Publishers and agencies sometimes have an uneasy relationship*. This article appeared in the Australian last year:
http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,24801357-15318,00.html
“ONLINE publishers have accused unscrupulous advertisers and their agencies of stealing their audiences by using a new form of audience targeting technology.
A special investigation by The Australian has revealed the growing use of “retargeting” technology which enables advertisers to slash their internet advertising costs by tagging visitors to premium websites.”
The key question for me is what are we buying when pay for an impression from a publisher?
If we only get the right to deliver the advertising then the technique described above obviously contravenes the agreement between agency and publisher.
However, ever since third party adserving has been in place we have been buying not only the right to display an ad but also to cookie the user and then use the fact that we’ve cookied them to report on what they do afterwards on a client’s site.
Currently the retargeting they describe here cannot be delivered via the system that tracks the impressions and clicks. Publishers can therefore see when advertisers insert additional tags to provide the retargeting options and reject these.
It won’t be long, though, until it does not require additional tags to allow retargeting. At this stage publishers will have to block third party adservers from reading or dropping cookies on users to prevent “their” users being retargeted elsewhere. This will prevent the standard tracking that adservers provide and decrease the value of online advertising.
I believe that publishers will not be able to prevent advertisers from retargeting their users elsewhere in the long term and that they should have sensible conversations with agencies about this. That said, agencies should also have the decency to speak to publishers about this and ensure that everyone understands it is being done in the best interests of the advertisers which will over time bring benefits to the online publishers.
*Despite the fact they both will do better by working in partnership, it is not a zero sum game.
