By Lou Mastria
The scope of progress and accomplishments to date by the Digital Advertising Alliance’s self-regulatory program have been praised by the White House, Commerce Department, and the Federal Trade Commission.
And the DAA isn’t resting on its laurels: we continue to work across industry to expand our engagement with millions of consumers and the breadth of participation by companies in our program. We wanted to share some of the latest progress.
DAA Education Takes Off
In January the Digital Advertising Alliance launched a new educational Web site – YourAdChoices.com – to provide consumers with information about the Advertising Choice Icon and interest-based advertising generally. The site provides a variety of videos to help users better understand their choices to control this type of advertising.
In recent months, a broad range of Web publishers and online advertising companies have served hundreds of millions of online banners to engage consumers, build awareness of the AdChoices Icon, and invite them to visit the educational site.
Thanks to this campaign, over five million unique visitors have now already visited YourAdChoices.com. With an average of more than a million visitors each month, this is a very promising start.
And this is just the beginning: as the campaign progresses over the year, the DAA expects its participating companies to serve billions more ad impressions to reach more users.
The DAA is fully committed to an educational program that will result in even greater consumer awareness of the AdChoices icon. Over the course of the year, the effort will expand to other forms of online media, including search. Moreover, campaign feedback will also help the DAA further refine and improve its efforts.
It’s precisely this kind of broad-based industry effort that provides the most effective approach for building awareness of the AdChoices icon – one which allows each online user to control whether “the right ads finds you.”
Company Participation Quadruples
The education campaign comes on top of an already robust deployment of the AdChoices icon within trillions of online ads, and continued growth in user engagement with the consumer choice tool.
One vital sign of the growing strength and breadth of self regulation has been the increase in the number of participating companies. This time last year the DAA announced it had 100 participating companies. That number has now grown to more than 400 companies active in the program, including advertisers, publishers, and ad networks.
Additionally, on the aboutads.info Web site there are now more than one hundred third party providers offering consumers choice. These third party providers comprise the vast majority of the marketplace for interest-based ads. More importantly, all of these companies are already subject to the DAA’s active enforcement and accountability program.
Thanks to the work of our sponsoring associations and their participating companies, the DAA program is really firing on all cylinders: the already ubiquitous AdChoice icons are now supported by a broad-based consumer education campaign. And the DAA is working to integrate its principles and choice mechanisms with browser-based functionality. Combined together, these tools will help provide the most comprehensive, easy-to-use and effective mechanism for consumer transparency and choice.
