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Politics & Culture, Social Media, Marketing & Privacy

“Remember November” — the RGA Gets It

May 5, 2010 No Comments

The two major Web ads released so far have been breathtakingly good; they feel like a movie trailer, and I actually had an emotional response to them. The juxtaposition of imagery, background music and iconic imagery is both powerful and well-done. It’s not often I’m impressed by political marketing, but Remember November does make my head nod in respectful appreciation.

A few comments on the RN campaign:

The mix of “V-for-Victory” and Guy Hawkes imagery is powerful, even for those whose knowledge of English history is a wee bit deficient. I suspect that the suggestiveness — the provocativeness — of the ads was a deliberate, first-rate example of call-and-response. By giving the Left something to get upset about in eminently predictable fashion, the RGA is in a position to anticipate the blowback and thereby control the message. This is smart.
The effort by the RGA is an implicit repudiation, I think, of the debacle that is Michael Steele’s RNC. Kudos to the RGA for having the balls to get in the game and avoid the RNC’s shameful dithering.
The above point notwithstanding, it’s curious that the RGA is mounting a significant campaign that isn’t specifically geared toward gubernatorial races, and it’s simultaneously heartening that the campaign’s message is an unambiguous call-to-arms against big-gummint liberalism.
RN represents the first stirrings that some on the Right are willing to embrace modes of communication that resonate outside the typical country-club market that so much Republican advertising seems to favor. RN is a shot in the arm for countless YAF and College Republican groups, who finally can point to an official party message that can appeal to younger voters. In 2006 and 2008, the Dems had the “cool” factor in spades, which may be one reason that so many college students — who profess a liberalism whose implications so few can clearly articulate — gravitated to Obama. Like it or not, a trendy countercultural message resonates with students much more strongly than a litany of policy points will.
The campaign seems to get that the most salient sociopolitical issue in the U.S. in 2010 isn’t health care or the environment or Afghanistan, but rather the proper relationship between government and the people. The litany of talking points against the Democrats in Washington has been so oft recounted that another exposition merely belabors the point. America is a center-right country, and the antics of the Obama regime seems to have re-awakened a long-dormant disaffection with government overreach and incompetence at all levels. How this disaffection plays out at the ballot box this fall will be a talking point for pundits for a generation.

So. I’m going to Remember November. Will you?

Politics & Culture, Social Media, Marketing & Privacy

"Remember November" — the RGA Gets It

May 5, 2010 No Comments

The new advertising campaign from the Republican Governors Assocation, called Remember November, astonishes me for one simple reason: At long, long, long last, it appears that some in the Republican Party finally get it.
The two major Web ads released so far have been breathtakingly good; they feel like a movie trailer, and I actually had an emotional response to them. The juxtaposition of imagery, background music and iconic imagery is both powerful and well-done. It’s not often I’m impressed by political marketing, but Remember November does make my head nod in respectful appreciation.
A few comments on the RN campaign:

The mix of “V-for-Victory” and Guy Hawkes imagery is powerful, even for those whose knowledge of English history is a wee bit deficient. I suspect that the suggestiveness — the provocativeness — of the ads was a deliberate, first-rate example of call-and-response. By giving the Left something to get upset about in eminently predictable fashion, the RGA is in a position to anticipate the blowback and thereby control the message. This is smart.
The effort by the RGA is an implicit repudiation, I think, of the debacle that is Michael Steele’s RNC. Kudos to the RGA for having the balls to get in the game and avoid the RNC’s shameful dithering.
The above point notwithstanding, it’s curious that the RGA is mounting a significant campaign that isn’t specifically geared toward gubernatorial races, and it’s simultaneously heartening that the campaign’s message is an unambiguous call-to-arms against big-gummint liberalism.
RN represents the first stirrings that some on the Right are willing to embrace modes of communication that resonate outside the typical country-club market that so much Republican advertising seems to favor. RN is a shot in the arm for countless YAF and College Republican groups, who finally can point to an official party message that can appeal to younger voters. In 2006 and 2008, the Dems had the “cool” factor in spades, which may be one reason that so many college students — who profess a liberalism whose implications so few can clearly articulate — gravitated to Obama. Like it or not, a trendy countercultural message resonates with students much more strongly than a litany of policy points will.
The campaign seems to get that the most salient sociopolitical issue in the U.S. in 2010 isn’t health care or the environment or Afghanistan, but rather the proper relationship between government and the people. The litany of talking points against the Democrats in Washington has been so oft recounted that another exposition merely belabors the point. America is a center-right country, and the antics of the Obama regime seems to have re-awakened a long-dormant disaffection with government overreach and incompetence at all levels. How this disaffection plays out at the ballot box this fall will be a talking point for pundits for a generation.

So. I’m going to Remember November. Will you?

Politics & Culture, Social Media, Marketing & Privacy

Online Privacy: Time for Action

April 11, 2010 No Comments

You visit a favorite Web site. You browse a while, and then you notice that all the ads you see are remarkably well-tailored for your unique preferences. The banner ads or AdSense offerings are for things that you like, or for businesses that are local to you. Product suggestions are for things you’ve recently browsed or purchased from a mail-order company.

