9 ms·

Brands need to fire adtech

242 points by hunglee2 10y ago

mark_l_watson 10y ago
I also submitted this great article. I have been thinking of adtech because I have several web sites, and run ads on none of them because I don't want irrelevant material on my sites. But, since I mostly have content about AI, semantic web, and food + nutrition + machine learning, I would be happy to place ads for specific products and services that I personally like. But I don't know of any ad placing service that, as a small traffic web host, would help me approach companies that I would like to advertise on my sites.
- sfifs 10y ago
  You've pretty pretty much articulated one of the reasons for existence of ad tech industry. Inventory on the web is highly fragmented and ad sales one small site at a time is not really scalable for anyone to make a living out of. Hence ad networks emerged to aggregate inventory. Now you probably have a "real" day job and don't really need to make even the website pay out, let alone make a living out of it. Not so for many other people who do make a living out of content.
- digitalzombie 10y ago
  Have you look at cj.com? One of the startup I used to work at is basically slickdeals where they just grab a bunch of coupons from cj and put it on their website. I'd imagine you can filter the coupons you want from them after they throw a tons at ya and post them on your website. Was just a programmer so I didn't deal with CJ directly to know how they work.
- manigandham 10y ago
  Why do you assume what you personally like is what your readers will like? But relevancy to your sites and readers is what adtech is all about. It doesn't help anyone to have irrelevant ads, they do care about making sure the fit is as good as possible. Stay away from the crappy "recommended links" widgets and popup videos and you'll find plenty of ad networks that can help.
  - srtjstjsj 10y ago
    It took you one sentence to refute your own claim about the quality of adtech ads -- you recommend them and then say don't use the most popular/successful/well-known ad systems.
    - manigandham 10y ago
      I'm not sure what you think I refuted here. You realize not every network is the same right? When it comes to relevancy then yes, many (but not all) ad networks do well at it because irrelevant ads don't help anyone. But the quality of the actual ad content and user experience matters. There are annoying ad formats like outstream video, interstitials, in-image ads, and more that just arent worth it. Same goes with the taboola widgets, which do work since they get millions of clicks daily, but are usually filled with low-quality clickbait which reflects poorly on the parent site. The most popular ad networks are the ones that have the lowest standards and run the worst ads because that's how you get more scale. It's simple math and has no bearing on how good they are. And yes you should avoid them if you want better "quality" in both ad content and UX.
- acomjean 10y ago
  I've noticed a few sites seem to have dedicated sponsors, which are in line with what they talk about. http://www.xlr8yourmac.com http://www.xlr8yourmac.com seems you use "OWC" other world computing as its primary sponsor http://strobist.blogspot.com/ http://strobist.blogspot.com/ (a flash lighting site) seems to have ads from a few flash companies and the 'midwest photo exchange' and a few flash copies. I'm not sure how those relationships were built. In college the newspaper had a dedicated team of people going out to sell ads for the paper. They had a "cut sheet" with information about how many papers where printed and how they were distributed..
unabridged 10y ago
Youtube is used horribly by advertisers. Don't make a video ad that plays before the content that people can't wait to click Skip. Just make a video that's entertaining/informative and post it to youtube. People will share it for free and watch it willingly.
- amorphid 10y ago
  I don't want to see ads. Period. In fact, I pay for YouTube Red & Google Play Music specifically to avoid ads. Ads suck.
- arkades 10y ago
  If it were trivial to make entertaining/informative ad copy, I imagine more ad copy would be.
- sfifs 10y ago
  I work at an advertiser. Most so called "viral" ads we've researched involve significant levels of paid impressions before they got to a "viralable" level. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Also it's significantly difficult to make a highly entertaining ad as well as convey your product benefits/superiority at the same time - strains creativity of the ad agencies though some are adapting faster to the online ad formats more than others. At the end of the day all those "emotional equities" that highly engaging and emotional ads convey have mainly a role in creating a positive image around your brand - making people actually buy is very difficult without actually conveying your product's value and benefits.
  - fwn 10y ago
    Who would have thought that actually adding value to peoples lives is hard. Much harder than paying someone to force others to see something.
    - sfifs 10y ago
      Sarcasm aside, sadly, if you build it they will come doesn't particularly work. Say you're made a new flavor of ketchup. Your product tests show people love it much better than anything else in the market. Arguably you are adding value to those people's lives with it. Now it won't sell at all and recoup your investment and arguably actually add value to people's lives unless they know about it and try it - hence advertising.
aviraldg 10y ago
This had to happen, but I weep for all the great tech created at Google enabled by these ad dollars that may not have existed otherwise. Hope they can transition to an alternative business model relatively quickly.
- manigandham 10y ago
  Relax, advertising is not going away. This is silly FUD article.
- exclusiv 10y ago
  Adtech will be fine but I do think we'll see a bigger shift of dollars into a bucket called content marketing versus traditional ad placement. So think about what Red Bull does with the content they develop and sponsor. YouTube should focus more on that market - helping match their own celebrities with brands and taking a cut of sponsored content versus a cut of ad revenue based on pageviews. The issue here is really not adtech; it's a conscious decision by Google to disregard the free but horrible speech of users in chasing pageviews and video consumption. And it's now coming back to bite them. I'm surprised it took that long. YouTube comments are vitriolic and a breeding ground for trolls.
  - srtjstjsj 10y ago
    People say horrible things in the public streets but billboard and shopwindow advertising is still tolerated there.
    - exclusiv 10y ago
      Good point. Although in this case it's more connected that the brands are subsidizing content and a site which doesn't care about hate speech and childish discussions. And parents and concerned consumers who like certain brands can easily point it out.
draw_down 10y ago
I guess I'm not sure of the value of parsing these fine distinctions between good and bad ads. Doesn't seem like the good kind are winning out. And the solution is that ad buyers need to have kinder hearts? Hmm.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Gresham's Law / Market for Lemons. Both have very strong information-theoretical roots.
sbarre 10y ago
I'm calling it now, we're heading back to #tipjartech
criddell 10y ago
I hadn't heard about the Zuckerberg's claim about authenticity on Facebook was surrounded by fraudulent ads. That's hilarious. Also, I've never thought about it before but I think the writer's claim that modern ads are really direct response marketing is right on. There is a difference.
- makomk 10y ago
  It's not even that surprising. Most of the major news sites are stuffed full of ads that look like fake news articles these days. They probably have the sense to turn them off on articles about fake news, but otherwise they don't care. You just don't hear about it as much because news sites don't generally criticise their fellow news sites in the same way they do sites like Facebook and YouTube that are a threat to their entire industry.
Tistel 10y ago
I used to work at a AdTech company. At the start of a campaign, we would put a lot of work into getting the ad campaign to show up on a highly curated set of apps that had desirable user for the campaign (men like sports score apps, women like whatever). But, near the end of the campaign, if we were getting paid for X clicks (or horror of horrors, paid per conversion) and the campaign was not projected to pull off the deal, we had to open it open to a sea of garbage apps to hit the target. There is so much fraud. There are apps out there that are known to be mostly bot users. I was trying to free up some drive space by removing art assets from campaigns that had ended months earlier. Several campaigns had the banner art turned off so there is nothing to click that were getting hundreds of clicks per day. There was just a bug in the click fraud bot that forgot to check if the art assets was still live that was just hitting the click URL blindly. I skip all the ads too.
- snarf21 10y ago
  I think this is the real issue. Companies would rather reach 100 real, interested potential customers than 100K "users" that are all fraud and views on click farm pages. At the end of the day, it is about how many people come out of the bottom of the funnel and become customers, not simply the number dropped in the top. At this point, it is hard for ad tech to take this approach because customers have come to view clicks as almost worthless so they hope a few real people fall down through all the fraud. There is a huge opportunity for someone to disrupt this space but it will take a new approach. It is hard to evaluate context when a lot of the web is just crap and screen scrapes of other sites and they all look the same. I think companies would actually pay more for the right system if it really moved the bottom line.
spamizbad 10y ago
Tech companies are taking a lot of heat here, but I think some of the blame here lies with Youtube's content creators. If I buy ad time on late-night shows on NBC, I know I don't have to worry about Jimmy Fallon opening his show with a diatribe on "White Genocide" or "How feminists are the real Hitlers" or incoherently rambling about LBGTQ tumblr teens in a sweat-stained Starwars t-shirt. Several Youtube content creators want to be able to freely oscillate between their core content topic (gaming, pop culture, etc) and random "edgy" topics. You're free to do that, and you shouldn't be censored, but you are not entitled to ad dollars. They claim they're just trying to be "real" and "authentic" with their audiences, but how is it "authentic" to rant against Jews, Muslims, immigrants and neoliberal globalism while lining your pocket with ad revenue from Johnson & Johnson on a global technology platform built by immigrants/1st-gens, many of whom are jewish or muslim themselves? The cognitive dissonance is exhausting.
