This made me realize that I am a little Jekyll and a little Hyde.  The Dr. Jekyll in me thinks that no one should be tracked if they don’t want to be and everyone should be able to choose how they are marketed to.  The Mr. Hyde in me loves the idea of tracking users, segmenting customers and using machine learning to enhance marketing campaigns.  This seems like a clear contradiction, am I a schizophrenic? In hopes of convincing everyone reading this that I am not a hypocrite, I will try to rationalize my thoughts.  

I believe that the constitution provides everyone with an inherent right to privacy, including online privacy, and should be forced to actively opt-in to a service where you give up that right.  This means that a privacy policy on a website should not automatically opt you in to a  tracking service.  On the other hand, I also believe that marketing strategists should be able to tailor their campaigns to as small a customer segment as they can.  This means that if the strategist selling jewelry knows who shopped for high-end clothing recently and only wants to display an ad to that specific customer, they should be able to.  The only caveat to my second statement is that everyone who is shown those customized ads has to opt-in to them.  

Most marketers don’t agree with me because it would make their lives harder.  Not only would they have to ask before being allowed to track a customer, they would also have to ask before showing a customized ad.  I think most marketers assume that if people are forced to make a conscience choice, they avoid making it and use the default settings.  This would cause marketers to have a lot less data about their customers and would not be able to make as educated a guess when choosing where to place an ad.  

I, on the other hand, believe that people make conscience choices about everything they do and would welcome another one.  I also believe that having less tracking data to work from may mean more work for the marketer, but it will also result in a better product and a better ad.  This is where scientific marketing comes to play.  Marketers should start by making a hypothesis based on a small amount of data and then try to prove it with experimentation and watching more data.  In effect, scientific marketing is a little behavioral targeting and a little marketing psychology, but it conforms to a world where privacy matters!

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Now that I am opted-out of seeing the ad, what is stopping Yahoo! from taking my search and surfing patterns and then creating a model to market to someone that is not opted out?  If there are lots of people like me going from Toyota’s site to the WSJ, what is stopping Yahoo! from going directly to Toyota and letting them know?  This way, Toyota will just buy more ads on WSJ.  Maybe it will cost more, but chances are it will be more effective advertising than placing the ads randomly.  

Despite my negative twist, I would still like to commend Yahoo! for being the first provider to allow such an opt-out service!  Customized advertising costs more for advertisers and while Yahoo! is lagging behind Google in ad sales, this is a brave step.  I think Google should take a page out of Yahoo!’s book and allow similar opt-out services on their sites, otherwise I think they are risking being labeled “evil”.

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