How should we advertise on the Internet?
Nowadays privacy is all the rage. Every single thing we interact with connected to the internet is trying to follow our every single step. Trying to get data on our behaviour. But what behaviour?
Every commercial we see, hear (or our phone hears) and click on is collected to big databanks in faceless server rooms around the world.
We asked for it.
Back in the day advertising on the Internet was very impersonal. People were annoyed by websites trying to push products that they weren't interested at all. The solution was to track and gather information on people how they behave on the Internet and then show them personal offers. We were truly #blessed.
Advertisers turned to stalkers.
When mobile phones became smart they finally linked our lives completely to the Internet. The advertisers had unlimited power.
What could be the alternative?
Now that the headless CMS solutions are growing in popularity, they should include tracking and advertisement services instead of some monolith. In Europe France and Austria have already ruled Google Analytics illegal as a 3rd party tracker.
The solution could be that the website itself gives the device an generated id or uuid that is not based on the users details. With this id and timestamp we can register page views and ad clicks. We also can easily add UTM parameters to the ad links.
These details should tell enough about what ads were seen and clicked but meaningless to any other party other than the site admin. The admin would provide statistics to the advertiser that can be confirmed with the UTM parameter data.
What about the ad personalisation?
That's the beauty of it, it's not personal anymore! The site admins will curate what the site will ultimately advertise. The result should be more natural like in the real world.
Conclusion.
Many sites need ad revenue to survive but people hate tracking monoliths invading our privacy. Embed an unified advertisement solutions to CMS systems as an alternative. Solutions that keep users as anonymous as possible.