- lovich 10y ago
  I see your argument but I think who's fault it is in the situation is more complicated than that. Yes if the content creators were just doing this for money, they should try and curate and audience that brands want to pay for. On the flip side, these brands didn't have to jump into Internet advertising. They could have stayed focused on the nice reliable TV show advertising. They want to hit more eyeballs though and the unreliable Internet content is proving more popular with consumers who are the real product when it comes to advertising. I figure there's going to be some back and forth between content creators and brands looking to advertise until a new equilibrium is reached and all shows fall in line to the new set of norms. After that, of course, a new format will likely arise and consumers will jump ship to the new format after finding the Internets norms too boring
- logn 10y ago
  I think the author is trying to stay focused only on the issue of adtech vs (as he calls it) Madison Avenue ads. You also raise relevant points but they can be separate issues. Anyhow to your point, I think the problem is that YouTube creators don't really think of themselves as being sponsored by brands. They've internalized only that they get paid to make content people watch. And that's not entirely accurate. But for all the problems the author identified with adtech it has afforded people such as those on YouTube to enjoy what may be a fleeting era of getting paid to be genuine and uncensored. Perhaps membership fees to the platform that get allocated to creators can succeed here.
cdata 10y ago
Ad targeting can be done based on what you know about the content it is displayed against. But it seems like a lot of weight is put on what the network knows about the person accessing that content. Enabling brands to automatically opt-out of being shown adjacent to content with extreme/hateful views is only part of the problem. Ad tech must also contend with the fact that the audience has many dimensions. Someone who harbors hateful feelings for a subgroup of humanity may also be interested in a sweet deal on a pay as you go plan from AT&T.
phamilton 10y ago
My favorite version of nonsense in ads is the current mobile space. Assuming mobile data is $10/GB, a 1MB video ad costs the end user 1 cent. Quality (though not premuim) mobile ad space has a CPM of about $5, or a cost per impression of half a cent. So whenever you see an ad in a mobile app and you aren't on WiFi, you are paying 1 cent to use the app _and_ watch an ad and the publisher is getting less than half a cent (ad rev share) from the advertisers. The end user and the publisher would be better off if they just paid the publisher half a cent directly.
- mschuster91 10y ago
  > Assuming mobile data is $10/GB, a 1MB video ad costs the end user 1 cent. Yeah and then the ads aren't even remotely interesting - most of in-app video ads for me are uninteresting-as-... F2P games (Clash of clans and countless variations - just how in blazes do these actually make money?!). But what I find even more annoying: that there apparently seems to be no way for the in-app ads to check if I already have a certain application installed. It's wasted money for Deutsche Bahn to spam me with ads for their (actually highly useful) app when I already have it installed... but then again, it's bad for privacy if any adtech company can profile me based on the set of apps I have installed.
  - pille 10y ago
    > just how in blazes do these actually make money?! I'm guessing they expect to make it back on the occasional whale who can't control their spending on these types of games.
    - rtb 10y ago
      Exactly. They extract money by addicting people and taking advantage of them. It should be criminal.
      - mschuster91 10y ago
        While in general I support your opinion, there is one critical question: where should the line between legal and illegal be drawn? For example, consider DLCs, a form of IAP. In the Fallout universe, what you get as a DLC would in other franchises be an entire game... should this be made illegal too? In my opinion, not - but instead it should be made illegal to ship games with bus so serious it requires weeks of waiting for multi-GB patches so they're barely playable...
mdorazio 10y ago
I feel like the author of this article is missing the reasons behind the rise of adtech in the first place, and doesn't really address how traditional advertising can compensate. There are at least three forces at work here: 1) People straight up don't want to see ads. Ad blockers, Netflix, etc. are a natural response to this. If your medium relies on traditional ads, there's an increasingly large chance that your audience won't ever see those ads in the first place. 2) Companies want to know that their advertising dollars are actually producing results, and traditional advertising completely sucks at this. If you've never run a traditional ad campaign, I suggest giving it a try and then decide how much value you think you got out of it. You can spend thousands to millions of dollars and have absolutely no idea if your money impacted sales even the smallest amount. Compare that to adtech, where you get real data on outcomes on a regular basis. Even if it's crap data, it's often better than "well we think the brand is stronger now". 3) Traditional mediums for advertising are dying out quickly, especially with younger demographics. Newspapers used to be the prime advertising medium, and now most of them are guilting, begging, or strong-arming people into viewing their ads online. Magazines readership has been declining year over year for at least a decade. Live broadcast TV viewing among younger viewers has been flat or declining as well. Where are you supposed to find captive audiences willing to sit through your golden-age traditional advertising spots? I agree that the adtech industry is slimy and in desperate need of a shakeup, but idolizing traditional advertising while ignoring the difficulties of ads in today's world doesn't really help here.
- mschuster91 10y ago
  > Where are you supposed to find captive audiences willing to sit through your golden-age traditional advertising spots? Uh, nowhere? People already ban ads wherever they reasonably can, in part due to the fact that excesses like popup ads, layer ads etc. have been encouraged and adopted instead of dropped and people just are fed up with being treated like a walking dollar machine. The only reasonable ad slots will be where people literally cannot block them - which means in the meatspace. Classic old advertising columns are on the way of being replaced by shiny flashy LED screens, same for public transport information systems (e.g. Munich, https://www.mvg.de/services/fahrgastservice/fahrgastfernsehen.html https://www.mvg.de/services/fahrgastservice/fahrgastfernsehe...). It will get really interesting once outdoor advertising can track people... but thank God, even in surveillance-friendly UK this stuff doesn't hold for long (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-08-12/snooping-garbage-bins-in-city-of-london-ordered-to-be-disabled https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-08-12/snooping-...).
kbos87 10y ago
Adtech is partly the result of CMOs over-optimizing for measurability. Marketing & advertising has had a long standing reputation as an unmeasurable activity, half of which was a total waste. As the tools to quantify the impact of some marketing activities have gotten better, a new obsession with measurement has been born. Now we're in a place where the top insecurity of most marketers is the accusation that they aren't data driven. In the process, they over-optimize for everything that's closest to the last touch, go on a wild goose chase to quantify things that can't really be quantified, and overlook a whole host of things that actually are important, like building a brand and differentiating your offering with the people in their ideal audience who aren't currently on the verge of a purchase.
- SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
  The measurement problem is very broad: it impacts not just adtech, but finance/economics and corporate management. It's some kind of weird math fetish, no more insightful than if we believed business ideas in French were automatically better than those in English.
- baddox 10y ago
  I think you're using the term "marketing" to refer to promotion, which is just one of the traditional "four P's" of marketing. This is pretty common usage, but it's important to point out that there's a lot more to marketing than promotion, and most of it isn't as questionably valuable or ethical as advertising.
arez 10y ago
He really paints a positive picture with the EU law and that big companies are going to shift, but that won't happen. The EU law is a joke and nobody will be really punished by that I assume. I would like too have less spying and the user in the driver seat of his own data, but that won't happen, there is just too much money on the table and the adtech system is waayy to big to just vanish. It's a fucking huge hydra
SonOfLilit 10y ago
Obligatory: https://medium.com/@RickWebb/banner-fraud-doesn-t-matter-fc84413fe59c https://medium.com/@RickWebb/banner-fraud-doesn-t-matter-fc8... "Here’s a message on behalf of brand marketers everywhere.† We know about banner fraud already. We just don’t care. Seriously. It’s fine. I mean, you got us into this mess years ago, and sure, it was kind of annoying, but you know what? It is what it is. To your immense credit, you have adjusted prices downward as you’ve made banners an ever-increasing stshow, so, actually, it’s totally cool. We like them. That’s right. I said it. We like banners. So stop telling us that they are useless. Everyone does not hate banners. You’ve thrown, god, what is it, something like 400 different, new, “better” ad formats at us now. But we keep buying banners. It’s time everyone accepted the truth: we’re not buying banners from you because it’s the only thing you can sell us, we’re buying banners from you because they’re cheap and they work."
rlongstaff 10y ago
Minor correction: Google was summoned to appear before a committee of the UK Parliament, not the Government. A link to the meeting: http://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/ecd59f92-64b6-4450-96b6-83c94cbf1b68?in=14:22:07 http://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/ecd59f92-64b6-4450-96b6...
- bitmapbrother 10y ago
