Oh, and we'll throw in thorough demographic profiles of your customers to help you target your campaigns individually. Smith recently demonstrated how sneaky online advertising can be by tracking information sent from his own computer to DoubleClick ad servers. DoubleClick is the largest marketer on the Internet, sending out more than a billion banner ads every day, according to its own press release. Smith found more than a dozen examples where sensitive information that could be tied to him was transmitted to DoubleClick, including his e-mail and mailing address, phone number, names of VHS movies he's interested in buying, details of a plane trip, search phrases used at search engines, and health conditions. It was not even necessary for Smith to click on the banner ads for data to be sent to DoubleClick servers.
Privacy is less a topic unto itself than an aspect of other parts of our lives.
It's easy to ignore because it happens so quietly, and violations are so peripheral. But there's a sea change occurring, and marketers have to get that through their heads. Analyst firm Forrester Research of Framingham, Mass., released a study showing that 53 percent of experienced Net users worry about their privacy and 80 percent of Net users want a policy that prohibits the sale of their data to anyone. Marketers Logic Internet marketers like DoubleClick, AvenueA, and Matchlogic reason that the bloodline of the Net economy, as it is in traditional media, is advertising. Tracking, they contend, allows companies to cut marketing costs and tailor ads and content to our needs.