Google’s 2007 acquisition of the data firm Doubleclick initiated a competitive squabble inside the technology industry that incited legislators, regulators, and White House officials in Washington, DC to worry that Internet advertising applications and processes that facilitated the delivery of targeted advertising could compromise consumer privacy. The ensuing debate threatened the reputation and the growth of the nascent digital advertising industry.

We put together a coalition of five leading marketing trade associations – the Association of National Advertisers, the American Association of Advertising Agencies, the Direct Marketing Association, the Network Advertising Initiative, and the IAB. Acting with the guidance of IAB’s policy counsel, Venable LLC, we recruited the Council of Better Business Bureaus to help us develop the industry’s first comprehensive self-regulatory program and mechanism to protect consumer privacy in behavioral advertising, which we spun into a co-owned, non-profit organization called the Digital Advertising Alliance. The DAA program, known as “Your Adchoices,” launched in 2009 and featured an icon that alerted consumers that the ads they were receiving were aimed at them based on their interests, and offered them easy methods to find out how their data was being deployed and by whom, and to opt out of behavioral advertising. The DAA program was subsequently adapted and adopted in the European Union, Canada, and Argentina, was designed to work in mobile app environments, and was further adapted to help consumers understand how political ads are being targeted to them.

At its 2009 launch, the DAA program was lauded by the White House, the Commerce Department, and the Federal Trade Commission, whose Chair called it “self-regulation with teeth.” More than 400 technology, media, and advertising companies and thousands of brands participate in the program. The icon is served on more than 1 trillion ad impressions each month; a 2021 survey showed that 82% of U.S. consumers recognized the DAA Adchoices icon. More than 40 million consumers have visited DAA’s sites to learn about and exercise choices about how their data is used. In the 13 years since the DAA’s launch, the U.S. Federal Government has not enacted privacy legislation harmful to advertisers.