The document discusses growing public concern about media agencies, data companies, and marketers tracking consumers' online behaviors to label them with personal characteristics and target ads. This allows for social discrimination and a lack of transparency that people find "creepy". While it benefits media buyers in the short term, it risks mounting public cynicism towards media and advertising in the long run. The industry provides poor explanations and its language makes the system harder to understand, but greater transparency about targeting is needed to address these problems.

1. Occupy Madison Avenue?
Joseph Turow
Annenberg School for Communication
University of Pennsylvania
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2. Media Planning and Buying
• Historically been involved in little public
controversy.
• Notable exceptions
– Early history of media and advertising
– Ratings issues
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3. In recent years, that has changed.
• An important reason is that the business
has moved to the center of the advertising
industry after decades of being considered
a backwater.
• Terry Kawaja charts reflect that change

4. Media Buying Before 1985
Agency
Ratings
Planners Companies “Publisher”
and
Buyers
Client
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6. What is the public concern?
• Media agencies, data companies and
marketers are working with media firms
(publishers) toward the goal of labeling
individual consumers (often anonymously)
with demographic, lifestyle, social, and
other characteristics as a result of tracking
their behavior across digital media.

7. So what?
• “Privacy”
• “Creepy”
• Social discrimination / the long click
• People are concerned and lack
knowledge.

8. Implications for Media Firms
• The new advertising food chain—pushes
down publishers
• Media buyers and post-publishing world
• Content farms
• Church/State dissolution

9. So,will all this lead to an Occupy
Madison Avenue movement?
• Perhaps, but more likely:
• Short-term gains targeting lead to long-
term losses for the industry as well as the
media system via encouraging mounting
public suspicion and cynicism of media
sources and marketers.
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10. Marketers haven’t fully stepped up
to the plate.
• Industry explanations of how the system
works are lame.
• Even people in the industry don’t
understand. Jargon makes it harder.
• Language of Digital Advertising Alliance a
case in point.
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11. Why not greater transparency?
• In frank moments, industry leaders cite two
problems working against greater
transparency regarding why individuals get
particular targeted ads:
 Difficulty of explaining categories’ origins.
 Fear of giving up corporate secrets.

12. These problems can be solved.
• And more generally, people in the
advertising industry need to think carefully
about the world they are creating through
their media planning & buying decisions.
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