Internet Service Providers, such as Comcast and AT&T, to gather even more personal information on their subscribers.
The American Civil Liberties Union, Center for Digital Democracy, Consumer Action, Consumer Federation of America, Consumer Watchdog, Privacy Lives, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, Privacy Times, and U.S. PIRG told the FCC in a filing 22 January 2010 that: “There are significant problems concerning the collection and use of personal data by companies, especially sensitive data and children’s data; (2) The FCC should not rely on industry self-regulatory models because they do not adequately protect consumer privacy; and (3) The principles and standards that should serve as the foundation of consumer privacy protection should be the Fair Information Practices, especially as they are implemented in the OECD Guidelines on data privacy… The FCC should consider all avenues it may use to protect consumers, including exercising its ancillary jurisdiction to address broadband privacy issues, and working with Congress and the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”), which has substantial expertise in consumer privacy protection.”
Both Google and Microsoft serve on the executive committee of the Interactive Ad Bureau, a trade association fighting against consumer privacy proposals in Congress and the FTC. The IAB just sent a letter signed by other ad and marketing industry lobbyists opposing Obama and congressional proposals to expand the ability of the FTC to better protect consumers. My CDD just sent emails to officials at both Google and Microsoft asking them to clarify where they stand on the IAB’s letter [see below]. Do our two leading online marketing leaders support financial and regulatory reform, including protecting privacy? Or does the IAB letter–and Google and Microsoft’s own role helping govern that trade lobby group–really reflect their own position against better consumer protection? Not coincidently, the IAB’s PAC has expanded its PAC contribution giving to congress.
Why does the IAB and other ad groups want to scuttle a more capable FTC? Think online financial products, including mortgages, pharmaceutical operated social networks, digital ads targeting teens fueling the youth obesity crisis, ads created by brain research to influence our subconscious minds, a mobile marketing system that targets us because it knows our location, interests and behavior. The IAB is terrified that a responsible consumer protection agency will not only peek under the ‘digital hood,’ as the Obama FTC is currently doing. But actually propose policies and bring cases that rein in irresponsible and harmful business practices. So Microsoft and Google: who are with? Consumers or the special interest advertising lobby?
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letter to Google: 22 January 2010
Dear Pablo, Jane, Peter and Alan:
As you may know, the Interactive Advertising Bureau recently sent a letter to Congress, along with other ad related groups, opposing the expansion of FTC regulatory authority as proposed in the Consumer Financial Protection Agency bill and related reauthorization [http://www.clickz.com/3636212].
Google serves on the executive committee of the IAB’s board. For the record, does Google support IAB’s stance that, as news reports say, if the FTC is given additional enforcement and penalty-making authority, “the FTC could essentially act as an unelected legislature governing industries and sectors across the economy.”
If Google disagrees with the IAB’s letter, I ask that it make its position public as soon as possible. I also respectfully request Google state its position regarding the Consumer Financial Protection Agency proposal, as well as its position on expanding FTC authority.
Regards,
Jeff Chester
Center for Digital Democracy
www.democraticmedia.org
letter to Microsoft: 22 Jan. 2010:
Dear Mike and Frank:
As you may know, the Interactive Advertising Bureau recently sent a letter to Congress, along with other ad related groups, opposing the expansion of FTC regulatory authority as proposed in the Consumer Financial Protection Agency bill and related reauthorization [http://www.clickz.com/3636212].
Microsoft serves on the executive committee of the IAB’s board. For the record, does Microsoft support IAB’s stance that, as news reports say, if the FTC is given additional enforcement and penalty-making authority, “the FTC could essentially act as an unelected legislature governing industries and sectors across the economy.”
If Microsoft disagrees with the IAB’s letter, I ask that it make its position public as soon as possible. I also respectfully request Microsoft state its position regarding the Consumer Financial Protection Agency proposal, as well as its position on expanding FTC authority.
Regards,
Jeff Chester
Center for Digital Democracy
www.democraticmedia.org