It’s been almost a year since Microsoft first pledged to default-enable Do Not Track in Internet Explorer 10, setting off an urgent debate about the future of third-party ad tracking which continues to this day. The company has endured attacks both withering (“paternalistic,” said Evidon) and mild (“absolutely not helpful,” offered IAB CEO Randall Rothenberg), imploring a change of heart.
All in vain. Immovable in so many things, Microsoft has proved equally so on the privacy question – which is at the heart of a new consumer marketing campaign that launches today.
“Your Privacy Is Our Priority” features TV, radio, print and online ads that create an emotional connection based on the idea that even big time sharers need some personal privacy.
“Through modern tracking technologies such as cookies and beacons, a site could share your browsing history with others,” says the voiceover in one TV spot. “Microsoft is finding ways to give you more control over things you want private. That’s why we’ve added protection in Internet Explorer and included Do Not Track with the belief that one day it too will give you more control.”
The ad copy would’ve been astonishing three years ago, assuming some end-user knowledge of the mechanics of digital ad tracking. This should put to rest any lingering fantasies that Microsoft may yet reverse course on Do Not Track in IE10.
But Microsoft faces some hurdles in its “privacy by design” push, not least of which is Mozilla’s Firefox browser.
Firefox has long worn the mantle of privacy and recently solidified that position with plans to block third-party cookies by default, regardless of a user’s Do Not Track setting. From a consumer marketing standpoint, Mozilla’s move is essentially an end-run around Microsoft’s progressive stance on Do Not Track, a mechanism that has yet to be defined by stakeholders in the World Wide Web Consortium. What’s going on here? One-upmanship? A anti-tracking arms race? Either way, it’s a cold war indeed for advertisers and long-tail publishers.
Gradually, advertisers are accepting that the world is going to change. At the recent Programmatic I/O conference in San Francisco, many attendees had already begun speculating on how the display ad market would be impacted by a 30% reduction in cookie data. Jointly, Internet Explorer and Firefox command enough market share in the browser space that, were a majority of their cookie data to disappear, the effectiveness of digital advertising would be significantly impacted.
“If browsers block cookies, a significant amount of money will go away” is how AppNexus CEO Brian O’Kelley put it.
“Browsers taking privacy into their own hands is a scary proposition for the space,” agreed Andrew Casale, VP Strategy, Casale Media. But he added, “The fate of ad exchanges is not linked to the cookie though.”
That’s an important point. Even without third-party cookie data, or a viable replacement in the form of device fingerprinting technologies, the ad targeting business will continue. And it will be dominated by very large companies with strong first-party consumer relationships – companies like Google, Yahoo, Aol, Amazon and eBay.
And, oh yeah, Microsoft.
