• Olympic kerfuffles begin already. Just biked past them setting up for hand over at buckingham palace. #
• been playing with Google Wave for a couple of weeks now & still not convinced. Only having a handful of people to chat w prob not helping #

• Blue skies, Apple Fest yesterday and a cracking bike ride today sees the last full weekend of BST '09 off with a glorious autumnal glow #

• Blue skies, Apple Fest yesterday and a cracking bike ride today sees the last full weekend of BST '09 off with a glorious autumnal glow #

Back in January 2008 I met with a couple of guys from the behavioural advertising company Phorm. Shortly after, I wrote a pretty rosy blog post about their proposition.

Positivity about Phorm has been, and continues to be, unpopular, but I haven't worked in display advertising for over a year now (I moved into paid search) and so I hadn't given much thought to my one-sided initial appraisal of Phorm since writing it. (Some will suggest that I didn't give it much thought at the time!) Last week, however, twitterfeed suffered a technical 'hiccup', and all my blog posts were accidentally automatically tweeted about, as if they were new posts. My old post about Phorm was brought back to the attention of my twitter followers, and to that of anyone who was searching twitter for Phorm-related tweets.

As you might imagine, I've since received one or two twitter mentions of criticism. I owe many thanks in particular to @zootcadillac who suggested I revisit the topic, and who sent me a link to this recent (October 2009) report of the All Parliamentary Communications Group.

In the report, evidence submitted by Phorm makes a forceful case for the legality of their system, and for their principles of collecting and storing as little data as possible (much less than Google, for example). Testimony from Gill Davison, on the other hand, suggests that allowing Phorm's proposed interception of ISP data would be akin to allowing one merchant to covertly listen in on a customer's phone call as they ordered services or goods from a competing merchant. Needless to say, as Davison points out, this kind of practice is not permitted in telephone communications.

Imagine a world where covert communications surveillance was allowed, and indeed was commonplace. If one merchant could do it, without repercussion from the consumer, no doubt all would do it; a level playing field would result. Davison's analogy may not be totally damning then.

However, such a world would not be right (and will never exist). It's not the merchant's rights we have to worry about, it's the consumer's. As the All Parliamentary Communications Group concludes, Phorm's proposed system is an opt-out one, and one that cannot be allowed. Worse still for Phorm, they have already conducted secret trials of their technology, where even opting out was not possible. They have been condemned for this, and rightly so.

With cookie-based behavioural targeting systems, the consumer is in complete control of their participation. If they want to disassociate themselves from any targeting profile that has been established, they merely clear their cookies. Moreover, together the IAB and Google provide facilities for the consumer to actively prevent a lot of cookie-based behavioural targeting from operating on their browser.

The interception of ISP data in ad targeting systems would allow the consumer considerably less freedom. As the All Parliamentary Communications Group report points out, Phorm will not be operating in the UK in the foreseeable future.

Take a look at the report and form your own opinion. It addresses a number of hot topics, in addition to behavioural targeting. Thanks again to @zootcadillac for sending me the link.

This past week I’ve been in Mountain View, California, for Google’s annual Website Optimiser and Google Analytics Authorised Consultant summit. Harvest Digital gained the WOAC and GAAC accreditations at the end of September.

Contrary to Dickie’s ( @thesearchbaron ) accusation, the summit was much more than just GPAITS (Google’s Piss About in the Sun). The WOAC/GAAC summit served primarily to strengthen the WOAC and GAAC network, which operates as Google’s support for the Website Optimiser and Google Analytics products. Plus it wasn’t even sunny for the first two days.

Google has quite a presence in Mountain View. My first clue about this came when the officer at San Francisco immigration saw I was staying in Mountain View and asked immediately if I was visiting Google. Someone told me that three years ago Google had only one or two buildings in the area; now, they must have twenty separate office buildings in Mountain View, maybe more. The company provides free WiFi to the whole of Mountain View, and the cab driver that took me to and from the office each day told me that eighty percent of his fares were driving people to and from Google. With all the office buildings and their support staff, the cab drivers and hoteliers, and the Google developers and executives themselves, the economic contribution that the company makes locally is very substantial (and that’s not to mention all the people around the world whose jobs exist because of Google’s role in the digital industry).

I didn’t see the main Google ‘campus’ in Mountain View (the so-called Googleplex), but the buildings where we were meeting for the summit were impressive enough.

The canteen food, all free, deserves a special mention: on my first day I served myself rib-eye steak for lunch; on my next, foie gras. I’ve often thought when visiting the Google offices in London that somehow the whole atmosphere feels a bit staged, but the execution of ‘Googliness’ in Mountain View felt much more genuine; I think ‘Googliness’ must sit a little better with the American culture than it does with our more cynical British one.

There were three hundred and three attendees at this year’s WOAC/GAAC summit. I estimate about two hundred and ninety of those attendees had an Apple iPhone – I can’t imagine there being many other occasions when there are quite so many iPhones in the same mobile phone cell.

Practically the first thing we were told was not to tweet or blog about anything that was presented without the express permission of the presenter. Fair enough I suppose: much of what we heard was either a client-specific case study, or a preview of yet-to-be-released technological features. While I’ll be sharing much of this stuff with my colleagues at Harvest (enough at least to convince them that it was worth sending me to California for a week), I can’t publish it here.

I will offer some general description though. First of all, it was really refreshing to attend a conference where I wasn’t constantly being sold to. There were two obvious commercial interests that defined the summit: the first was that of the conference attendees: we were there to learn about how to offer more and better services as consultants (no objections there!). The other was Google’s, and they were quite overt about it: advertisers that use GWO and GA properly are more successful, and they spend more money on Google AdWords (again, no objections there – ad agencies stand to make money from advertising spend as much as the media supplier does).

Most of the content that was presented had to do with what was possible with advanced use of the GWO and GA products, through clever application of the API, or through clever integration with other technologies or adaptation to a client’s particular needs.

On the WOAC day, much of what was presented had to do with how best to use and sell the Website Optimiser product. As Dan Siroker ( @dsiroker ) pointed out, GWO is for challenging assumptions, or as Tim Ash ( @tim_ash ) put it, it’s for correcting the client’s false perception that their ugly baby (a rubbish website) is handsome. As Google likes to think of it, GWO is the anti-HiPPO (the HiPPO being the “Highest Paid Person’s Opinion”).

With GWO, as with GA, much of the challenge for us as consultants is figuring out how best to work a client engagement: how to communicate with various client departments, each with their own concerns, or how best to manage an engagement where multiple agencies are involved.

My week in Mountain View has brought me a little closer to the support network that exists in the combination of Google and the WOAC and GAAC partners, and it’s revealed how much potential there is for my agency’s expertise in the Website Optimiser and Google Analytics products to create value for our clients and for ourselves. The next step is for me to start thinking about relaying what I’ve learnt back to my colleagues... (how to make sure Harvest sends me again next year...).

• wow! check out that sunset… #
• expecting non-stop boyzone to be played on jukebox at work tomorrow #

• wow! check out that sunset… #
• expecting non-stop boyzone to be played on jukebox at work tomorrow #

• Thank you fellow harvest people for a refreshingly outdoors-y weekend away! The best one yet imho #

• Thank you fellow harvest people for a refreshingly outdoors-y weekend away! The best one yet imho #