A User-First Framework for Sustaining Local News - Harvard ...

Lem Lloyd, a former journalist who is now the Yahoo! vice president in charge of its
advertising consortium with local news organizations, argues that increased
transparency will serve all concerned—users, advertisers, networks, news
organizations—perhaps everybody except fly‐by‐night operators hoping to misuse
consumer information. He envisions quite specific techniques that would enable users to
mouse over an ad, for example, and discover what network is serving it and what sorts
of targeting placed the ad on the page in the first place.
“That will help educate consumers,” he said in a telephone interview. “It will lead to
better informed consumers who will increasingly see advertising as content.”
Given appropriate respect for consumer privacy, Lloyd believes the day will come
when users will be annoyed—as opposed to alarmed—by advertising that fails to target
their behavior and interests.
“Five years from now, if a user sees an irrelevant ad on a page they’re viewing,
they’ll be asking, ‘What the hell is that?’” Lloyd said. “People will expect [publishers
and advertisers] to know what they’re interested in.”
By the end of January 2010, the ad industry was moving in just that direction. The
Future of Privacy Forum, an advocacy group working with ad agencies, developed a
series of small icons to be attached to online ads, perhaps beginning in the summer of
2010. Clicking on the icon would explain to users how and why the ad showed up on
their screens. 99
Whether advertisers invest in ads on news sites or their own, it’s clear that a big ad
shift is coming from legacy platforms to digital.
Prepping for Advertising’s Big Shifts Online
Consider the gap between user behavior and ad spending: Consumers are spending
28 percent of their media time online, but just 13 percent of ad spending is committed
there. That compares with 12 percent of media time spent with print and a 26 percent ad
spend, setting the stage for a huge contraction of print ad spending. TV will be dealing
with its own less dramatic gap, with 39 percent of the spending going to TV but only 31
percent of consumers’ time. 100
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