According to those familiar with the negotiations, advertisers and their representative agencies are ultimately aiming to protect their investments in online media. They are questioning whether publishers should have the right to use data from individual campaigns to build collective repositories on consumer behaviour. These profiles can be ammunition for publishers to better sell ads. While this can be good news for advertisers, it can also help improve a competitor's position in the marketplace. Some online publishers are already considering ways to guard their audiences. Forbes.com, for example, uses ad-serving technology from 24/7 Real Media called Open AdStream, which offers controls to block the settings of cookies from third-party ad servers. "Our audience is a very hard-to-reach...executive audience. We've worked hard to build that audience," said Mike Smith, chief technology officer at Forbes.com. "What we want to prevent from happening is allowing third parties to reach our audience after engagement with Forbes.com." He said that although the company doesn't prevent third parties from profiling its customers, it's "in the works." The stakes are high for Internet companies such as Yahoo, which has built an advertising research division called Full Service that relies on ad intelligence to improve the effectiveness of campaigns. A host of other Internet companies, including search site LookSmart, have announced plans to resell research garnered from advertising. Keep off our turf
Web publishers such as Yahoo! are not only concerned with maintaining rights to aggregate data on consumers. They are also newly aware of protecting their turf from third-party ad servers such as DoubleClick or Atlas DMT. Web site owners are worried that such outside parties can collect information about their visitors through the use of cookies. Then by matching that data to consumers' travels throughout the Web, they can sell marketers targeted ads to their audience on other sites. For example, a reader of The New York Times online may visit a host of smaller niche sites. Through an ad network, a marketer may be able to reach that Times visitor through a site that charges much less for advertising. Yahoo! and AOL Time Warner declined to comment for this story. In contrast, advertisers are worried that their campaign data can be pooled into research at sites such as Yahoo! and can be used to bolster rivals' marketing. For example, if a computer maker invested heavily in product ads with a Web publisher, that site may learn what kind of promotions consumers respond to, then turn around and sell that learning to a rival. As a result, advertisers are suggesting that ad contracts restrict data rights on a case-by-case basis. They are also talking about whether commissions are appropriate if Web publishers gain financially from their campaign intelligence. For its part, the IAB said that it is close to buttoning up its new terms and conditions. The organisation issued its first-ever guidelines last March, but it has been working for some time to update the standards. The terms and conditions cover such issues as advertising placement and positioning, payment liability, cancellation policies, and privacy. The IAB's chief executive, Greg Stuart, said he could not comment on the IAB's private talks, but he emphasized the importance of data in future interactive mediums. "One of the Internet's special sauces is data," Stuart said. "Interactive is a big deal going forward because of the data...Internet measurement is already better than any other medium. "It will certainly be increasingly valuable to the entire advertising and marketing world because it's the basis to measure return on investment. The better the data the better the return-on-investment analysis."
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