The internet gives marketers unparalleled ability to target consumers.  Now if consumers would just get with the program.

Let’s make a deal.  I promise not to bore you any more with information that has no relevance to you.  I promise to stick to topics that interest you.  I promise not to repeat myself.  And I’ll throw in another promise: I won’t talk about you to anyone else.

All we need to do to get started is one little thing: You have to tell me about yourself.

Have we got ourselves a deal?

Online marketers are amassing more and more tools to speak meaningfully to carefully targeted audiences, and survey data suggests that consumers are at least reluctantly willing to agree that they would prefer targeted, relevant messages.  But that doesn’t mean consumers are really going to play along.

The latest data about cookie deletion and rejection has set off a round of debate and hand wringing.  Are consumers deleting cookies every month?  Are they blocking cookies even before they are installed?  How are marketers to deal with these recalcitrant consumers?

JupiterResearch kicked things off with its report that 39 percent of internet users were deleting their cookies at least once per month. The implications for anyone involved in online advertising, website analytics or online marketing are obvious. If users are regularly deleting their cookies, that’s going to distort the picture of their online activities and reduce marketers’ ability to serve up targeted ads or marketing programs.

Then, data from Atlas DMT suggested consumers actually deleted cookies far less frequently than they (the surveyed consumers) said. But the web analytics and measurement firm later came out with a retraction, essentially affirming the original Jupiter findings.

Next, research survey company InsightExpress weighed in with new survey results that supported the original Atlas DMT theory, i.e., that consumers didn’t know what they were talking about. For example, while 77 percent of consumers in a survey said they know what a cookie is, only 30 percent could provide an accurate description. Further, while a large percentage said they deleted their cookies on a regular basis, when asked to prove it by physically deleting their cookies on their computers, only a small percentage could do so.

WebTrends capped the ongoing debate this week with a report on rejection rates for so-called third-party cookies, which track a site's unique visitors and their responses to marketing campaigns and website promotions.  Rejection rates ran at 12.4 percent in April 2005, WebTrends said, up from less than 3 percent in January 2004.  Outright cookie rejection is far more serious than occasional cookie deletion, WebTrends argues, because it has an immediate affect on the accuracy of measurement.

All in all, it’s clear that a significant chunk of consumers are blocking or removing cookies, either actively or through the use of installed software.

This shouldn’t surprise marketers.  However much consumers might buy into the notion of targeted ads, and recognize that there is a value to them, privacy continues to be of the utmost importance to most people, and an instinctive distrust kicks in whenever they are asked for personal information.  Those ingrained attitudes aren’t going to melt just because marketers have neat new tools to work with.

Consider the results of a 2004 survey by the Ponemon Institute that probed consumer attitudes about divulging personal information.  Only a handful of information categories were acceptable to more than half of the respondents -- home location and telephone, gender, email and IP address, and education.  This kind of bare-bones information isn’t nearly enough to unlock the door to highly targeted ads.

It seems almost counterintuitive that consumers would be more protective of ephemeral information like reading preferences than of real world data such as phone numbers and home addresses.  But that gets at the heart of the privacy issue: consumers recognize that they live in a highly connected world, and realize that much of the fundamental data of their lives is probably only a mouse click away if anyone wants it.  To preserve their sense of privacy, then, they may feel even more, not less, protective of largely symbolic information like religious affiliation or taste in literature.

Privacy is a hot button issue.  A November 2004 survey of US Internet users by ReleMail, an email privacy certification service, found that 96 percent said that email privacy was important to them.

Many internet users are doubly on the alert because their online behavior is tracked at work. 

With the boss looking over one shoulder and a marketer looking over the other, it should come as a surprise to no one that a fair number of Internet users are going to look for ways to lock out prying eyes.

Even so, there are still plenty of users who seem to understand the quid pro quo – trading personal information for a better online experience (i.e. free content supported by more relevant advertising information).  A TRUSTe survey found a general understanding of why companies collect information -- and nearly half of the respondents said they trusted companies to safeguard it.

The latest data on cookies is not the end of the debate, or the death knell for targeted marketing, but a reminder that new technology and tools will only go so far when they come up against human nature.

Ezra Palmer is the editorial director of eMarketer. eMarketer publishes data, analysis and market projections focusing on e-business, online marketing and emerging technology. Founded in 1996, eMarketer aggregates, filters, organizes and analyzes data from more than 1700 research firms, consultancies and government agencies around the globe.