Third-party ad serving has distanced brands from their customers and their data, leading to consumer distrust. Here are some solutions for regaining consumer trust.

Consumers have been telling us how they should be treated since long before Google, Yahoo or Microsoft existed. Consumers want to deal with a known and trusted brand. They are loyal, will pay more for products and services, and will recommend those brands they can trust.

The key word here is "brand." Online we call them advertisers, and they are the folks single-handedly responsible for funding the explosive growth of this medium and its most prominent players.

Before the internet, consumers expressed their preferences to the brand directly. Good brands listened and responded. But because of the complexity of the technology and the foresight of some very savvy entrepreneurs in the mid-'90s, advertisers have allowed third parties to usurp their relationship with consumers online. Brands have been distanced from their customers and hold little control over how information about their customers and prospects is collected and used. Likewise, online consumers have lost the ability to easily discern with whom they are entering into a relationship. 

In the current model, ad servers and media networks collect data across multiple campaigns funded by various advertisers and then can re-purpose the information to their own benefit. Today when you shop online, a series of servers you may not be explicitly aware of are recording bits of data about you. In fact, my informal review of Ad Age's Top 10 advertisers from 2007 found that a two-minute site visit looking at three company brands resulted in an average of 5.6 domains setting 15.8 cookies to track my activities.    

This kind of tracking has led to a flurry of activities by the FTC, advocacy groups and industry working groups -- all aimed at increasing consumer privacy online. Just within the last few weeks, lawmakers in New York proposed legislation that would make it illegal to use personal data for advertising purposes without the consent of the user.

Consumers are voicing their concern, too, by driving demand for anti-spyware and anti-adware software that also makes it easy for them to block or delete cookies.

All of this has placed the traditional ad serving model in jeopardy. We as an industry need to develop an approach to re-establishing consumers' comfort of dealing with a known and trusted brand online.

One such approach is to remove the ad server from the data equation without sacrificing the benefits of third party ad serving. Under this model, advertisers deliver their own online ad campaigns entirely from their own domain while maintaining the effectiveness and economy of an enterprise caliber ad serving platform. Campaigns are delivered using only the advertiser's cookie, and creating a database of log records only meaningful to that individual advertiser. There are no additional middlemen or data gatherers in the process, and thus the data is not aggregated and repurposed across multiple advertisers. It is analogous to the U.S. Postal Service, delivering the mail anywhere in the United States, but having no role in the information shared between the sender and the recipient. 

Another approach is to adopt technology that delivers ad campaigns without the use of cookies at all. Advertisers targeting audiences that have specific privacy requirements need a solution that delivers ads without the threat of any unique tracking. Counts of clicks and impressions can be preserved, but closed-loop or view-through metrics and cookie targeting are not available.

If you're wondering whether it pays to meet the level of trust consumers expect, reference a study by the Carnegie Mellon Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory presented at the FTC's Town Hall on eHavioral Advertising in November. The study concluded that consumers are willing to pay a higher price when transacting online in places where their privacy is protected. 

Now, clearly I am in the business of providing measurement and targeting technology to advertisers, so I believe in it. That said, we have the ability to redefine the way we use technology so that brands can recapture their relationship with the consumer. Our industry simply needs to look offline to learn this lesson.

Scott Nelson is the executive vice president and COO of TruEffect.