Musings from GroupM: Debate Over Behavioral Data Ownership Must Focus On Consumers - John Montgomery - MediaBizBloggers

The anticipated debate about "data ownership" has begun in earnest with agencies and their clients on one side and publishers on the other.

Publishers are concerned that agencies may use data collected from an advertisement to retarget the same user elsewhere on the Web. For example, John Citizen sees an ad for Audi on a premium site like Forbes.com, the agency drops a cookie in John's browser and advertises to him on a cheaper, long tail site that he visits at a later time. The publishers worry about being disintermediated and the potential diminution of their brands.

On the other side, clients and their agencies are concerned about how data obtained from their advertising on a publisher's site will be used. For example, a publisher gleans insights from the client's campaign and uses this data to inform publisher strategy on how to sell to client's competition or other advertisers. Clients are worried about data confidentiality and how information collected about their brand's consumers are used. They want assurances that the data will not be used to inform anyone outside of the direct campaign relationship.

Expect lively discourse.

However, while both sides intellectualize about issues like the passage of data ownership from publisher to advertiser and how we can respectively protect ourselves from potential harm, we should be sharply aware that the consumer right to data privacy is amongst the most hotly debated properties in congress and the press.

While we continue to debate internally, we will be carefully observed by an important group of stakeholders—Internet users, legislators, and privacy advocates chief among them—and we need to prove to them that we take the consumers' position in this debate seriously. We should not forget that behavioral advertising falls low on consumers' list of priorities; in fact, they would rather we didn't collect any information about them at all. We must remember that we are not considered the good guys in this equation. If we don't take the consumers' position in this debate seriously, we risk attracting some form of damaging legislation and, worse, alienating users in the process.

We should be educating consumers about behavioral advertising, telling them what information is collected, explain how it is used, and inform them of their right to opt out. And most importantly, we must regard our ability to collect and use data about consumers as a privilege and treat it with the respect it deserves. One early step might be to consider changing the language we use from "data ownership" to "data usage rights."

So, let the debate rage on, but let's not forget who the real owners of the data are. The consumers.

John Montgomery is Chief Operating Officer of GroupM Interaction North America, a unit of WPP.

Read all John's MediaBizBloggers commentaries at Musings from GroupM - MediaBizBloggers.

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