The Implications of Improved Attribution and Measurability for Antitrust and Privacy in Online Advertising Markets

The digital revolution has often been heralded for the transformation it has produced in advertising. The ability to collect data about the individual, automatically parse it, and then serve ads on that basis has transformed advertisers’ ability to target ads and show specific ads to specific groups of consumers. This targeting revolution has led to the emergence of paid search advertising, where search engines serve ads on the basis of billions of possible search terms. In online display advertising, the targeting revolution has led to contextually targeted banner ads that accurately match an ad to the content the consumer is reading. This same revolution has also led to behaviorally targeted banner ads where the advertiser can use past browsing behavior to target ads. The digital advertising revolution’s implications for measuring advertising effectiveness are far less discussed in academic literature. Tracking a user’s clickstream across websites allows far more accurate measurement of different advertisements’ performance. Though this revolution has not attracted much academic interest, the advertising industry has responded swiftly to the increased potential for accurately measuring advertising effectiveness. A new type of advertising firm and technology has emerged, specializing in the measurement and attribution of advertising performance. By 2009, 31% of Internet firms were actively using cross-channel attribution technologies. These technologies allow advertisers to assess and compare the relative performance of different online, and sometimes offline, advertising platforms. Advertising platforms can include search advertising, display advertising, social media, and direct mail campaigns.