Scenario 3: Consumer Privacy takes over the Ad world

2010

The internet technology is poised for substantial growth. Internet advertising is touted as the next big thing and the prospect of convergent technologies loom large. The industry is taken aback by the rise of data privacy movements. In 2009, Facebook, Myspace and Xing received warning letters from EU consumer groups for shortcomings on privacy policies. Also, there is a trend for developing stricter policies for controlling behavioral advertising. Although these incidents are on the rise, Internet firms are confident that they will be able to respond adequately. As a result of the threats from EU and other multi-lateral organizations on privacy the is a backlash for free content on the internet that had previously been ad-supported. As a consequence Hollywood, news media, print media, and other types of media are beginning to switch their business models to subscription or pay-per-view, pay-per-access etc. to cover the operational costs as advertisers become reluctant to sponsor content on the web. The Financial Times and the Economist make their websites pay-only and cause an outrage from the public but stick to their guns with the argument that if they cannot provide advertisers with relevant metrics on advertising reach and usage they have to charge for their services to stay in business.

2014

Open source software does great on the market. Google’s open source operating system spawns a generation of applications that give a lot of value to the consumers. Open source gives rise to free access of consumer information. Facebook has a privacy setting set to private for consumers below the age of 18 and the setting is public for consumers above the age of 18. The concept of ‘friending’ in which an entity appears to be a person takes off. Hence consumers below the age of 18 are not protected. The targeted personal advertising industry tries to catch consumers young and it creates a huge backslash in the world. Consumer rights grow in strength demanding stricter legislation and a method to track collection of consumer advertisement. As a consequence of the backlash in the web advertisers seek to safe havens such with the old print media tycoons such as News Corp, who by now have shifted their business model to news distribution to open platform reading devices that many years ago was called Kindle. The old media empires have now a different position as the consumer electronics manufacturers are not selling reading devices capable of various subscription over a 4.5G connection and very little free content is available on the web anymore. The global media conglomerates such as News Corp use web as a service differentiator, but the advertising business is now back to basics with broadcast type ads in the electronic version of the FT pushed via mobile network to its subscribers. The content industry, like Hollywood, is suffering as movie distribution and piracy is becoming more widespread as advertising on the internet is difficult. As a consequence dark nets and smaller groups on the Internet share content over hyper efficient P2P networks. All the efforts by the studios and other content owners have now gone down the drain as the only commercially viable way to offer premium content through ad supported business models does not work anymore. Content owners therefore choose highly secured walled garden operators to distribute content to paying subscribers only. Ad supported free-to-air television is seeing some recovery of lost revenues from advertising since 2010 as less TV content are made available on the web, the money that were flowing towards the web are nor flowing back to TV as well as the print media, now electronic print.

2017

There is an intense battle fought between internet firms such as Google, Facebook, Myspace and Bing and consumers over the issue of protecting consumer rights as the consumer opinion is now against them as a consequence of over exploitation and collection data without the consumers knowledge. An outcry occurs when it becomes clear that both Facebook and Google have sold profiles of millions of users by implementining hidden words on their computers. The industry comes up with a proposal to introduce self regulated principles for online advertising to stimulate advertising to return to the Internet together with consumers, who now have started to operate in smaller trusted networks and abandoned Facebook etc.. What it means is that consumers will be allowed to protect their data but it will not be easy for them to do so, even of several software companies previously supplying anti-virus software now specialize in supplying anti-advertising and data mining applications In the meantime, Privacy forum research groups take off and there is a global education drive which educates the consumer that advertising firms collect information not only pertaining to you but also pertaining to your family and friends. Internet firms desperately come up with a business model of offering more free content in return for personal info, approved by the user, but it fails to take off. NTT Japan successfully develops the fiber optic cable that pushes 14 trillion bits of bytes per second. This translates to faster and wider internet reach and potentially wider misuse of consumer information. The consumers are now split in two camps, one who are for data mining and advertising supported business models and another against, with a strong view on privacy rights. Bacause of the string institutional support for piracy both in the US, EU and ASEAN members the supporters of advertising supported business models as both media companies, content owners, ISPs and telco operators take advantage of the situation and promote their pay-services heavy as “privacy proof” and includes various protection software in their offers to assure the consumer. Content is increasingly being paid for.

2020

Consumer privacy rights take over the advertising world. There is a consumer rights watch group and policy maker that tracks the way firms use consumer data especially on the web. Each web site has clear indications on the type of data is intends to collect. Just as the green sign on eatables is a sign of vegetarian stuff, each website has symbols that indicate if there is behavior tracking cookies or 3rd party tools that the website uses. Hence, advertising loses its hyper individualization drive. Advertising is therefore going back to where it was 20 years ago, primarily driven by direct marketing, television and out of home advertising.

References: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/6239 http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2009/09/consumer_groups.html http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=141722987030 http://www.findingdulcinea.com/guides/Technology/Internet/Internet-Marketing-and-Privacy.pg_04.html#04