How on earth does “teh Internets” know these things?

Simple. You are a number in an enormous database, and the data associated with that number is growing at a frightening rate.

Savvy Web users already know that cookies can track your browsing history, but the old standby of blocking or deleting cookies is no longer enough. Marketers are increasingly integrating offline data, or data from other online sources like social-networking sites, to develop a comprehensive profile about you. This profile worth its weight in gold — it can be sold and shared as an asset. Worse, this aggregation is happening behind the scenes, with users unaware of the wide variety of information being integrated into their marketing profiles.

Ryan Singel, writing in Wired on April 9, reports that some privacy-protection groups have had enough:

A trio of privacy groups want federal regulators to take a close look at ad networks that track web surfers’ and sell targeted ads.

The groups want the Federal Trade Commission to open an inquiry into whether these networks, including Google and Yahoo, are unfairly tracking Americans and profiting from their data.

The World Privacy Forum, the Center for Digital Democracy and U.S. PIRG (public interest research groups) argue that online marketers are secretly combining online data with offline data and using that to run real-time ad auctions.

“Consumers will be most shocked to learn that companies are instantaneously combining the details of their online lives with information from previously unconnected offline databases without their knowledge, let alone consent,” said U.S. PIRG Consumer Program Director Ed Mierzwinski. “In just the last few years, a growing and barely regulated network of sellers and marketers has gained massive information advantages over consumers.”

Companies named in the complaint (.pdf) include Google, Yahoo, PubMatic, TARGUSinfo, MediaMath, eXelate, Rubicon Project, AppNexus and Rocket Fuel.

At issue is a growing market of targeted, real-time ads, where advertisers can choose to show ads to people based on their age, gender, income and location — as well as their recent online behavior — often on unrelated sites that let third parties track users (for instance, Wired.com uses DoubleClick to serve ads and it tracks users across the web using cookies.)

Third-party cookie tracking isn’t new — but as the complaint points out, marketers are increasingly trying to augment that data with other data sets — such as the social network data that Rapleaf harvests and re-sells.

The kicker line in Singel’s story: “Tying ad cookies to personally identifiable data would let marketers successfully combine online and offline data on website visitors to build a complete digital dossier on a user.”

Nervous yet? Even a centrist privacy group funded by the tech industry itself is calling for regulations. That’s how bad it is.

It is interesting to note that Facebook came down hard-and-heavy against Suicide Machine, a service that scrubs a user’s profile from social-networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. These networking sites presently allow a person to delete a profile, but “deletion” is merely inactivation — the profile and all associated data still exists, and is still subject to indexing and search and resale. Suicide Machine is different; you supply your login and password, and its scripts actually delete all information in the profile, so that the inactivated profile is stripped down to an empty shell. After only a few hundred (out of more than 300 million) active accounts were emptied by Suicide Machine, Facebook acted swiftly to block the service. This behavior, combined with the way that Facebook keeps trying to trick users into opening data on their profiles, is suggestive. It doesn’t take a genius to see that the name of the game is personal-data aggregation and resale.

And why not? It’s big business. If you were selling a product, wouldn’t you like to have a mailing list targeted to people who you already know are likely to enjoy your product? If you were advertising a service, wouldn’t you prefer to tailor your ads to people in your local community who fit your service’s targeted demographic profile? Of course you would.

The problem is that consumers are at a significant disadvantage. They are not notified in a reasonable manner that their information is tracked, nor do they have a reasonable chance to opt out or to charge companies for the privilege of selling their marketing preferences. Worse, for people who have poor impuse control or even a psychological disorder that includes spontaneous purchasing, highly customzied targeted advertising is akin to preying on the weak — like putting a fresh beer, unasked, in front of a recovering alcoholic.

The slippery slope is greased with lard: When terabytes of marketing data can be successfully linked to personally identifiable information, it’s not a stretch to link it one step further to things like credit reports. Already, so much information about a person is publicly available; allowing businesses the opportunity to build a complex dossier on a person, without that person’s active consent or ability to opt out, is a step too far. Might next-generation social profiling be next? Or could prospective landlords or employers have the chance to buy a report that lists the things you buy, the subjects you search for, and the keywords in your ostensibly private social-networking profiles? Maybe skip tracers or creditors can start harassing friends and family — whose information is conveniently obtained via your own online profiles, or from theirs — to do the repayment shakedown? What if a father-in-law-to-be ran a marketing report and discovered your penchant for browsing S&M Web sites?

The Federal Trade Commission should act quickly to put a stop to the unfettered aggregation of private consumer data; if the FTC lacks the spine, then Congress should put into place definitive regulations that protect a citizen’s online privacy. At a minimum, users should be actively informed of all monitoring activities and given the opportunity to definitively and persistently opt-out, on a per-company basis as well as globally, and a user must be allowed to actively opt-in to any change to a site’s privacy terms that would otherwise open private data to the public or to third-party indexers, before this information is released.

Although this humble blogger is unabashedly pro-capitalist, I do accept that there must be certain limits placed on free enterprise in order to protect consumers from unfair or predatory business practices. No person should have his private activity collected and profiled without his active consent. Period.

It’s time for action, before it’s too late.