  What a ridiculous inquiry. There are 400 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute and these people think that Google should inspect each and every one of them for hate content. Why don't they go after all of the UK ISP's and carriers that serve hate content from UK based IP addresses?
manigandham 10y ago
> Brands are bailing from adtech No, not even close. Some ads were mishandled and with the current political climate, brand safety is now a big topic. This cycle happens every few years when the marketing/agency/media buying talent turns over and as new tech develops. At the end of the day, it's just tech. You can use it well or use it poorly. > Let's be clear about all the differences between adtech and real advertising. What? Adtech is obviously not advertising. It's a name of an industry sector that provides technology to do digital advertising (which itself is a smaller subset of the marketing technology sector). There's also no such thing as "real" advertising unless we're now going to call certain types fake. > Adtech is magic in this literal sense: it’s all about misdirection. More nonsense. Generalizing a 12-figure industry that powers a large part of the economy because of one specific platform, type of ad buying and news event is not useful. -- Here's the reality: Advertising (and moreso marketing) is all about finding the right consumers, capturing their attention, and converting that into some kind of action. Modern Adtech is primarily about that middle piece, capturing attention by distributing messaging to the right users at the right time and place. It's just plumbing. Technology that can be used for good or bad. Also, all advertising is targeted whether it's a billboard or a banner on a website. Technology has allowed us to become much more specific through data and tracking but there are both good and bad examples of this. When netflix shows you a recommendation for a show that you end up loving, that was a good ad. When you see an ad for shoes you've already bought, that's not so good. Either way it's technology that's being used with 1000s of other factors that produce that end result. Does adtech have issues? Absolutely. 99% are because it's a global industry without any oversight or regulation. There is nothing that stops companies from running knowing fake ads, there are no fines when they run malware, there are no pushbacks when their JS tags ruin performance, and there is a fundamental mismatch in how media is bought through politics and personal connections compared to the sales and performance oriented outcome on which it is judged upon. These are human and business and industry problems that are neither created by nor will be solved through technology.
fullshark 10y ago
Adtech has issues but the idea that traditional advertising which has zero feedback from users is gonna make a comeback seems silly. Paying marketers millions to launch campaigns in magazines or TV when you have no clue how it lands seems more fraudulent to me than Adtech where you can measure user impressions/clicks. This reads to me like a guy in a shrinking market lashing out at an existential threat. Disc: I work for an adtech business
- manigandham 10y ago
  These articles are all the same, complaining about adtech without any real understanding. It's just tech, quite literally plumbing, that lets marketers put messages in front of people and see what happens next. The internet has made it more capable than ever but how it's used varies greatly and there are both great and terrible examples.
tgragnato 10y ago
> What Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism” is going to be illegal a year from now in the EU anyway, thanks to the General Data Protection Regulation, aka GDPR. Mark your calendars: on 25 May 2018 will come an extinction event for adtech, because here are the fines the GDPR will impose for unpermitted harvesting of personal data: 1) “a fine up to 10,000,000 EUR or up to 2% of the annual worldwide turnover of the preceding financial year in case of an enterprise, whichever is greater (Article 83, Paragraph 4)”‘; and 2) “a fine up to 20,000,000 EUR or up to 4% of the annual worldwide turnover of the preceding financial year in case of an enterprise, whichever is greater (Article 83, Paragraph 5 & 6).” GDPR will be "great stuff" because it imposes user protection and grants basic rights. - individual mandatory notification for possible adverse impact of data breaches - right to be forgotten -> right to erasure - data portability (hello ... Apple Health, Google Fit, Microsoft Office extended/unportable format, whatsoever) - verifiable explicit consent for data collection (purpose included) These are the things that makes me proud of the EU, and I just wish that GDPR were made more visible to the general public.
- angry-hacker 10y ago
  Most likely it will turn out as the accept cookie crap every site is now showing. We just have more if those notifications... Nothing to be proud of.
  - tgragnato 10y ago
    The cookie banner is annoying ... You're right > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13802068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13802068 The last time one of these "ordering services" [https://www.justeat.it https://www.justeat.it] targeted me with ads (via sms), I tracked back the data, crawled the web for their mails, sent them a good list of laws, so they have been forced to reply and delete all my personal data in a timely manner. Never seen a single ad again, I am unsure this would have worked in the US.
    - dottedmag 10y ago
      Could you share the list of the laws to send? I find it quite problematic to force companies on Malta to do that.
sixQuarks 10y ago
I don't think this author is being fair to direct response advertising. One of the most important pillars of direct response marketing is to target effectively. That means spending a lot of time getting to know your target audience, their habits, the media they actually pay attention to. Direct response marketing done right should make advertising go from "unwelcome pest, to welcome guest" - mainly because you're targeting your audience so well. Many people may think they're doing direct response marketing, but that doesn't mean they're actually doing it.
angry-hacker 10y ago
Why are brands so scared of where their ads appear? Does it really matter? Are they measuring it? I swear there are ads left and right on every rap video that talks about killing others, snorting cocaine and snagging women. Why they want their ads appear there but no next to some lunatic creating conspiracy theory videos or whatever the hate speech videos mean. Can't they just opt out of those categories?
- abeyer 10y ago
  > I swear there are ads left and right on every rap video that talks about killing others, snorting cocaine and snagging women. Why they want their ads appear there but no next to some lunatic creating conspiracy theory videos or whatever the hate speech videos mean. Because pop culture sells, even the bad parts of it. (especially the bad parts of it when the bad parts are sex, drugs, and violence)
aalimov 10y ago
Blah blah blah thanks for your summary of the articles relating to this... How has his generated so much discussion?
oli5679 10y ago
I worked as an intern at a couple of companies spending a lot of money on digital marketing, and I was amazed by the assumptions underpinning the marketing 'attribution models' that they used. Both used 'Last Touch', and apparently this is industry standard for many firms. This assigns 100% of credit for a sale to the last marketing channel that the customer used. For example, if you clicked on a sponsored search/banner advert for the product and then buy, that channel will get 100% of the profit from the sale. Implicit in this is the assumption that had the advert not been shown, the probability of purchase would have been 0%. This is wildly optimistic. Both were spending a lot of money on 'own brand keywords on Google, and it doesn't take a genius to realise that customers searching for Company X trainers may well have ended up reaching the page and buying, in the world where the ad didn't appear in the top 3 links for these searches. However, none of this seemed to be clearly conveyed by the very marketing consultants/analysts in the presentations with countless charts and acronyms that they gave to their relatively untechnical managements. My assessment was that both companies were horribly overspending, and I was agnostic as to whether the marketeers where dishonest or misguided. This has also been studied, and seems to confirm the intuitions I had. In one experiment, Ebay did A-B testing on all of its own-brand marketing paid search advertising and this had ZERO impact on short run sales [1]. Other A-B tests have found incremental sales advantages a small fraction of the values found by these horribly optimistic marketing models [2]. One interesting analogy is with political campaigns. A wise politician campaigns in battleground regions where they have the biggest chance of changing the result in their favour. A wise firm markets to similarly marginal customers. Digital marketing offers the benefit of being able to carefully avoid customers that are totally uninterested, but naive (or dishonest) attribution can cause companies to 'preach to the choir' and then over-credit their marketing activities. Lots of current industry practice would be analogous to a member of the Obama campaign telling him to avoid Texas and campaign in New York, and then congratulating himself after he won with a landslide! [1] http://cn.cnstudiodev.com/uploads/document_attachment/attachment/550/tadelis.pdf http://cn.cnstudiodev.com/uploads/document_attachment/attach... [2] http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1399&context=heinzworks http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1399&c...
cavisne 10y ago
"news about it is coming hard and fast" The difference with this story is its being driven by the media organizations, not by "news" - any actual issue or event. There is an obvious motivation here, the mainstream media organizations see this as a way to concentrate advertising dollars back to them, and they will paint any major brand that doesn't do so as supporting ISIS/Nazi's. Google is in a dangerous position here, they probably have the data to prove this is a nonsense narrative, but the media organizations had enough influence to force big brands to stay away. Stuck between protecting their moat, and going to war with the mainstream media.
- generic_user 10y ago
