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Net marketers to develop user data standards
By Reuters
Special to CNET News.com
November 15, 1999, 4:30 a.m. PT
SAN FRANCISCO--Internet marketers should move a step closer today to knowing just about everything about everybody in cyberspace, when nearly 25 makers of Internet marketing, tracking and analysis applications announce they are building a standard way to create, store and exchange data on Web users.
CPEX, which stands for Customer Profile Exchange, is targeting the release of the first version of the standard for June 2000.
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The CPEX standard would enable an e-commerce site that stores customer information in an Oracle database, for example, to combine that data with information collected by telemarketers for its print catalog.
"Businesses don't have a good picture of who their customers are and what they need, so they can't service them well," said Matt Cutler, co-founder and chief e-business intelligence officer for net.Genesis of Cambridge, Mass., a maker of Web site analysis software. "It's our organization's point of view that having an integrated customer view is critical, because, in the Net economy, your competition is just a click away."
The announcement by CPEX is due at the Personalization Summit, a conference sponsored by Net Perceptions on the role of personalization marketing.
Proponents of Web tracking like to call it personalization--the back-end applications that let Web users sign up for regular stock quotes, get the local weather and be greeted by name when they log onto a portal. It is even more useful for marketers, who can use the same collected information to target ads and promotions based on users' profiles.
To do that, marketers and Web publishers rely on a variety of applications from a range of vendors, most of them providing only a piece of the puzzle. It is often difficult to merge the personal data collected when a user buys a product online, for example, with that collected as he or she clicks around from Web site to Web site.
Vignette, an Austin, Texas-based software maker, got the CPEX ball rolling. The consortium is chaired by Siebel Systems, with marketing co-chaired by net.Genesis and Vignette. Working side by side will be several companies that are fierce rivals, such as Andromedia and net.Genesis, and Oracle and Siebel.
"It will remain the decision support system that differentiates companies," said Brad Husick, vice president of standards and evangelism for Vignette. "We're saying we shouldn't argue over the language we speak, but over what we do with that information and the certain conclusions we derive."
Aberdeen Group analyst Donovan Gow said the CPEX initiative appears to be strong. "One impressive thing they've done in the short time they've been around is signing up a stellar list of participants, getting traction pretty quickly," Gow said.
"Next, they'll have to prove to the end user that it's in their interest to share the information, and hope it catches on."
However, as those end users find out more about the tracking and data mining that is going on, some are starting to balk. "There's an old saying that if you automate a mess, you just get a bigger mess," said consumer advocate Jason Catlett, who operates a site called JunkBusters. "The sharing of personal information is a big mess in this country right now. That said, the CPEX developers are clearly thinking about privacy because they know it's a potential party-stopper."
Catlett's site offers information on how consumers can hide from marketers online and off.
Catlett said CPEX will make it much easier for marketers to trade consumer profiles, requiring infrastructure to ensure the fair handling of consumer information. He said he had been briefed by CPEX and is encouraged. "I think it's a good idea if standards provide a way for companies to easily abide by fair information practices," he said.
The plan is to include a way to embed privacy controls in the CPEX standardized information. Forrester analyst Eric Schmitt says this is probably in response to the Federal Trade Commission's workshop on consumer privacy online, held on Nov. 8.
"The most immediate benefits of a standard data model for a customer are clearly to the corporations, not to individuals," Schmitt said. "CPEX, by nature of the environment we're in now, is going to be under pressure to do more than develop this standard in an ethical vacuum. They'll be more sensitized to the privacy concerns." |
