Agencies Test Industry's New ‘You Are Being Targeted’ Icon
As part of an industry-wide campaign to discourage new privacy laws, online ad agencies are planning to debut the new behavioral targeting icons in approximately four weeks. — Cadreon, a buying platform of Interpublic Group's Mediabrands …
Context & Ripple Effects
The icon is the ad industry's answer to three years of accumulating pressure: privacy groups proposed a do-not-track list back in October 2007, EU scrutiny of targeted web advertising followed that November, and in March 2009 privacy groups attacked Google's targeted advertising plans. In January 2010, the New York Times profiled the small-'i' privacy mark as the emerging self-disclosure idea.
Now agencies including Cadreon, the Interpublic Group Mediabrands buying platform, are testing the 'You Are Being Targeted' version ahead of a debut in roughly four weeks — and per the confirmed reporting, the rollout sits inside an explicit industry-wide campaign to discourage new privacy laws. The icon is disclosure as lobbying: show consumers they're tracked so lawmakers conclude legislation isn't needed.
First-order effects
- Cadreon and other testing agencies get a standardized disclosure layer they can point to when regulators or privacy advocates challenge behavioral targeting, ahead of the four-week industry debut.
Second-order effects
- Privacy groups who pushed the 2007 do-not-track list gain a concrete symbol to organize against, shifting the fight from whether to disclose toward whether an icon without a real opt-out counts as consent.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, self-regulatory symbols become the industry's standard preemption tool against legislation — the same dynamic playing out in Brussels since the 2007 EU scrutiny of targeted ads.
The trend: Behavioral advertising is moving toward industry-designed transparency marks deployed explicitly to forestall privacy legislation rather than await it.