There is one frustration about blogging.  Just when I get rigorous and religious about posting on a planned publication schedule, along comes some piece of news on something I wrote that throws off the production line and causes me to have to interrupt the previously scheduled program and cover it.  Don’t you just love the real-time web?  Yes, in fact, you do.  So I have to be flexible and learn to balance thought with immediacy like a one-legged man standing on a log rolloing down a set of rapids.

So what happened?  Yesterday I published an article about the fact we should be using the term tailored versus targeted advertising and how our research showed that consumers would accept any number of emails as long a they were tailored to their specific concerns.  Today,  the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology at UC Berkeley School of Law ( Berkeley Law ), and the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania published a study that reports that contrary to my research, most adult Americans (66%) do not want online advertisements tailored (yes, they used the right term) by marketers to their specific interests.  Moreover, when Americans are informed of three common ways that marketers gather data about people in order to tailor ads, between 73% and 86% say they would not want such advertising.

The study is called "Americans Reject Tailored Advertising and Three Activities that Enable It.".  What I find most surprising is that the study reports that even 18-24 year old feel this way (55%), which is lower than the average but still higher than I would have thought.  86% of young adults, the study goes on to say, don’t want tailored advertising if it is the result of following the online behavior, and 90% reject it if it results from following their activities offline.

I  went through the study in some detail and, so you know, I am very comfortable with survey methodologies and dealing with the vailidity of statistical results reported.  As part of this, I am always looking for holes in the methodology that could indicate bias.  The Berkeley/U Penn study had a better methodology that two prior surveys on the subject- one from Consumer’s Union conducted in 2008 and one that was conducted in 2008 by TRUSTe and repeated in 2009 by the Privacy Consulting Group.  So I think that, as a general matter, the survey is a better indicator of attitudes than anything done previously.  Having said that, there are two issues I have with the study:

1. Nowhere in the study was it asked whether or not the consumers would put up with tailored advertising if it is what paid for the information they got for free on the web.  This is a critical issue, because at the end of the day, consumers know that they are making this tradeoff – otherwise they would have fled sites with advertising in droves.
    
2. Asking people about what they would do is always dangerous.  There is a famous study by Oral-B (I think) where they put consumers into focus groups and asked them what color of toothbrush they liked most.  Universally, the two top colors reported were red and blue.  The participants were thanked for their participation and told that they could take several Oral-B toothbrushes free from baskets as they walked out the door (and yes, the baskets had a random mix of all colors).  What was chosen most frequently?  Amber.  So you see, what people tell you and how they act can be very different.

I would like to see a follow-on study that actually tests behavior, not responses to questions, especially in light of objection #1.  Having said that, I think the study is definitely on to something and we as an industry need to pay attention before concern turns into anger and the public vocally demands tighter privacy laws from their legislators.

The survey also uncovered other attitudes we need to be concerned about, and I have not seen them reported – so I quote them here for your convenience: 

• Even when they are told that the act of following them on websites will take place anonymously, Americans’ aversion to it remains: 68% “definitely” would not allow it, and 19% would “probably” not allow it.
   
• A majority of Americans also does not want discounts or news fashioned specifically for them, though the percentages are smaller than the proportion rejecting ads.
   
• 69% of American adults feel there should be a law that gives people the right to know everything that a website knows about them.
   
• 92% agree there should be a law that requires “websites and advertising companies to delete all stored information about an individual, if requested to do so.”
   
• 63% believe advertisers should be required by law to immediately delete information about their internet activity.
   
• Americans mistakenly believe that current government laws restrict companies from selling wide-ranging data about them. When asked true-false questions about companies’ rights to share and sell information about their activities online and off, respondents on average answer only 1.5 of 5 online laws and 1.7 of the 4 offline laws correctly because they falsely assume government regulations prohibit the sale of data.
   
• Signaling frustration over privacy issues, Americans are inclined toward strict punishment of information offenders. 70% suggest that a company should be fined more than the maximum amount suggested ($2,500) “if a company purchases or uses someone’s information illegally.”
   
• When asked to choose what, if anything should be a company’s single punishment beyond fines if it “uses a person’s information illegally,” 38% of Americans answer that the company should “fund efforts to help people protect privacy.” But over half of Americans adults are far tougher: 18% choose that the company should “be put out of business” and 35% select that “executives who are responsible should face jail time.

 Well, at least I guess we can put to bed the use of tailored versus targeted (although the survey did interchange them regularly).  See how good I am as an evangelist?