Promo - January 2009 - (Page 28)

OTHER REGULATORY LANDMINES MARKETERS SHOULD WATCH FOR IN 2009: • The Federal Communications Commission is in the process of rewriting its guidelines for TV sponsorship and product placement disclosures, specifying when in the program the disclosure should be made, how prominently and for how long. • Updated “Green Guides” from the FTC will tackle new eco-claims such as carbon footprints, sustainability and renewability. Chances are the agency will offer examples but not standards for measuring these claims. Continued from page 27 that should be enough.” WATCHING THE WATCHERS Marketers are moving more ad dollars online in search of cost-effective, targeted advertising. And the Web is becoming increasingly personalized, as sites acquire the ability to know where we’ve surfed, what we’re interested in and even, with GPS-enabled phones, where we may be in the world. The convergence of those two trends may make behavioral targeting—the serving up of ads tailored to our interests based on what sites users have visited in the recent past—a hot button issue this year. The FTC actually produced a set of online ad guidelines in December 2007 that let the marketing industry regulate itself as to what information it collected on Web users and how it used that data. But tech developments since then have added a new sense of urgency to the debate over privacy and online advertising, and that new fear may combine with a new, consumer-oriented administration in the White House to produce new rulings on behavioral targeting. In particular, online ad companies such as NebuAd and Phorm have stirred the issue by seeking deals with Internet service providers. These behavioral ad companies use hardware installed at the ISP to perform “deep-packet inspection” to get to know its customers’ interests much better, they say, and thus to serve up more personally relevant ad messages. The problem is that while deeppacket inspection doesn’t reveal any personally identifiable information, the ad company could possibly acquire that user ID data by, for example, monitoring traffic to link an IP address to a specific e-mail address. Privacy advocates have also charged that the opt-out provisions for ISP customers in these deep-packet deals are weak, and that controls over how ISPs can sell their users data need to be beefed up. This hot button may only get hotter this year. A class action lawsuit filed in California last November against NebuAd and several ISPs charged that they violated several federal and state laws protecting computer users from abuse and data theft. Legislators such as Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), chairman of the Telecommunications and Internet Subcommittee, have said they will draft legislation this year that will impose a consumer opt-in to any data monitoring by their ISP or third parties. State laws are also in the works. And in a legal forecast published just after the Obama election, Lewis Rose, a partner with Kelley Drye & Warren LLP, suggests that a new administration with a more activist Internet ideology might lead the FTC to a 180-degree turn on self-regulation of Internet advertising. “It is possible that the FTC will do an about-face, and ask Congress to implement privacy legislation, just as the FTC reversed course under President Bush and withdrew a prior call for privacy legislation under the Clinton administration,” Rose writes. “If the FTC does 28 january 2009 / WWW.PROMOMAGAZINE.COM / Promo http://www.promomagazine.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Promo - January 2009

Promo - January 2009 Contents Editor's Note Casual Games Dr. P and the Roses Outside the Cup Geek�Chic Expresa Tu Hispanidad Jump Start Commentary The Show Must Go On Fed Up Q&A: Smart Food Agency Center Resource Center Gray Goes Green Index of Advertisers

Promo - January 2009

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.