In Online Privacy Plan, the Opt-Out Question Looms

The new FTC privacy report is certainly worth discussion, but this hit piece smells like a submarine. Had anyone ever heard of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, subtly brought into the article about half way through?

Wow. If your goal is to butcher display advertising, this is how you do it. Retargeting, demographic targeting, and predictive targeting would all be gone -- you'd be left with top shelf inventory sold by salespeople, and remnant inventory at remnant prices. Because every other type of ad tech is really about better calculating the value and hence price of so-called remnant inventory. The same tech is applied to top shelf, but it's not as critical.

On the other hand, this would be an enormous gift to fb -- they'd be the only company standing with demo targeting, because they know your demos since you told them, no history tracking or prediction involved. Similarly an enormous gift to G because I'd bet their adwords / adsense still work pretty well in the absence of any history tracking. Though performance might degrade over time if you can't even tie eg search terms back to downstream conversions -- it's unclear just how far a no tracking proviso goes.

I do think many publishers would be forced to require visitors to allow tracking or pay money. And it would certainly be strange to see the US with more stringent privacy requirements than the EU.

Honestly, if people are concerned with this today, they should disable 3rd party cookies.

Worth noting, this would also be an enormous gift to TV and cable -- if you look at the ratio of ad spend to time, it's enormously skewed in favor of cable/tv at the expense of online. The massive influx of dollars to online advertising is just those ratios rebalancing themselves and people figuring out how to do online advertising properly.

edit:

for tools: my opinions are mine and mine alone. They were neither vetted nor approved by any employer; past, present, or future.

edit2:

I work at an advertising company you've heard of. I'd rather not say the name here not because it's a secret but because I'd rather it not be easily googleable by people who want to make my thoughts out to be representative of anyone else.