  The people who are making these decisions are precisely the billionaire one percent that has had there agenda disrupted because people are getting information from alternative media that challenges the narrative of the mainstream corporate press. They would love to get back to the days when they could just throw crap over the wall onto the TV and people had not other sources of information or any way to collectively discuss its validity.
generic_user 10y ago
The claim that Corporations have some fundamental opposition to how online advertising works with tracking and spying and personal data collection is total baloney. No one has made any demands to change how these networks work or to stop collecting data. What they want is essentially a demonetization blacklist. So that a handful of billionaires who own these companies can hand youtube, facebook and who ever else a list of people and organizations with the 'wrong opinions' and have them demonetized, delisted and otherwise disappeared. Who gets to decide what is fake news? And who gets to decide what is and is not 'hate speech' and 'extremism'. The Billionaire board members of a few multinational corporations? That's not democracy, its corporate fascism. This is how the one percent fights back against populism. These people have been given some nasty black eyes in the past few years and there not use to it. There use to running things in the background and now there not getting what they want and the democratic process is not working in there favor. So there going to fight back in any way they can. Including attacking the internet and the ability for people to have there voices heard.
jlawer 10y ago
I think the solution for the google / youtube issue would be to have 2-4 tiers of content. And let brands decided what tiers their Ads are displayed against. Tier 1 Vetted - Google marks a video for vetting when it has enough views. A Human checks the video and approves it. This lets google charge more for the "trusted ads", especially as selection bias means they will all be well above average in popularity. Tier 2 Partner Network - Google delegates to the channel / network / partner to verify the content. This allows major partners to post content without needing it to be google vetted. Google ties this into the royalties payment so violation of this can result in financial penalty / being kicked off. If a video is reported it is immediately marked for vetting. Tier 3 - Unverified. This is where majority of new content goes. There are plenty of brands that are less concerned about being associated with the random mix. As the general quality will be down the ad price will likely be lower, but these are the Tier 4 - Unsuitable for major brands. This is for any content that has been vetted and is ok as far as Youtube's TOC, but inappropriate for major brand advertising. This will likely not generate a large amount of ad revenue, however being marked as a tier 4 video means you will not earn much, so it won't be produced by ad supported content producers. If this content is appropriately tagged you might be able to sell the ads to the opposing view. This pro-life vs pro-choice. The main reason this tier exists is to protect the dollars from Tier 1 & 2. The vetting system could even have certain tags to mark content of certain types. I.e. you could allow a brand to not advertise against political material, however you would charge more for the placement of more targeted ads. The system will push the vetting onto content producers while maintaining a pretty big (financial) stick to keep them in line.
terravion 10y ago
Do we really trust the purveyors of traditional advertising (newspapers, television news, etc.) to be without bias or vendetta when reporting on this problem? It seems to be part of a larger pattern--at least as much of a pattern as the fact that there is trash on YouTube. Military History Visualized's "Economic Warfare? PewDiePie vs. WSJ #YouTube" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewLtRGh2IvM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewLtRGh2IvM a very intriguing take on what's happening.
- jjeaff 10y ago
  And now evidence the the WSJ faked snapshots of videos to prove that ads were showing on offensive content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lM49MmzrCNc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lM49MmzrCNc
jonstokes 10y ago
I don't know what Searles is smoking (ok, actually, I do -- it's a strong mix called "Remember When..."), but big, battleship "trusted" brands cheat at digital in ways that are every bit as sleazy as adtech. The big guys game the system and rip off sponsors by buying fake traffic and fake engagements to inflate their campaign metrics and suck more money from advertisers. So yeah, everything that he says about how bad adtech is is true, but the idea that if everyone would just go back to doing big branding-oriented media buys on "trusted sites" then the fraud would magically disappear -- that's nonsense on stilts.
intrasight 10y ago
I assume that there are ad firms between the brands and this adtech. Isn't that typically the case? Shouldn't we be blaming the ad firms and not Google?
camgunz 10y ago
Advertising is a race to the bottom. The way I shop is I figure out what my needs are, I survey the state of the art, I narrow down some options, compare them (price, stats, reviews, company rep, etc.) and then buy. Advertising, on the other hand, exists to subtly influence an emotional, impulsive, subconscious choice, and it's far more effective in the macro. The problem is that when your brain is engaged, you resent advertising and it has the opposite effect on you. Once you're wise to it, it just sours you on the whole thing. Advertisers could cultivate a lot more loyalty with me (and I assume most people) if they made honest pitches. You know, "hey you're looking for an x86 NUC with 2 ethernet ports, here's what we got, also here's some other socially responsible things we do". Anything past that ought to be banned. You can see the effect this has. Look at ever increasing ad budgets by large corporations, or small businesses wasting precious resources trying to compete with the huge ad budgets, people's general cynicism about businesses and endorsements, etc. It has an undermining effect culturally and an entrenchment effect economically. It's honestly just all bad.
- manigandham 10y ago
  You are never as rational as you think you might be when it comes to shopping or anything else. And advertising drives the economy and is quite literally the reason the company you work for is in business - so it's just not that simple to say "it's all bad" because it isn't. In fact it's quite the opposite.
  - camgunz 10y ago
    Yeah my post gives that impression, but I know that rationality is elusive: people are very suggestible. That's precisely why I think we ought to protect people from advertising. I don't accept that business requires manipulative advertising. I don't want to get into the weeds of "what is advertising anyway?" or "if no one knows about your products, how can they buy them?", so let's just stipulate that there's "advertising" (i.e. what I describe above) and "manipulative advertising". People are entirely, obviously capable of buying things without a team of behavioral psychologists tricking them into it, and businesses are entirely capable of selling things without manipulating consumers into it. The problem arises when companies are free to put resources into manipulative advertising; it's a classic race to the bottom. Company A spends $X on ads; Company B spends $X + $Y on ads. We quickly reach the status quo, except we spent $$$ on manipulating people into buying products instead of improving them, wasting tons of resources and probably causing people to spend money buying our stuff unwisely by preying on their hopes and insecurities. It is at least unfathomably wasteful, and maybe also evil. (Also -- and this probably comes off as more hostile than I intend it to -- you don't know anything about me, if I work for a company, if I'm unemployed, if I work for a government, a university, etc. You can argue that modern business requires advertising without making assumptions like this).
libeclipse 10y ago
There have been reports that the WSJ articles that triggered this whole thing were fake. Source: h3h3
dillondoyle 10y ago
I made my first Medium comment, this article kind of doesn't make a ton of sense and made me a bit mad. Here is what I wrote: https://medium.com/@dillondoyle/first-medium-comment-hope-im-doing-this-right-f064186d9c4f https://medium.com/@dillondoyle/first-medium-comment-hope-im... Specifically in response the the author saying "Real advertising doesn’t do any of those things, because it’s not personal." That's the opposite of my work/goal in marketing, I do everything I can to make advertising personal, at the individual level. Using deterministic data and 'ad tech' to speak to voters/consumers 1:1 if possible. And also I hate the way the author kind of just lumps 'ad tech' together without really seaming to understand the current ads ecosystem. I guess talking about anything that's not an IO at a print newspaper or something similar seems to be his idea of not 'ad tech' - but even a 'simple' PMP deal or even an IO involves a lot of ad tech, to find the audience, to match audiences, to plan and execute. I do think there should be more conversation about ad tech bloat - please don't load 100 http requests for one 300x250 banner, and the amount of 1st party cookies/session data and other data the publishers don't even realize is leaked is insane. Fuck 'Add This' has made an entire ads data company because publishers are too fucking lazy to paste in their own FB share buttons. I buy addThis audience data all the time. So stupid, why would big publishers need to use this tool - and why don't publishers realize this is a revenue stream they seem to badly need but are mostly not getting.
BukhariH 10y ago
I feel like a lot of people here are really confused about how digital marketing works. I hope I can dispel a lot of assumptions people are making! Yes, there can be a lot of fraud (not that I've ever seen that much) when it comes to CPC but, clicks most new age marketers aren't that focused on CPC that much anymore. Instead they focus on CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) which is essentially how much you paid e.g £40000 and how many customers signed up as a result of that channel e.g 150. So, in this case your CAC would be ~£27. This calculation takes everything from fraud clicks, CPC costs, conversions into account. CAC is the first step, next step involves working out the LTV for that specific channel. Finally, the marketer compares the CAC to LTV and the ones with the best ratio are channels we focus on. The reality is most of the time the best channels are digital and targeted. If any would like me to go into detail about how marketers go about targeting people then I can do that too!

