Front Porch Says Competitors Over Promise Behavioral Ad Revenue — continued

There are rewards for good behavior
Front Porch won't deal with what he calls "skanky" advertising—some pharmaceuticals and porn, for example—so if users visit sites related to those products, the technology doesn't record the fact. Ditto if they simply visit YouTube or their MySpace page. "The behavior in effect doesn't exist, never happened."

It may sound innocuous—it certainly does to me. It may even sound like a good thing for subscribers. Instead of being inundated with meaningless unwanted advertising, some of the unwanted ads will actually have relevance. But a lot of people don't like the idea—Britton has seen survey data suggesting that 43 percent of respondents would ask to be put on a do-not-contact list for behavioral tracking.

"We've done a poor job probably of explaining it to the general market," he admits. "I'm beginning to wonder if we've kind of screwed up the market for the next year or so because some of the early installations were not perhaps done in the most—I don't know—respectful way or something…"

One thing is clear: the only way behavioral ad targeting can possibly work going forward is as a voluntary opt-in program in which subscribers explicitly agree to participate. That is certainly Britton's view.

"From an ISP's perspective, wouldn't you rather give them the opportunity upfront to say, 'Hey, I don't want to do this,' rather than have them find out later [that you're tracking them], get ticked off and then find someone else to use to give them broadband?"

But making it an opt-in program poses a problem—which Front Porch's product just happens to be perfectly positioned to solve for ISPs. How do you efficiently and with minimum cost put the behavioral targeting proposition in front of subscribers so they're sure to see it, understand it and be likely to agree to participate.

You need to communicate with your subscribers
Britton originally developed PorchLight to solve exactly these kinds of messaging problems—because as he points out, ISPs can't, or shouldn't, count on e-mail or phone to get vital messages to subscribers.

Phone is too expensive. E-mail is too slow in some cases—alerting users of imminent maintenance outages, for example. And it's unreliable because many subscribers don't use their ISP-issued e-mail address, and the ISP has no way of knowing which address they do use. Most subscribers in fact never see ISP messages, he says.

PorchLight does a few other things as well. It can tie into an ISP's billing system and automatically send delinquent subscribers messages reminding them to pay their bills. If the subscriber doesn't respond, it can escalate the case—again, automatically—and interrupt service, confining them to a walled-garden site with limited or no access to the open internet.

"That's usually really effective," Britton says. "If they can't go on the internet to check their sports scores, or whatever it is they like to do, they're much more likely to pay."

Hotspots
PorchLight can also manage ad serving for the kind of tiered services that many hotspot operators and fixed ISPs have tried, albeit with mixed success. For example, FreeHotspot.com in Europe, which provides optionally ad-supported free or low-cost hotspot connectivity, is a big Front Porch customer.

And PorchLight provides the redirect functionality used by airport and other hotspot operators to automatically direct users to their portal sites to sign up for service before letting them out onto the public Internet.

So quite aside from the potential benefits of behavioral targeting, the messaging and redirect functionality that Front Porch's appliance and services provide are something ISPs should consider.

Subscribing to services
That same functionality, however, can also automate the entire opt-in and subscriber registration process for behavioral targeting programs, saving the ISP as much as ten or 15 minutes of staff time per subscriber if they had to do it by other means, Britton claims.

Behavioral targeting too is worth considering, despite the bad press. ISPs need to manage their expectations, though, and be cautious in their approach to subscribers. Britton recommends starting with pilots involving a subset of no more than 10,000, and carefully presenting the concept and giving customers a chance to say yea or nay.

ISPs who can see beyond the negativity and are willing to take this slow, cautious approach stand to realize a significant return—just not right away.

—End

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