Egg on your Facebook: Beacon ad platform illuminates challenges for mobile marketing

Wireless carriers and mobile marketers are very much in the dark about how to approach consumers on their phones, but Facebook’s Beacon has helped light the way. The way not to go, that is.
The oh-so-cool social-networking site managed to enrage thousand of its members with Beacon, an advertising platform that automatically informs members about their friends’ purchases on Blockbuster.com, eBay and 42 other partner sites. Facebook users were initially included in the program without their knowledge, and had to opt out if they wanted to keep their purchases to themselves. Customers who triggered a Beacon-enabled action also prompted a “toast pop-up” allowing them to block the update, but critics complained that the messages could be ignored or missed entirely by users who click away from the screen too quickly. If the pop-up went unclicked for 20 seconds, the transaction went through the Beacon system.
And, like David Hasselhoff, Beacon may be even creepier than it first appeared. Research firm Computer Associates found that the service tracks users’ activities after they’ve logged off the site and moved on to other Web destinations. Even members who’ve specifically declined to have their off-Facebook movements broadcast to their friends can be tracked.
“Facebook Ads introduce both a privacy concern and an annoyance factor, and give the user only marginal control over the annoyance concern and zero control over the privacy concern,” Benjamin Googins of Computer Associates wrote on the firm’s blog last week. “It connects my online actions to my Facebook account-collecting and aggregating an even broader array of data in one database. Yikes.”
The Beacon backlash was as furious as it was predictable: A two-week-old online petition against the program already has 65,000 backers (link can be viewed only by registered Facebook members), forcing Facebook late last week to ask users to opt in to the feature. The company also vowed that it “is not sharing user information with participating sites and never sells user information.”
But substantial damage had already been done. The protests reportedly spurred advertiser Overstock.com to pull out of Beacon, and Travelocity-which Facebook had promoted as a launch advertiser-also opted to stay on the sidelines.
What does all this have to do with wireless? Not much. yet. But mobile operators may have more to gain-and to lose-than any other player on the interactive advertising field. Not only can they track each subscriber’s activity on the network, they also have demographic data such as names, addresses and ages that can help advertisers deliver highly targeted marketing messages.
Those ads often make for a win-win outcome for advertisers and consumers, and social-networking profiles can help target those marketing messages with unprecedented accuracy. A 20-something urbanite could see ads for an upcoming show by her favorite band, for instance, while affluent, middle-aged businessmen could receive a come-on from Tommy Bahama.
Operators are salivating at the thought of monetizing the valuable information, of course, but a misstep could prove disastrous. Verizon Wireless recently provoked a few howls of outrage when it quietly began requiring subscribers to opt out of allowing the operator to share their customer proprietary network information (CPNI). Mobile marketing efforts that draw more media attention are sure to draw the attention of legislators eager to fill the role of crusading consumer advocate.
So it behooves wireless companies to view Beacon as the lighthouse its name conjures: a highly visible warning to steer clear. Because as Facebook is discovering, the digital advertising playground is a treacherous place.