Russell Glass, CEO of Bizo.com aspires to "provide anonymous, safe, transparent targeting for every ad served on the web." Well I guess we all should have lofty goals. But Russ is one of the few people talking about transparency in online advertising; specifically the idea that you ought to know not only where the ads you see came from but why you were served those particular ads.
It's a huge idea. Imagine how you feel when you go to the mailbox after making a charitable donation only to find that every charity in the same category is in hot pursuit. You grimace and figure that the hospital must have sold their list. But its still an inference and an annoyance.
Russ proposes to put an icon on every ad that signals info about its origin and your relationship to the ad is buried inside. Clicking on the icon essentially reads and displays the data on the targeting cookie. By click #2, you see that the ad came from BusinessWeek or DoubleClick and it was aimed at a C level manufacturing guy in NYC. Will this knowledge make you more likely to respond? Nobody knows. Will it illuminate who is trying to reach you and why? Undoubtedly.
This idea will thrill privacy nuts, soothe paranoids and fuel anti-advertising types. It will also make advertisers in search of tighter targeting parameters happy. But it will probably never much matter to the vast majority of B2B targets Bizo engages who don't currently think this is a problem.
Nonetheless knowing this information, a Netzien could fix wrong information or add new information to the cookie; thereby opting-in for more relevant ads or opting-out of advertising. The truly enlightened will feel much better about online advertising. Russ, who leads a business spun off by ZoomInfo 18 months ago, thinks that web surfers will have a "high degree of interaction" with transparent ads. He's aiming for 100% transparency and leveraging this idea to differentiate Bizo.com from other ad networks.
In his mind, transparency is virtually a right. "If you use data to target ads," he argues "then your target customer should know about it, know what information you have about him or her, have the right to edit the information and the right to opt in or out."
Consider several interesting ramifications and possibilities from transparent ads:
1. Customers Will Get a Voice. If you know who's after you; you can run toward or away from them. Knowing who is targeting you can drive closer customer engagement or prompt privacy and customer service complaints. Either way it moves advertising from passive serving to active customer interaction.
2. Competitive Analysis is Easier. Rather than pay ComScore zillions to track competitive spending, placement and creative, you simply read the ads served to sample customers in your target set. After a dozen ads, you'll have a pretty fair understanding of what the bad guys are up to.
3. Everything Will Feel Kosher. There's something liberating and beautiful about openness. Having everything above board will satisfy privacy advocates, expose more of the strategy behind advertising and possibly improve the ad industry's image. Even for the uninvolved and ambivalent, knowing who's advertising and why they're targeting you eliminates a few levels of paranoia and reminds people of the commercial relationships that underlie most of the economy.
4. Online Ads Will be More Like Online Dating. In practice, the two are hardy separable, but transparency will make it clear who likes you and who wants to be your new best friend. Consumers will actually have the choice of saying "Yes" or "No" to advertisers. This will force better creative targeting, more message testing and more CRM-type thinking. Today advertisers' desires are unknown to their target customers. In a transparent world, customers read, react and respond on equal footing.
5. Ads Will Work Better. Transparency will eliminate waste, filter out the troublemakers, improve targeting and ultimately yield a better ROI. In theory it will reduce noise in the system which will enhance signal reception.
