Fighting Marketing Drones Over 3rd Party Web Tracking?

Web Sawy asks: "I work for a large-ish company (4000+). We have a number of disparate divisions and, believe it or not, varying knowledge on How Technology Works. It was brought to my attention that one part of the corporate website has been using 'a third party tool' to 'compare the performance of individual ads'. In other words, some external party is tracking user surfing habits. How does one go about educating co-workers on the evils of these third party services, which are currently 'helping' the Marketing department? What technologies are people using to do this type of reporting to help the Marketing department generate their numbers? In the world that I live, I can't even see those third-party ads (or hidden images!). I certainly can build my own user tracking system using existing technologies but before I fight that major uphill battle, I wonder if Slashdot readers would share their insights."

Comments

Lies!

[Tuxinatorium]

There is no internet. It is a fabrication of the online news media. Those infidels should be hit with a shoe. I triple guarantee you, you are reading this message on paper, not on the internet. I speak only the facts.

Is it legal?

[GreyyGuy]

First I would check your site's legal disclaimers on privacy and the like. If it says anything about not sharing information with third party vendors, then contact your legal group and the market droids and tell them bad things have happened. That will be your biggest stick.

After that, find out what statistics the marketing people want and see if you can write somethign that will give them the same info, or provide some anonomized statistics that they can give to a thrid party for analysis. Marketing sorts are usually just ignorant of what they do, so if you tell them you can do for free what they just paid $200,000 or more for, they will listen.

Why they do this

[dacarr]

You are not marketing. You did not go to school to be in marketing. Therefore, according to Marketing, you don't know shite from shinola. It doesn't matter if you have a doctorate, have coded C for 20 years, scored 300 on a standard IQ test, taught yourself Perl, MySQL, PHP, HTML, ASP, Java, and C, or cut your teeth on a PDP-10, you are an imbecile because you can't (or won't) sell.

Therefore, you have to bite back if you want this to be done. My suggestion is to build the applet, install it, let it run for a few weeks, and demonstrate the results at the next meeting. If you can prove you can do it for less money, you can look favorable to the higher ups. Marketing will still look at you, the puny code geek, through their noses, but you will also have the satisfaction of beating them.

Re:Why they do this

[dubl-u]

You are not marketing. You did not go to school to be in marketing. Therefore, according to Marketing, you don't know shite from shinola. It doesn't matter if you have a doctorate, have coded C for 20 years, scored 300 on a standard IQ test, taught yourself Perl, MySQL, PHP, HTML, ASP, Java, and C, or cut your teeth on a PDP-10, you are an imbecile because you can't (or won't) sell.

Thank goodness we technical people don't feel that way about marketroids.

My suggestion is to build the applet, install it, let it run for a few weeks, and demonstrate the results at the next meeting.

That's a good strategy. I'd add two more things. First, provide them with something they want that the vendor doesn't provide. Often, what people really hate about outside vendors is that they don't have much control, so if you use a short-cycle iterative process (e.g., Extreme Programming), they may be instantly happier because they feel like they are in the driver's seat.

Second, learn how to express your objections and offerings in marketing terms. E.g., don't talk to them about right to privacy; talk to them about bad PR.

Third Parties EVIL!

[spRed]

1. Third party tracking
2. ?????
3. EVIL unleashed on the world!

Did someone with a third party tool steal your girlfriend or something? Are they reselling user information? Is it too closely cuppled with your user database? Purchase history?

No? Then there is no big deal. Go with whatever technology works for you.

What does it do?

[Blaine Hilton]

Some 3rd party tools can be very helpful and are cheaper then building your own. The problem though is some of these are really adware and spyware. You should ask around and see if your boos and coworkers know what spyware is. Explain that your company is using spyware (if it is) and you should also explain the benefits by using a different solution.

What evils are you talking about?

[Alpha27]

You haven't detailed the evils these tools pose to the users. As others have said already on the comments, check to see if they are violating any privacy agreements your site has in place.

If the software works, why reinvent the wheel? In some way, they just said you valuable time but not having you build something inhouse that's already available. If they are comfortable with it, then good.

I'm curious what you describe as being evil. If it helps to keep a site up and running, more efficiently if your companies main source of revenue is from the ads, then what's wrong with that? I prefer getting ads that are targetted to my interest. We all know a majority of us will not fill out a form of turn-ons/offs as for what we're interested in. Instead, user tracking is fine, as long as the site doesn't violate my privacy.

Also, I hope your complaint isn't about why they didn't decide to build it inhouse instead, then that just sounds more like a programmer's power struggle.

Futility or leveraging a greater power

[MadAhab]

Let's get this straight. You are want the folks from marketing to be less evil. That's hilarious. The answer, of course, is to stomp them with a greater evil: find someplace this conflicts with stated privacy policies and alert the company lawyers.

Back right around the time the whole DoubleClick/Abacus thing was going down, a marketer brought up in a meeting how great it would be if we bought their service so we could learn who was looking at our sites and send them stuff. After carefully explaining that the whole scheme was dicey, and we would have no way of knowing if the data was even any good at all (though it was sure to be expensive), I further explained that this was a major privacy conflict brewing, and that it was likely to get our company in particular, which was/is a large household name, a lot of negative publicity, hostile letters, hate mail, and if we were unlucky, front-page attention on how Evil our company was. The response from Marketing? "Wow, so when can we sign up for it." Sam, you fucking idiot. I was right, of course: lucky for you our department didn't get on that train before it crashed (and lucky it crashed before it got out of the station).

So that's what you can expect from Marketing.