C’mon Google , give me a break!

I’ve been watching the evolution of GMail with great interest. Not only because as an email marketer, I need to be able to guide clients on how to adapt their email programs to accommodate GMail’s restrictions - the most immediately challenging being GMail’s handling of graphics, forwards and spam. But that’s another post…

You see, those are really technical issues. They’re easily addressed and it’s my job to address them. We already have strategies in place for our clients, and are working hard to ensure all of our work is “GMail friendly” now.

Nope, it’s the whole contextual ads and privacy debate that has me… well, frankly, spooked.

In reality, GMail advertising isn’t much different from the personalization features employed by many online retailers. Serve up information that’s contextually relevant to what the visitor is already interested in. Email programs already scan content to provide spam filtering and virus checking, among other services. According to Google, this makes it ok because it’s already happening somewhere else.

Let’s conveniently ignore the fact that what the visitor is looking at is a private conversation.

Imagine if your cellular phone company had a technology that would “listen” to your telephone conversation and then send text ads to your cell phone related to the “content” of your phone call. And said it was ok, because the eavesdropper is a computer not a person!

Hey - as a marketer I would love to have an ad for my company’s services pop up every time a VP of Marketing asks a colleague to refer an email services company or a digital communications consultant or an Internet marketing consultant. As would every other agency in the business. But I certainly wouldn’t want my competitor’s advertising showing up next to an email message I send to a customer, who happens to be a GMail subscriber, that contains a proposal for our services.

How far will we allow “contextually relevant” advertising to go?

For example, I send Acme Corp. a proposal to provide email services at a rate of $X per thousand emails. My competitor’s contextually relevant ad “sniffs” this information and uses it to present the following text ad?
If you’re paying more than $(X-5) CPM, you’re being overcharged for email delivery! Click here to save now.

Can’t you see the possibilities.

OK - so that’s not what GMail does. At least not yet. Ad copy isn’t dynamically changed according to the content of an email message and maybe it never will be. But haven’t we opened the door, if only just a crack?

Google is presenting this invasion of privacy as a “benefit” to the user.

Perhaps in our increasingly apathetic culture, it is. For my part, I’m not averse to a bit of work in exchange for the right to hold a private conversation without having it exploited for financial gain.

If you want to send me “contextually relevant” messages, cut me a cheque for some of the profits. After all, if I’m doing the work of having the conversation that enables your marketing, I’ve just become the content producer. And last I checked, content producer was a paying job…