Online Ad Targeters Collecting Your Data Over a "Lifetime." Follows Yahoo's Digital Privacy Flip Flop

Online marketers want it both ways--to be able to closely track and target you in the short-term and also store longer term data profiles.  We believe that's one reason why Yahoo! just announced it was abandoning its previous committement limiting how long it would retain your information.  Now, one of the leaders in behavioral targeting--Audience Science--has announced a new feature providing "Lifecycle Management."   The Audience Science "Gateway DMP" that gives digital marketers  "better ability to collect and aggregate huge volumes of data from disparate sources..."  As Behavioral Insider reports, "The feature supports a fundamental shift in online target marketing, notes AudienceScience CEO Jeff Hirsch. Until now marketers used data management platforms per transaction or campaign, rather than to develop a long-term relationship with customers. It's a shift in how data is being used, he says. The lifecycle of a campaign spans from the consumer's first interest in a product or service through the purchase process. Previously, AudienceScience had stored information for 12 weeks because the focus remained on immediate purchase intent items. Now brand marketers want a longer view of consumer activities."

As Audience Science explains, "Continuous data collection now gives the Gateway DMP access to 300+ billion events taking place online on any given day. For the company’s 1,800 advertising and publishing partners, this milestone represents the highest level of ability to effectively target ad campaigns over a longer period of time, and to better understand and relate to their online audiences...Ad campaigns can be optimized for not only generating short-term leads and driving purchase intent at the start of the campaign, they can also be changed to address the post-purchase customer and even the customer segments that might consider a purchase later in the campaign cycle."

The move by Yahoo, Audience Science and others to hold on and monetize your information is part of the "Big Data" Ad Exchange world we confront.