The future of privacy and targeted advertising
One of the key themes at our Future of Media Summit 2008 (Silicon Valley July 14 simultaneous with Sydney July 15) will be the future of privacy and targeted advertising. The panel run across the locations will include top executives from Traffic Marketplace, Dataportability.org, Acxiom, and Electronic Frontier Foundation (see event site for details).
This topic is at the heart of the future of media. In a world awash with advertising, shown to a fragmented and increasingly cynical audience keen to avoid it, the value (and thus the price) of advertising is falling. Media proprietors are finding it harder to pay for content production, and in many cases media properties are getting smaller.
Source: eMarketer
What could entirely change the equation is targeted advertising, in which people are shown advertisements that are relevant to their interests, profile, and forthcoming purchases. Often the best way to understand people is to study their behaviors, thus the current emphasis on ‘behavioral targeting’. This would make the advertising far more valuable to advertisers, media companies would make more money, and media consumers should be happy because they get relevant and interesting advertisements.
