Nick Martin's Marketing Pages

Google grips its social tiger firmly by the tail

Google+, the search giant's new social sharing project, looks like it's going to be a blockbuster.

In beta phase by invitation only or by request from the Google+ page, beta user numbers shot up to 10M before Google temporarily closed the platform to new requestors.  

Most beta users have GMail accounts, a rich future seam of (currently) 170M consumers worldwide.

Econsultancy report that several thousands brands are said to be extremely keen to get involved early.   

There are two aspects of Google+ that excites me as a marketer:

• Google Circles enables the user to categorise groups of connections or friends according to interests. This compartmentalisation makes sense from the user perspective and may encourage more mature consumer groups to use social media in a more widespread sense. From a brand marketing perspective, it permits a higher degree of segmentation and targeting, should make it easier to tap into the long tail.

• Google+ takes an important step to evaluating the relative behavioural strength of social networks. Just because you're highly connected on Facebook doesn't mean that you're friends with all of them, or that they have any influence over the things you decide to do or buy.  Functionality within Google+  opens up possibilities to sift and separate the relevant from the irrelevant. An individual may have lots of apparent connections, but how many of them have significance? 

Understanding these nuances should help brands determine who is influential within groups and what recommendation strategies are likely to be most powerful in kicking off purchasing journeys.

July is shaping up to be a good month for Google. On the back of tremendous quarterly results showing a 36% jump in earnings, could Google+ represent a major new marketing channel, where the undoubted power of trusted recommendation takes a further significant step in capturing a material slice of online marketing spend? 

 

Dutch Require Consumer Consent to Put Cookies on PC - WSJ.com

The Dutch Parliament passed a law Wednesday that forces websites to get explicit consumer consent before they place small text files known as cookies on a computer. The new law was opposed by the online-advertising industry, which fears the legislation will pave the way for similar moves across Europe.

EU officials have said they probably won't challenge the Dutch law, indicating it is unlikely to be overturned and suggesting that industry may have a bigger fight on its hands than it feared.

In November 2010, the EU passed a directive requiring online advertisers to get "informed consent" from users before placing cookies on their computers. Under EU treaty law, countries then had until May to write that rule into their national legislation, but there has been some confusion about exactly how the language had to be interpreted.

"The Dutch law is an important case study because it's such a big market," said Kimon Zorbas, vice president of the Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe, which represents online advertisers. "We would expect companies from our sector to either move their operations to neighboring countries or lose their clients to companies located elsewhere in Europe."

Online advertisers are up in arms. An increasing number of ad campaigns are dependent on cookies, which store data on users and their viewing habits, and the business model could be crippled, they say. "Fifty percent of campaigns in euro volumes might be shut down," said Stephan Noller, chief executive of nugg.ad, an online-advertising consulting company.

In the Netherlands, publishing companies lobbied furiously against the bill, arguing the law exceeds the EU mandate because it includes a provision that websites must prove they have received permission from users to place cookies on their machines. One news portal called nu.nl said it might disappear entirely.

EU regulators will now "carefully assess the Dutch legislation to verify its compliance with the e-privacy directive," said Jonathan Todd, a spokesman for Neelie Kroes, the EU's commissioner for the digital agenda. EU officials in Ms. Kroes's cabinet say they believe the Dutch law is in the spirit of the EU requirement for "informed consent."

That could be bad news for the online-ad industry, because the EU is committed to harmonizing rules. "We all stand to lose from fragmented rules," said Ms. Kroes, speaking Wednesday afternoon in Brussels at a conference on online legal issues.

via online.wsj.com

With the highest broadband penetration in Europe, marketing practise and spend that has migrated substantially online, this news reported today in WSJ, threatens online behavioural advertising in the Netherlands, and might prove to be a key case point of influence for Eastern and Southern EU States in their own local interpretations of the EU Directive, whilst expanding the market opportunity for competing marketing methods that can target and personalise in real-time. Today the Country of Origin principles that exist within the EU permit multinational organisations to move their operations when local laws are not to their taste; but what happens if and when this basic principle is changed to require conformance to Country of Destination laws?

PETs to the rescue of OBA?

Industry presented plans for self regulation to the European Commission last month , following a public statement by Commissioner Neelie Kroes, in which she established clear benchmarks that a self-regulatory instrument would need to meet in order to be deemed acceptable and sufficient by the Commission.

These are:

1. Effective transparency (paramount). This means that users should be provided with clear notice about any targeting activity that is taking place.

2. Consent, i.e. an appropriate form of affirmation on the part of the user that he or she accepts to be subject to targeting.

3. A user-friendly solution, possibly based on browser (or another application) settings. Obviously we want to avoid solutions which would have a negative impact on the user experience. On that basis it would be prudent to avoid options such as recurring pop-up windows. On the other hand, it will not be sufficient to bury the necessary information deep in a website’s privacy policies. We need to find a middle way.