242 points by hunglee2 10y ago

I also submitted this great article. I have been thinking of adtech because I have several web sites, and run ads on none of them because I don't want irrelevant material on my sites. But, since I mostly have content about AI, semantic web, and food + nutrition + machine learning, I would be happy to place ads for specific products and services that I personally like. But I don't know of any ad placing service that, as a small traffic web host, would help me approach companies that I would like to advertise on my sites.

sfifs 10y ago
You've pretty pretty much articulated one of the reasons for existence of ad tech industry. Inventory on the web is highly fragmented and ad sales one small site at a time is not really scalable for anyone to make a living out of. Hence ad networks emerged to aggregate inventory. Now you probably have a "real" day job and don't really need to make even the website pay out, let alone make a living out of it. Not so for many other people who do make a living out of content.
digitalzombie 10y ago
Have you look at cj.com? One of the startup I used to work at is basically slickdeals where they just grab a bunch of coupons from cj and put it on their website. I'd imagine you can filter the coupons you want from them after they throw a tons at ya and post them on your website. Was just a programmer so I didn't deal with CJ directly to know how they work.
manigandham 10y ago
Why do you assume what you personally like is what your readers will like? But relevancy to your sites and readers is what adtech is all about. It doesn't help anyone to have irrelevant ads, they do care about making sure the fit is as good as possible. Stay away from the crappy "recommended links" widgets and popup videos and you'll find plenty of ad networks that can help.
- srtjstjsj 10y ago
  It took you one sentence to refute your own claim about the quality of adtech ads -- you recommend them and then say don't use the most popular/successful/well-known ad systems.
  - manigandham 10y ago
    I'm not sure what you think I refuted here. You realize not every network is the same right? When it comes to relevancy then yes, many (but not all) ad networks do well at it because irrelevant ads don't help anyone. But the quality of the actual ad content and user experience matters. There are annoying ad formats like outstream video, interstitials, in-image ads, and more that just arent worth it. Same goes with the taboola widgets, which do work since they get millions of clicks daily, but are usually filled with low-quality clickbait which reflects poorly on the parent site. The most popular ad networks are the ones that have the lowest standards and run the worst ads because that's how you get more scale. It's simple math and has no bearing on how good they are. And yes you should avoid them if you want better "quality" in both ad content and UX.
acomjean 10y ago
I've noticed a few sites seem to have dedicated sponsors, which are in line with what they talk about. http://www.xlr8yourmac.com http://www.xlr8yourmac.com seems you use "OWC" other world computing as its primary sponsor http://strobist.blogspot.com/ http://strobist.blogspot.com/ (a flash lighting site) seems to have ads from a few flash companies and the 'midwest photo exchange' and a few flash copies. I'm not sure how those relationships were built. In college the newspaper had a dedicated team of people going out to sell ads for the paper. They had a "cut sheet" with information about how many papers where printed and how they were distributed..

unabridged 10y ago

Youtube is used horribly by advertisers. Don't make a video ad that plays before the content that people can't wait to click Skip. Just make a video that's entertaining/informative and post it to youtube. People will share it for free and watch it willingly.

amorphid 10y ago
I don't want to see ads. Period. In fact, I pay for YouTube Red & Google Play Music specifically to avoid ads. Ads suck.
arkades 10y ago
If it were trivial to make entertaining/informative ad copy, I imagine more ad copy would be.
sfifs 10y ago
I work at an advertiser. Most so called "viral" ads we've researched involve significant levels of paid impressions before they got to a "viralable" level. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Also it's significantly difficult to make a highly entertaining ad as well as convey your product benefits/superiority at the same time - strains creativity of the ad agencies though some are adapting faster to the online ad formats more than others. At the end of the day all those "emotional equities" that highly engaging and emotional ads convey have mainly a role in creating a positive image around your brand - making people actually buy is very difficult without actually conveying your product's value and benefits.
- fwn 10y ago
  Who would have thought that actually adding value to peoples lives is hard. Much harder than paying someone to force others to see something.
  - sfifs 10y ago
    Sarcasm aside, sadly, if you build it they will come doesn't particularly work. Say you're made a new flavor of ketchup. Your product tests show people love it much better than anything else in the market. Arguably you are adding value to those people's lives with it. Now it won't sell at all and recoup your investment and arguably actually add value to people's lives unless they know about it and try it - hence advertising.

aviraldg 10y ago

This had to happen, but I weep for all the great tech created at Google enabled by these ad dollars that may not have existed otherwise. Hope they can transition to an alternative business model relatively quickly.

manigandham 10y ago
Relax, advertising is not going away. This is silly FUD article.
exclusiv 10y ago
Adtech will be fine but I do think we'll see a bigger shift of dollars into a bucket called content marketing versus traditional ad placement. So think about what Red Bull does with the content they develop and sponsor. YouTube should focus more on that market - helping match their own celebrities with brands and taking a cut of sponsored content versus a cut of ad revenue based on pageviews. The issue here is really not adtech; it's a conscious decision by Google to disregard the free but horrible speech of users in chasing pageviews and video consumption. And it's now coming back to bite them. I'm surprised it took that long. YouTube comments are vitriolic and a breeding ground for trolls.
- srtjstjsj 10y ago
  People say horrible things in the public streets but billboard and shopwindow advertising is still tolerated there.
  - exclusiv 10y ago
    Good point. Although in this case it's more connected that the brands are subsidizing content and a site which doesn't care about hate speech and childish discussions. And parents and concerned consumers who like certain brands can easily point it out.

draw_down 10y ago

I guess I'm not sure of the value of parsing these fine distinctions between good and bad ads. Doesn't seem like the good kind are winning out. And the solution is that ad buyers need to have kinder hearts? Hmm.

dredmorbius 10y ago
Gresham's Law / Market for Lemons. Both have very strong information-theoretical roots.

sbarre 10y ago

I'm calling it now, we're heading back to #tipjartech

criddell 10y ago

I hadn't heard about the Zuckerberg's claim about authenticity on Facebook was surrounded by fraudulent ads. That's hilarious. Also, I've never thought about it before but I think the writer's claim that modern ads are really direct response marketing is right on. There is a difference.

makomk 10y ago
It's not even that surprising. Most of the major news sites are stuffed full of ads that look like fake news articles these days. They probably have the sense to turn them off on articles about fake news, but otherwise they don't care. You just don't hear about it as much because news sites don't generally criticise their fellow news sites in the same way they do sites like Facebook and YouTube that are a threat to their entire industry.

