As any busi­ness devel­op­ment man­ag­er can tell you, there’s a lot of unease out there about the track­ing that ad agen­cies use to dri­ve online adver­tis­ing sales. Or is there? A new poll con­duct­ed by Zog­by Ana­lyt­ics for the Dig­i­tal Adver­tis­ing Alliance (DAA) sug­gests that, once peo­ple know how track­ing works, they’re alto­geth­er less both­ered by it and active­ly pre­fer behav­ioral­ly tar­get­ed ads.

Tar­get­ed ads don’t wor­ry people

Only 4 per cent of the 1,000 adult respon­dents sur­veyed said they were con­cerned about behav­ioral­ly tar­get­ed adver­tis­ing. In fact, busi­ness devel­op­ment man­agers might want to note that most peo­ple were con­sid­er­ably more wor­ried about cyber-crime. 12 per cent were most wor­ried about gov­ern­ment sur­veil­lance, 33 per cent wor­ried about virus­es and mal­ware and, for 39 per cent, iden­ti­ty theft came top of the tree.

As DAA Man­ag­ing Direc­tor Lou Mas­tria put it:

“Some oth­er stud­ies have used emo­tion­al words. If it uses the word ‘track­ing’ and does­n’t define what it is, it can mean a lot of things. For the adver­tis­ing indus­try, we’ve said what it means and that the results of the poll bear this out.”

70 per cent of respon­dents pre­ferred at least some ads to be tar­get­ed toward their spe­cif­ic inter­ests, while 40 per cent said they’d pre­fer all ads to be behav­ioral­ly tar­get­ed. Most respon­dents appre­ci­at­ed that adver­tis­ing keeps the inter­net free of charge: 75 per cent pre­ferred an ad-sup­port­ed inter­net model.

Skep­tics respond

But if this is encour­ag­ing data for busi­ness devel­op­ment man­agers, a note of skep­ti­cism was also sound­ed: after ana­lyz­ing the poll, Pro­fes­sor Joseph Tur­ow of the Annen­berg School of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions said that the sur­vey had been word­ed to get the answers the DAA want­ed. When peo­ple are giv­en tick box options in reply to the ques­tion “What is your biggest con­cern about the inter­net?”, it’s not sur­pris­ing only 4 per cent respond­ed “behav­ioral­ly tar­get­ed adver­tis­ing,” Tur­ow argues, because they don’t know what it is.

But then, isn’t ask­ing loaded ques­tions a fea­ture of those oth­er polls yield­ing oppo­site results? As Sen. Jay Rock­e­fellers (D‑W.Va.), a DAA skep­tic, pre­pares to dis­cuss the industry’s ad choice self-reg­u­la­to­ry sys­tem in Con­gress, he should take note of one find­ing in the lat­est poll: 62 per cent don’t trust the Gov­ern­ment to reg­u­late the deliv­ery of adver­tis­ing on the internet.