Consumer Choice and Relevant Advertising

The CEO of BlueKai, an online behavioral targeting and marketing company, makes some interesting points about giving consumers more control over their online profiles. The company’s profile viewer, which displays the categories they have put you in and which lets you edit your preferences, is no silver bullet, but it is one piece of the puzzle. Now how about asking Web sites who provide data about users to show a dashboard linking to the profile manager from their home page ?

I was interested in checking out my own profile, but alas have not visited enough web sites in their network to be included. Of course, most users would have no idea if they visited sites participating in this or any other network. (Hint – on your browser toolbar, choose View, then Page Source, and scrool thorough looking for the name of the code referring to the ad network. Or look at the bottom edge of your browser window when you visit a new web page and watch the locations your browser is visiting in the background to fetch the ad content of the page.) Check out your own profile at http://tags.bluekai.com/registry.