Tistel 10y ago

I used to work at a AdTech company. At the start of a campaign, we would put a lot of work into getting the ad campaign to show up on a highly curated set of apps that had desirable user for the campaign (men like sports score apps, women like whatever). But, near the end of the campaign, if we were getting paid for X clicks (or horror of horrors, paid per conversion) and the campaign was not projected to pull off the deal, we had to open it open to a sea of garbage apps to hit the target. There is so much fraud. There are apps out there that are known to be mostly bot users. I was trying to free up some drive space by removing art assets from campaigns that had ended months earlier. Several campaigns had the banner art turned off so there is nothing to click that were getting hundreds of clicks per day. There was just a bug in the click fraud bot that forgot to check if the art assets was still live that was just hitting the click URL blindly. I skip all the ads too.

snarf21 10y ago
I think this is the real issue. Companies would rather reach 100 real, interested potential customers than 100K "users" that are all fraud and views on click farm pages. At the end of the day, it is about how many people come out of the bottom of the funnel and become customers, not simply the number dropped in the top. At this point, it is hard for ad tech to take this approach because customers have come to view clicks as almost worthless so they hope a few real people fall down through all the fraud. There is a huge opportunity for someone to disrupt this space but it will take a new approach. It is hard to evaluate context when a lot of the web is just crap and screen scrapes of other sites and they all look the same. I think companies would actually pay more for the right system if it really moved the bottom line.

spamizbad 10y ago

Tech companies are taking a lot of heat here, but I think some of the blame here lies with Youtube's content creators. If I buy ad time on late-night shows on NBC, I know I don't have to worry about Jimmy Fallon opening his show with a diatribe on "White Genocide" or "How feminists are the real Hitlers" or incoherently rambling about LBGTQ tumblr teens in a sweat-stained Starwars t-shirt. Several Youtube content creators want to be able to freely oscillate between their core content topic (gaming, pop culture, etc) and random "edgy" topics. You're free to do that, and you shouldn't be censored, but you are not entitled to ad dollars. They claim they're just trying to be "real" and "authentic" with their audiences, but how is it "authentic" to rant against Jews, Muslims, immigrants and neoliberal globalism while lining your pocket with ad revenue from Johnson & Johnson on a global technology platform built by immigrants/1st-gens, many of whom are jewish or muslim themselves? The cognitive dissonance is exhausting.

lovich 10y ago
I see your argument but I think who's fault it is in the situation is more complicated than that. Yes if the content creators were just doing this for money, they should try and curate and audience that brands want to pay for. On the flip side, these brands didn't have to jump into Internet advertising. They could have stayed focused on the nice reliable TV show advertising. They want to hit more eyeballs though and the unreliable Internet content is proving more popular with consumers who are the real product when it comes to advertising. I figure there's going to be some back and forth between content creators and brands looking to advertise until a new equilibrium is reached and all shows fall in line to the new set of norms. After that, of course, a new format will likely arise and consumers will jump ship to the new format after finding the Internets norms too boring
logn 10y ago
I think the author is trying to stay focused only on the issue of adtech vs (as he calls it) Madison Avenue ads. You also raise relevant points but they can be separate issues. Anyhow to your point, I think the problem is that YouTube creators don't really think of themselves as being sponsored by brands. They've internalized only that they get paid to make content people watch. And that's not entirely accurate. But for all the problems the author identified with adtech it has afforded people such as those on YouTube to enjoy what may be a fleeting era of getting paid to be genuine and uncensored. Perhaps membership fees to the platform that get allocated to creators can succeed here.

cdata 10y ago

Ad targeting can be done based on what you know about the content it is displayed against. But it seems like a lot of weight is put on what the network knows about the person accessing that content. Enabling brands to automatically opt-out of being shown adjacent to content with extreme/hateful views is only part of the problem. Ad tech must also contend with the fact that the audience has many dimensions. Someone who harbors hateful feelings for a subgroup of humanity may also be interested in a sweet deal on a pay as you go plan from AT&T.

phamilton 10y ago

My favorite version of nonsense in ads is the current mobile space. Assuming mobile data is $10/GB, a 1MB video ad costs the end user 1 cent. Quality (though not premuim) mobile ad space has a CPM of about $5, or a cost per impression of half a cent. So whenever you see an ad in a mobile app and you aren't on WiFi, you are paying 1 cent to use the app _and_ watch an ad and the publisher is getting less than half a cent (ad rev share) from the advertisers. The end user and the publisher would be better off if they just paid the publisher half a cent directly.

mschuster91 10y ago
> Assuming mobile data is $10/GB, a 1MB video ad costs the end user 1 cent. Yeah and then the ads aren't even remotely interesting - most of in-app video ads for me are uninteresting-as-... F2P games (Clash of clans and countless variations - just how in blazes do these actually make money?!). But what I find even more annoying: that there apparently seems to be no way for the in-app ads to check if I already have a certain application installed. It's wasted money for Deutsche Bahn to spam me with ads for their (actually highly useful) app when I already have it installed... but then again, it's bad for privacy if any adtech company can profile me based on the set of apps I have installed.
- pille 10y ago
  > just how in blazes do these actually make money?! I'm guessing they expect to make it back on the occasional whale who can't control their spending on these types of games.
  - rtb 10y ago
    Exactly. They extract money by addicting people and taking advantage of them. It should be criminal.
    - mschuster91 10y ago
      While in general I support your opinion, there is one critical question: where should the line between legal and illegal be drawn? For example, consider DLCs, a form of IAP. In the Fallout universe, what you get as a DLC would in other franchises be an entire game... should this be made illegal too? In my opinion, not - but instead it should be made illegal to ship games with bus so serious it requires weeks of waiting for multi-GB patches so they're barely playable...

mdorazio 10y ago

I feel like the author of this article is missing the reasons behind the rise of adtech in the first place, and doesn't really address how traditional advertising can compensate. There are at least three forces at work here: 1) People straight up don't want to see ads. Ad blockers, Netflix, etc. are a natural response to this. If your medium relies on traditional ads, there's an increasingly large chance that your audience won't ever see those ads in the first place. 2) Companies want to know that their advertising dollars are actually producing results, and traditional advertising completely sucks at this. If you've never run a traditional ad campaign, I suggest giving it a try and then decide how much value you think you got out of it. You can spend thousands to millions of dollars and have absolutely no idea if your money impacted sales even the smallest amount. Compare that to adtech, where you get real data on outcomes on a regular basis. Even if it's crap data, it's often better than "well we think the brand is stronger now". 3) Traditional mediums for advertising are dying out quickly, especially with younger demographics. Newspapers used to be the prime advertising medium, and now most of them are guilting, begging, or strong-arming people into viewing their ads online. Magazines readership has been declining year over year for at least a decade. Live broadcast TV viewing among younger viewers has been flat or declining as well. Where are you supposed to find captive audiences willing to sit through your golden-age traditional advertising spots? I agree that the adtech industry is slimy and in desperate need of a shakeup, but idolizing traditional advertising while ignoring the difficulties of ads in today's world doesn't really help here.

