The continuing controversy over Phorm (the advertising service secretly trialled by BT to track and target ads based on internet surfing patterns) highlights exactly where so many advertisers, new wave advertising services and social networks, desperate to wring money out of their service, are going wrong. Two elements are continually prevalent, those of awareness and trust – do users know what they’re being signed up for and do they trust that it is both legitimate, secure and won’t see their details sold to every Tom, Dick and Harry that comes begging.
The trouble is that consumers either don’t perceive this trust in the first place due to clandestine tactics of those less scrupulous marketers or they initially trust the company or service but it is promptly taken away when advertising comes into the equation especially when it is done ‘under the radar’.
A prime example of this is Facebook and its ‘revolutionary’ yet universally condemned, Beacon advertising service. The trouble is that users never signed up to Facebook to be plied with advertising and, as such, its ‘Beacon’ advertising service was destined for controversy from the word go. The decision to make it an opt-out rather than opt-in technology was one step too far for users, feeling aggrieved at having the service forced upon them. This action was truly damaging to what could have been a highly successful advertising product.
Predictably people were rather annoyed about Beacon sparking reams of bad press, a swift backtrack by Zuckerberg and a failure of the service to truly take off. One blog prints reports (though unconfirmed) of current click-through rates of just 0.04%, a pretty abysmal average. And while poor click-through rates obviously aren’t all due to distrust of Facebook, the secretive way in which Beacon was implemented definitely had an effect on the success of the system.
Now we find Phorm is trying similar tactics which also have blown up in their faces. Its secret trials with BT have created such a media furore that the EU may intervene and punish.
Online advertisers need to recognise that transparency is the key; keeping users fully appraised of what they’re signing up for is the only way to build the trust that might, with luck, lead to success. Launch a service in an ill-considered, secretive and invasive way and it’s simply doomed to failure and rightly so.
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