On a related note, I would expect from you a clear condemnation of illegal practices which are unfortunately still taking place, such as ‘re-spawning’ of standard HTTP cookies against the explicit wishes of users.

4. Effective enforcement. It is essential that any self-regulation system includes clear and simple complaint handling, reliable third-party compliance auditing and effective sanctioning mechanisms. If there is no way to detect breaches and enforce sanctions against those who break the rules, then self-regulation will not only be a fiction, it will be a failure. Besides, a system of reliable third party compliance auditing should be in place.

During the round table, Robert Madelin, Director General of DG INFSO, clarified that the Commission position is in favor of an opt-out approach for cookies. He also clearly stated that profiling is an appropriate tool for marketing purposes and that its use both online and offline needs no distinction. Finally, the Commission stated its interest to find the right balance between data protection and the legitimate interest of data processing for a balanced economy. 

This is good news, and takes us back to the fundamentals of the European Data Protection Principles. Those principles (subject to a EU statutory refresh of the legislation) should be applicable irrespective of channel or marketing application. 

Enter stage right, Microsoft announced its plans to roll out the functionality to block all online tracking as part of its new Internet Explorer 9 (IE9). This announcement, whereby the new IE9 will feature an "opt-in mechanism" and "tracking protection lists", comes only days after the publication of a report on the protection of online privacy by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC). In its report the FTC prominently calls for industry to provide internet users with a functionality to block online tracking activities, often referred to as a "do-not-track list" (similar to a do-not-call register).

Mozilla are also known to be working on a do not track technology by 'cloaking' the user's internet activity, though they are citing technological difficulties.

In responding to the latest FTC concerns that current tools for blocking online tracking are blunt instruments, Microsoft may nonetheless have gone too far in proposing 'opt-in' for behavioural tracking, (depending on how the technology worked in practise and what they mean by opt in). 

Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704594804575648670826747094.html#ixzz1AoD0nIJm

UK freezes in face of new ePrivacy Directive: Respond to the Consultation

The UK Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) has just published a public consultation on the implementation of the revised EU Telecoms Package. 

The Telecoms Package, a set of five directives that regulate the electronic communications sector in the European Union, contains the so-called e-Privacy Directive. As part of the review, the existing opt-out rule for the use of browser cookies, which are widely used to deliver targeted marketing messages on the internet, was replaced by a requirement to collect the consumers' "consent". This ambiguous wording leaves it up to national governments to clarify whether they interpret "consent" to mean "prior opt-in consent", or whether they prefer to stick with the existing "implicit opt-out consent" rule.

BIS proposes to implement the relevant parts of the Directive by copying the exact wording into the new, national law - without clarifying whether "consent" is to be interpreted as an opt-in or opt-out approach. In practice, this would mean that the exact meaning of "consent" is to be interpreted by the data protection regulator, the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).

According to Outlaw.com, BIS recognises the importance of cookies (AKA targeting) to make the Internet work and deliver value to users:

 "The internet as we know it today would be impossible without the use of […] cookies," says BIS. "Many of the most popular websites and services would be unusable or severely restricted and so it is important that this provision is not implemented in a way which would damage the experience of UK Internet users or place a burden on UK and EU companies that use the web."

"The Directive acknowledges this by saying that consent is not required when the cookie is strictly necessary to deliver a service which has been explicitly requested by the user," it says.

BIS goes on to say that since the range of uses where a cookie is strictly necessary to deliver a service online are impossible to define due to the fast moving nature of the Internet, and therefore it will be down to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) to interpret the Directive in practise.

The risk, and likely outcome of this tactic, is that any degree of certainty around the use of 3rd party cookies for online targeted advertising, or online behavioural advertising, gets kicked into the long grass until next spring 2011 by which time the ICO will be forced one way or another to declare its hand. 

In the meantime, we await the moment that some EU member states will no doubt feel compelled to be more forthcoming - and give their view on what constitutes personal data; the weight they will give to Recital 66 (non binding guidance that suggests browser settings could constitute an affirmative consent mechanism), and illuminating examples of application areas that are to be construed to need cookies to deliver a service.

Imagine a scenario where every member state interprets the e-Privacy Directive differently. Now combine that with a further scenario which obliges business to apply country of destination laws to their online activities (instead of country of origin laws) and you end up in with an almightly mess. This, I'm afraid to say, is exactly the scenario we are about to face in reality.

That's why it's important to participate in BIS's Consultation, specifically responding to the impact assessment questions.

BIS Consultation is open until December 3rd. You can respond with your point of view and any evidence via this link or directly online via BIS's Survey Monkey. Don't just listen to the debate, submit your view to the UK Government and help legislators understand the impact of a literal implementation of the ePrivacy Directive.