mschuster91 10y ago
> Where are you supposed to find captive audiences willing to sit through your golden-age traditional advertising spots? Uh, nowhere? People already ban ads wherever they reasonably can, in part due to the fact that excesses like popup ads, layer ads etc. have been encouraged and adopted instead of dropped and people just are fed up with being treated like a walking dollar machine. The only reasonable ad slots will be where people literally cannot block them - which means in the meatspace. Classic old advertising columns are on the way of being replaced by shiny flashy LED screens, same for public transport information systems (e.g. Munich, https://www.mvg.de/services/fahrgastservice/fahrgastfernsehen.html https://www.mvg.de/services/fahrgastservice/fahrgastfernsehe...). It will get really interesting once outdoor advertising can track people... but thank God, even in surveillance-friendly UK this stuff doesn't hold for long (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-08-12/snooping-garbage-bins-in-city-of-london-ordered-to-be-disabled https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-08-12/snooping-...).

kbos87 10y ago

Adtech is partly the result of CMOs over-optimizing for measurability. Marketing & advertising has had a long standing reputation as an unmeasurable activity, half of which was a total waste. As the tools to quantify the impact of some marketing activities have gotten better, a new obsession with measurement has been born. Now we're in a place where the top insecurity of most marketers is the accusation that they aren't data driven. In the process, they over-optimize for everything that's closest to the last touch, go on a wild goose chase to quantify things that can't really be quantified, and overlook a whole host of things that actually are important, like building a brand and differentiating your offering with the people in their ideal audience who aren't currently on the verge of a purchase.

SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
The measurement problem is very broad: it impacts not just adtech, but finance/economics and corporate management. It's some kind of weird math fetish, no more insightful than if we believed business ideas in French were automatically better than those in English.
baddox 10y ago
I think you're using the term "marketing" to refer to promotion, which is just one of the traditional "four P's" of marketing. This is pretty common usage, but it's important to point out that there's a lot more to marketing than promotion, and most of it isn't as questionably valuable or ethical as advertising.

arez 10y ago

He really paints a positive picture with the EU law and that big companies are going to shift, but that won't happen. The EU law is a joke and nobody will be really punished by that I assume. I would like too have less spying and the user in the driver seat of his own data, but that won't happen, there is just too much money on the table and the adtech system is waayy to big to just vanish. It's a fucking huge hydra

SonOfLilit 10y ago

Obligatory: https://medium.com/@RickWebb/banner-fraud-doesn-t-matter-fc84413fe59c https://medium.com/@RickWebb/banner-fraud-doesn-t-matter-fc8... "Here’s a message on behalf of brand marketers everywhere.† We know about banner fraud already. We just don’t care. Seriously. It’s fine. I mean, you got us into this mess years ago, and sure, it was kind of annoying, but you know what? It is what it is. To your immense credit, you have adjusted prices downward as you’ve made banners an ever-increasing stshow, so, actually, it’s totally cool. We like them. That’s right. I said it. We like banners. So stop telling us that they are useless. Everyone does not hate banners. You’ve thrown, god, what is it, something like 400 different, new, “better” ad formats at us now. But we keep buying banners. It’s time everyone accepted the truth: we’re not buying banners from you because it’s the only thing you can sell us, we’re buying banners from you because they’re cheap and they work."

rlongstaff 10y ago

Minor correction: Google was summoned to appear before a committee of the UK Parliament, not the Government. A link to the meeting: http://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/ecd59f92-64b6-4450-96b6-83c94cbf1b68?in=14:22:07 http://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/ecd59f92-64b6-4450-96b6...

bitmapbrother 10y ago
What a ridiculous inquiry. There are 400 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute and these people think that Google should inspect each and every one of them for hate content. Why don't they go after all of the UK ISP's and carriers that serve hate content from UK based IP addresses?

manigandham 10y ago

> Brands are bailing from adtech No, not even close. Some ads were mishandled and with the current political climate, brand safety is now a big topic. This cycle happens every few years when the marketing/agency/media buying talent turns over and as new tech develops. At the end of the day, it's just tech. You can use it well or use it poorly. > Let's be clear about all the differences between adtech and real advertising. What? Adtech is obviously not advertising. It's a name of an industry sector that provides technology to do digital advertising (which itself is a smaller subset of the marketing technology sector). There's also no such thing as "real" advertising unless we're now going to call certain types fake. > Adtech is magic in this literal sense: it’s all about misdirection. More nonsense. Generalizing a 12-figure industry that powers a large part of the economy because of one specific platform, type of ad buying and news event is not useful. -- Here's the reality: Advertising (and moreso marketing) is all about finding the right consumers, capturing their attention, and converting that into some kind of action. Modern Adtech is primarily about that middle piece, capturing attention by distributing messaging to the right users at the right time and place. It's just plumbing. Technology that can be used for good or bad. Also, all advertising is targeted whether it's a billboard or a banner on a website. Technology has allowed us to become much more specific through data and tracking but there are both good and bad examples of this. When netflix shows you a recommendation for a show that you end up loving, that was a good ad. When you see an ad for shoes you've already bought, that's not so good. Either way it's technology that's being used with 1000s of other factors that produce that end result. Does adtech have issues? Absolutely. 99% are because it's a global industry without any oversight or regulation. There is nothing that stops companies from running knowing fake ads, there are no fines when they run malware, there are no pushbacks when their JS tags ruin performance, and there is a fundamental mismatch in how media is bought through politics and personal connections compared to the sales and performance oriented outcome on which it is judged upon. These are human and business and industry problems that are neither created by nor will be solved through technology.

fullshark 10y ago

Adtech has issues but the idea that traditional advertising which has zero feedback from users is gonna make a comeback seems silly. Paying marketers millions to launch campaigns in magazines or TV when you have no clue how it lands seems more fraudulent to me than Adtech where you can measure user impressions/clicks. This reads to me like a guy in a shrinking market lashing out at an existential threat. Disc: I work for an adtech business

manigandham 10y ago
These articles are all the same, complaining about adtech without any real understanding. It's just tech, quite literally plumbing, that lets marketers put messages in front of people and see what happens next. The internet has made it more capable than ever but how it's used varies greatly and there are both great and terrible examples.

tgragnato 10y ago

> What Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism” is going to be illegal a year from now in the EU anyway, thanks to the General Data Protection Regulation, aka GDPR. Mark your calendars: on 25 May 2018 will come an extinction event for adtech, because here are the fines the GDPR will impose for unpermitted harvesting of personal data: 1) “a fine up to 10,000,000 EUR or up to 2% of the annual worldwide turnover of the preceding financial year in case of an enterprise, whichever is greater (Article 83, Paragraph 4)”‘; and 2) “a fine up to 20,000,000 EUR or up to 4% of the annual worldwide turnover of the preceding financial year in case of an enterprise, whichever is greater (Article 83, Paragraph 5 & 6).” GDPR will be "great stuff" because it imposes user protection and grants basic rights. - individual mandatory notification for possible adverse impact of data breaches - right to be forgotten -> right to erasure - data portability (hello ... Apple Health, Google Fit, Microsoft Office extended/unportable format, whatsoever) - verifiable explicit consent for data collection (purpose included) These are the things that makes me proud of the EU, and I just wish that GDPR were made more visible to the general public.

angry-hacker 10y ago
Most likely it will turn out as the accept cookie crap every site is now showing. We just have more if those notifications... Nothing to be proud of.
- tgragnato 10y ago
  The cookie banner is annoying ... You're right > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13802068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13802068 The last time one of these "ordering services" [https://www.justeat.it https://www.justeat.it] targeted me with ads (via sms), I tracked back the data, crawled the web for their mails, sent them a good list of laws, so they have been forced to reply and delete all my personal data in a timely manner. Never seen a single ad again, I am unsure this would have worked in the US.
  - dottedmag 10y ago
    Could you share the list of the laws to send? I find it quite problematic to force companies on Malta to do that.

