PR play?
Despite mounting concern about consumer privacy online, at least one analyst said that marketing a cookie-free product is mostly a public relations play.
"Cookie-less ad serving is more for the benefit of the press than for marketers," said Marissa Gluck, an advertising analyst at Jupiter Research, a division of Jupiter Media Metrix. "Using cookies for ad serving is not inherently evil. It is the accepted standard."
But Interadnet's Valas said that because this is a big year for privacy, his company's product is answering an unfulfilled need for government Web sites and others. Businesses targeting products at children must be especially careful not to collect personal data; otherwise, such companies risk breaking guidelines of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), Valas said.
By not using cookies, companies could lessen their chances of violating COPPA. Without a cookie, an advertiser is unable to track a consumer over multiple uses of a Web site or view any personally identifiable data that cookies sometimes contain. It also is unable to target ads based on consumers' online preferences.
"You're going to give something up in the cookie-less world, (which is) the ability to build a longer-term picture of online behaviour. This gives a more in-the-moment picture of online behaviour," Valas said.
The ad-serving technology does give advertisers data on how many ads were delivered and how many times a visitor clicks to the marketer's page. Interadnet said the technology can report a consumer's geographic location, pulled from data within IP addresses. It can also evaluate the success of an ad campaign through comparisons and track the number of sales at a site not specifically pinned to the ad campaign.
Valas said that one government agency is already using Interadnet's product for an ad campaign and that it has received calls from companies in the health care, pharmaceutical and financial industries, all areas dealing with sensitive consumer data.
