Phorm revisited

Back in January 2008 I met with a couple of guys from the behavioural advertising company Phorm. Shortly after, I wrote a pretty rosy blog post about their proposition.

Positivity about Phorm has been, and continues to be, unpopular, but I haven't worked in display advertising for over a year now (I moved into paid search) and so I hadn't given much thought to my one-sided initial appraisal of Phorm since writing it. (Some will suggest that I didn't give it much thought at the time!) Last week, however, twitterfeed suffered a technical 'hiccup', and all my blog posts were accidentally automatically tweeted about, as if they were new posts. My old post about Phorm was brought back to the attention of my twitter followers, and to that of anyone who was searching twitter for Phorm-related tweets.

As you might imagine, I've since received one or two twitter mentions of criticism. I owe many thanks in particular to @zootcadillac who suggested I revisit the topic, and who sent me a link to this recent (October 2009) report of the All Parliamentary Communications Group.

In the report, evidence submitted by Phorm makes a forceful case for the legality of their system, and for their principles of collecting and storing as little data as possible (much less than Google, for example). Testimony from Gill Davison, on the other hand, suggests that allowing Phorm's proposed interception of ISP data would be akin to allowing one merchant to covertly listen in on a customer's phone call as they ordered services or goods from a competing merchant. Needless to say, as Davison points out, this kind of practice is not permitted in telephone communications.

Imagine a world where covert communications surveillance was allowed, and indeed was commonplace. If one merchant could do it, without repercussion from the consumer, no doubt all would do it; a level playing field would result. Davison's analogy may not be totally damning then.

However, such a world would not be right (and will never exist). It's not the merchant's rights we have to worry about, it's the consumer's. As the All Parliamentary Communications Group concludes, Phorm's proposed system is an opt-out one, and one that cannot be allowed. Worse still for Phorm, they have already conducted secret trials of their technology, where even opting out was not possible. They have been condemned for this, and rightly so.

With cookie-based behavioural targeting systems, the consumer is in complete control of their participation. If they want to disassociate themselves from any targeting profile that has been established, they merely clear their cookies. Moreover, together the IAB and Google provide facilities for the consumer to actively prevent a lot of cookie-based behavioural targeting from operating on their browser.

The interception of ISP data in ad targeting systems would allow the consumer considerably less freedom. As the All Parliamentary Communications Group report points out, Phorm will not be operating in the UK in the foreseeable future.

Take a look at the report and form your own opinion. It addresses a number of hot topics, in addition to behavioural targeting. Thanks again to @zootcadillac for sending me the link.

... but with great power comes great responsibility

It was reported last month that five families at a court in Los Angeles jointly filed a negligence and fraud suit against Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. The company owns the social networking site MySpace, which enabled paedophiles to groom and sexually assault the children of those families.

I first read about this case shortly after writing my last blog entry, and I think it provokes a discussion that follows from it: about the responsibility that new media providers must be willing to accept if they are to protect the health of new media. Empowering media consumers as broadcasters is a dangerous business. By encouraging us all to become personal broadcasters, new media providers are giving each of us the ability to devastate our own privacy in an instant. It's not just Google or News Corporation that we share our information with, so that they can show us adverts; imagine the consequences of accidentally sharing a personal document with the whole internet, instead of a small group of friends. And it's not just issues of privacy that accompany broadcasting. Media providers are also empowering individuals to commit libel and infringe ownership rights.

One immediate response to these concerns would be to say that it's down to individuals and the government to be responsible for these issues of identity and interaction; and it's true, we do have personal responsibility, and of course the government does too. But I think that responsibility for these concerns should lie most of all with media providers, because assuming this responsibility is in their own best interests. Let me explain why:

As I mentioned at the end of my last entry, moral integrity and trustworthiness are likely to become increasingly valuable as a consequence of changes in the branding environment. This somewhat superficial reason isn't the only one though for why media providers will need to be moral, trustworthy, and responsible: they will need to be these things in order for new media, for consumer content creation to work at all.

As they collect and help us to share more information, media providers are demanding more trust of consumers than has ever been asked of them before. In addtion to the information that we actively upload, media providers are in a position to collect information relating to every single discrete action we take in using the internet. When a transfer of information occurs, it's already being recorded:

• where geographically in the world the consumer is; and more specifically, what internet service provider he or she is using. This is to become increasingly important when, as with Virgin's new 'quadruple-play' TV, landline, mobile phone, and internet offering, the channels of our media consumption ('old' and new) begin to merge.
• When exactly the information transfer was made;
• exactly what information was transferred;
• and how, i.e. with exactly what media device the transfer was made.

That last category of recorded information is very sweet icing on the cake for the media industry. By using 'cookies', the data gathered about each of our information transfers is made uniquely identifiable, and so can be made continuous with the data on all our other internet activity.

We're looking in new media at the ready availability of a massive amount of information on consumption; and this information is without the bounds we've seen traditionally in media research methodologies, like those of sample size, human error, research budget, as well as others. Where online media consumption can be linked to purchase - and that's where consumption itself is not already purchase - there's a veritable cornicopia of data relating the media we consume, to how we spend our money.

My point here though is mainly to encourage trust, and to urge media providers to warrant it, rather than to warn consumers against it. There's incredible potential for insight in all this information, and I'm sure that that can be for the good of everyone involved; but, and here's the very significant rub: media providers must be responsible for and have the trust of consumers if they want us to invest our information.

Thinking now for a moment of the work I did at the marketing research agency Millward Brown, I'm not sure what all this new-found power in new media is going to mean for the study of consumer attitudes. In a world where on-demand, interactive new media is the only media, it might not be necessary for us to bother trying to research consumer attitudes at all, when we would have a near-perfect picture of what media people are exposed to over time, and the effects of that exposure on media consumption and purchase. In such a world, in the terms of consumer insight, attitudes become consumption itself.

I would probably guess also that advertising pretesting, as we know it - out of 'field' - will become a redundant practice. What would the point be of having a separate out-of-field process for pretesting a piece of advertising, when it's actual performance in field, amongst a perfectly controlled audience, can be monitored, perfectly?

However I can see it being useful to be able to apply to our ongoing study of how consumption is impacted upon in new media, that which we understand already about how in traditional media attitudes can be changed. And I don't mean to suggest either that the quantitative analysis of consumption data is ever going to replace the creative, brain-storming processes of qualitative research, or anticipating patterns in consumer behaviour before they form.

And once again, as with the future of the advertising industry, we run into a brick wall when it comes to the number of people actually 'on' the internet. All the traditional ways of examining consumer attitudes remain of paramount importance in the undeveloped world. Whatever man-power that might be freed up by efficiencies and redundancies in the new media world would probably be wisely invested in developing digital media on the ground, in the places where it hardly yet exists.