AOP speaker interview: Nick Barnett, Phorm

Q. What are the main barriers to entry for publishers when adopting behavioral targeting? Are the costs coming down?

There are no significant barriers to entry today –  as a publisher (or as an advertiser) it’s really easy to start using behavioural advertising and start increasing your ad-yields. The key issues for publishers (and advertisers) to date have been that the scale of users and therefore impact of results is too small to justify the effort involved. Typically ad-serving reach hasn’t been a major issue, but behavioural reach (ie the ability to identify user interests across a scale audience) has been lacking. We are now seeing solutions coming to market that address these issues and as we take steps to increase the volume of users benefiting from behavioural advertising, and improve the quality of underlying data that drives the results we fully expect the results to improve dramatically, creating benefits for publishers, advertisers and consumers alike. 

Q. What steps are being taken to enhance the user experience of behavioral targeting?

By definition, behavioural advertising improves the customer experience of using the internet. Customers don’t see any more ads, but a proportion of ads they do see are more relevant to their interests, ie they get access to campaigns/offers/products they may have otherwise never seen.

We believe that customers should always be in control of the experience. In Phorm’s Open Internet Exchange (OIX) we will provide clear and transparent notice about the service and customer will be able to switch it off or on at any time they choose. Our ad targeting technology has been built to set superior standards of privacy. We don’t know who you are, we don’t know where you have been and participation is always a clear choice

Q. To what extent is the vendor responsible for ensuring a users’ privacy isn’t being breached when using behavioral targeting?

Clearly, any vendor must ensure that any targeting solution they offer, whether behavioural or otherwise, doesn’t breach any consumer privacy standards. It is up to the vendor to ensure its partners (publishers/networks, agencies/advertisers, ISPs) and consumers are fully aware of this, and that the vendor takes steps to ensure that, at no point, consumer privacy is breached.

*Q. Is there a best practice standard for behavioral targeting firms?

There are no clearly defined industry standards today for behavioural targeting firms. However, many of us are working closely with the IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) who have established a Behavioural Targeting Task Force which is in the process of defining a set of best practices for us all.

Q. What steps has Phorm taken to address privacy concerns?

Phorm’s whole approach and entire system has been developed, from the ground up, with privacy in mind

·         We don’t know who you are your are anonymous to the system and we don’t store any personally identifiable information

·         We don’t know where you’ve been – we don’t store browsing histories

·         Participation is always a choice

We firmly believe that we’re setting superior standards in online privacy and choice

Q. What do you think the future holds for behavioral targeting? What would you like to see?

We clearly believe that behavioural targeting has a very exciting future and offers significant improvements in efficiency and ROI for agencies, significant improvements in yields for publishers and a significant improvement in the customer experience of using the internet for consumers. With the advent of Phorm’s OIX technology, advertisers and publishers can, for the first time, take real advantage of the true benefits behavioural targeting can offer - true granularity of targeting, mass reach, real-time behaviour.

Behavioural targeting offers display advertising a significant opportunity to increase revenues and market share by taking search-style granularity and targeting ability and applying it to display.

Nick will be speaking at the AOP Behavioural Targeting Forum on Wednesday 30^th July 2008, for more information, click here.