Welcome to the Q&A, a new occasional bonus issue that will help you get to know the leaders, builders, and thinkers working to give us back control over our online lives. Let me know what you think and who else you’d like to hear from at [email protected].
Scott Spencer, CEO/co-founder of Rewarded Interest
Scott has over 25 years experience in ad tech and consulting. He developed the initial advertising exchange for DoubleClick which was acquired by Google. He is also responsible for the creation of the Coalition for Better Ads and its model for improving ad experience through incentive alignment.
1. How do you describe what you do to people who are not in the technology industry?
I am working to shift the power dynamic of the web back to the user. The implicit tradeoff of free content for your attention to personalized advertising is broken. The experience of being interrupted to consent on every site you go to is broken.
I’ve created a better experience online. A free tool that lets you automate your consent preferences and skip annoying cookie popups while improving your privacy. A tool that blocks unwanted tracking. And a new deal for people to get a share of what advertisers spend to show you ads.
2. What is your origin story? What made you care about this work and enter your field?
I have always loved the open internet. The idea that content can be easily created and published online. Over time advertising has become the dominant way to pay for this free content. But the “implicit deal” with consumers – that tracking and targeting ads is a fair exchange for free content – was made without their choice. My goal is to help consumers exercise their right to control how they are tracked, by whom, and to get a fair share if they allow it.
I first entered the online industry when I joined DoubleClick. Back then, there wasn’t even agreement on what is an “impression” for advertising. The problems were numerous and the secondary implications fraught. I helped create tools to make rich media (at the time, defined as anything that wasn’t a static image) easier to create and deploy. Later, I would end up creating the Coalition for Better Ads to make popups and auto-play video ads go away across the web. I partnered with Adobe to develop a new rich media format that was easier to create and deploy, only to launch an effort to deprecate support for Flash when its security flaws made it a conduit for fraud and malware.
These efforts eventually led me to create Google’s Ads Privacy and Safety team, bringing together anti-fraud, creative policy enforcement, malware detection, and privacy controls under a single team. It turns out the trend of abusing these new tools had continued, and more work was required to combat the bad actors that were trying to harm consumers. Lack of trust was not only bad for everyone, but it drove people to opt out of the advertising ecosystem completely with ad blockers and other tools – hurting the ability to provide the open access to content that drove me to the internet in the first place.
Today, I am focusing on the issues of privacy and the failures of cookie banners. What was initially conceived as a way to give users transparency and control has become a meaningless message that people would rather skip than engage with. The challenge is not just that they are interruptive, but that publishers and site owners have entire teams and companies designed to increase consent rates without any incentive to improve comprehension or consideration. Well meaning regulation has further made this an antagonistic relationship since consent to targeting of ads is a significant financial benefit for the publisher while privacy advocates push for more global opt outs.
And this is accelerating with agentic use cases. As AI Chatbot interfaces contemplate commercial offers embedded in responses (i.e., agentic ads) consent dialogs are an afterthought. Consumers needs tools and services that are on their side – to allow for considered decisions when people have time to think about them. And, solutions that align the incentives so it’s not an us vs. them model of consent.
3. What book(s), paper(s), or project(s) influenced how you think about the relationship between platforms and the communities who use them?
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte – Data can be insightful and even beautiful when presented the right way. Or it can be hidden and duplicitous.
The Service Profit Chain by Earl Sasser – Incentives matter and doing the right thing can improve the bottom line.
4. What are you working on right now that you are most excited about?
I’m focusing on fixing consent in a traditional and agentic world before it’s too late. There are already efforts to erode consumer protections in the name of fewer consent banners. And the agentic world is ignoring consent altogether. We don’t need to give up the right to control our data, our identity in the name of a few fewer clicks.
Instead, there is the opportunity to give consumers more control and a better experience. Websites have companies trying to get you to click allow all, why don’t consumers have someone helping them to deal with consent? The goal is a consumer’s agent – a set of tools that are designed to help get the consumer what they want out of their online experience. If you want to allow targeted ads, do so on your terms. If you want to just block everything, that’s your call. All in a user experience that streamlines the process, avoiding the constant friction of consent dialogs.
5. If you could get everyone in this space to pay attention to one under-appreciated problem or opportunity, what would it be?
Your data and identity are yours. Online transactions, browsing, tap-to-pay – all these interactions leak identity and create data. It’s not a lost cause. There is an opportunity to protect consumers and enable the low-friction transactions we all enjoy without dropping data breadcrumbs everywhere, that is, unless you want to because you are getting something for it you actually want.
The Rewarded Interest Chrome plug-in is available now at https://www.rewardedinterest.com/ .