sixQuarks 10y ago

I don't think this author is being fair to direct response advertising. One of the most important pillars of direct response marketing is to target effectively. That means spending a lot of time getting to know your target audience, their habits, the media they actually pay attention to. Direct response marketing done right should make advertising go from "unwelcome pest, to welcome guest" - mainly because you're targeting your audience so well. Many people may think they're doing direct response marketing, but that doesn't mean they're actually doing it.

angry-hacker 10y ago

Why are brands so scared of where their ads appear? Does it really matter? Are they measuring it? I swear there are ads left and right on every rap video that talks about killing others, snorting cocaine and snagging women. Why they want their ads appear there but no next to some lunatic creating conspiracy theory videos or whatever the hate speech videos mean. Can't they just opt out of those categories?

abeyer 10y ago
> I swear there are ads left and right on every rap video that talks about killing others, snorting cocaine and snagging women. Why they want their ads appear there but no next to some lunatic creating conspiracy theory videos or whatever the hate speech videos mean. Because pop culture sells, even the bad parts of it. (especially the bad parts of it when the bad parts are sex, drugs, and violence)

aalimov 10y ago

Blah blah blah thanks for your summary of the articles relating to this... How has his generated so much discussion?

oli5679 10y ago

I worked as an intern at a couple of companies spending a lot of money on digital marketing, and I was amazed by the assumptions underpinning the marketing 'attribution models' that they used. Both used 'Last Touch', and apparently this is industry standard for many firms. This assigns 100% of credit for a sale to the last marketing channel that the customer used. For example, if you clicked on a sponsored search/banner advert for the product and then buy, that channel will get 100% of the profit from the sale. Implicit in this is the assumption that had the advert not been shown, the probability of purchase would have been 0%. This is wildly optimistic. Both were spending a lot of money on 'own brand keywords on Google, and it doesn't take a genius to realise that customers searching for Company X trainers may well have ended up reaching the page and buying, in the world where the ad didn't appear in the top 3 links for these searches. However, none of this seemed to be clearly conveyed by the very marketing consultants/analysts in the presentations with countless charts and acronyms that they gave to their relatively untechnical managements. My assessment was that both companies were horribly overspending, and I was agnostic as to whether the marketeers where dishonest or misguided. This has also been studied, and seems to confirm the intuitions I had. In one experiment, Ebay did A-B testing on all of its own-brand marketing paid search advertising and this had ZERO impact on short run sales [1]. Other A-B tests have found incremental sales advantages a small fraction of the values found by these horribly optimistic marketing models [2]. One interesting analogy is with political campaigns. A wise politician campaigns in battleground regions where they have the biggest chance of changing the result in their favour. A wise firm markets to similarly marginal customers. Digital marketing offers the benefit of being able to carefully avoid customers that are totally uninterested, but naive (or dishonest) attribution can cause companies to 'preach to the choir' and then over-credit their marketing activities. Lots of current industry practice would be analogous to a member of the Obama campaign telling him to avoid Texas and campaign in New York, and then congratulating himself after he won with a landslide! [1] http://cn.cnstudiodev.com/uploads/document_attachment/attachment/550/tadelis.pdf http://cn.cnstudiodev.com/uploads/document_attachment/attach... [2] http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1399&context=heinzworks http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1399&c...

cavisne 10y ago

"news about it is coming hard and fast" The difference with this story is its being driven by the media organizations, not by "news" - any actual issue or event. There is an obvious motivation here, the mainstream media organizations see this as a way to concentrate advertising dollars back to them, and they will paint any major brand that doesn't do so as supporting ISIS/Nazi's. Google is in a dangerous position here, they probably have the data to prove this is a nonsense narrative, but the media organizations had enough influence to force big brands to stay away. Stuck between protecting their moat, and going to war with the mainstream media.

generic_user 10y ago
The people who are making these decisions are precisely the billionaire one percent that has had there agenda disrupted because people are getting information from alternative media that challenges the narrative of the mainstream corporate press. They would love to get back to the days when they could just throw crap over the wall onto the TV and people had not other sources of information or any way to collectively discuss its validity.

generic_user 10y ago

The claim that Corporations have some fundamental opposition to how online advertising works with tracking and spying and personal data collection is total baloney. No one has made any demands to change how these networks work or to stop collecting data. What they want is essentially a demonetization blacklist. So that a handful of billionaires who own these companies can hand youtube, facebook and who ever else a list of people and organizations with the 'wrong opinions' and have them demonetized, delisted and otherwise disappeared. Who gets to decide what is fake news? And who gets to decide what is and is not 'hate speech' and 'extremism'. The Billionaire board members of a few multinational corporations? That's not democracy, its corporate fascism. This is how the one percent fights back against populism. These people have been given some nasty black eyes in the past few years and there not use to it. There use to running things in the background and now there not getting what they want and the democratic process is not working in there favor. So there going to fight back in any way they can. Including attacking the internet and the ability for people to have there voices heard.

jlawer 10y ago

I think the solution for the google / youtube issue would be to have 2-4 tiers of content. And let brands decided what tiers their Ads are displayed against. Tier 1 Vetted - Google marks a video for vetting when it has enough views. A Human checks the video and approves it. This lets google charge more for the "trusted ads", especially as selection bias means they will all be well above average in popularity. Tier 2 Partner Network - Google delegates to the channel / network / partner to verify the content. This allows major partners to post content without needing it to be google vetted. Google ties this into the royalties payment so violation of this can result in financial penalty / being kicked off. If a video is reported it is immediately marked for vetting. Tier 3 - Unverified. This is where majority of new content goes. There are plenty of brands that are less concerned about being associated with the random mix. As the general quality will be down the ad price will likely be lower, but these are the Tier 4 - Unsuitable for major brands. This is for any content that has been vetted and is ok as far as Youtube's TOC, but inappropriate for major brand advertising. This will likely not generate a large amount of ad revenue, however being marked as a tier 4 video means you will not earn much, so it won't be produced by ad supported content producers. If this content is appropriately tagged you might be able to sell the ads to the opposing view. This pro-life vs pro-choice. The main reason this tier exists is to protect the dollars from Tier 1 & 2. The vetting system could even have certain tags to mark content of certain types. I.e. you could allow a brand to not advertise against political material, however you would charge more for the placement of more targeted ads. The system will push the vetting onto content producers while maintaining a pretty big (financial) stick to keep them in line.

terravion 10y ago

Do we really trust the purveyors of traditional advertising (newspapers, television news, etc.) to be without bias or vendetta when reporting on this problem? It seems to be part of a larger pattern--at least as much of a pattern as the fact that there is trash on YouTube. Military History Visualized's "Economic Warfare? PewDiePie vs. WSJ #YouTube" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewLtRGh2IvM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewLtRGh2IvM a very intriguing take on what's happening.

jjeaff 10y ago
And now evidence the the WSJ faked snapshots of videos to prove that ads were showing on offensive content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lM49MmzrCNc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lM49MmzrCNc

jonstokes 10y ago

I don't know what Searles is smoking (ok, actually, I do -- it's a strong mix called "Remember When..."), but big, battleship "trusted" brands cheat at digital in ways that are every bit as sleazy as adtech. The big guys game the system and rip off sponsors by buying fake traffic and fake engagements to inflate their campaign metrics and suck more money from advertisers. So yeah, everything that he says about how bad adtech is is true, but the idea that if everyone would just go back to doing big branding-oriented media buys on "trusted sites" then the fraud would magically disappear -- that's nonsense on stilts.

intrasight 10y ago

I assume that there are ad firms between the brands and this adtech. Isn't that typically the case? Shouldn't we be blaming the ad firms and not Google?

camgunz 10y ago

Advertising is a race to the bottom. The way I shop is I figure out what my needs are, I survey the state of the art, I narrow down some options, compare them (price, stats, reviews, company rep, etc.) and then buy. Advertising, on the other hand, exists to subtly influence an emotional, impulsive, subconscious choice, and it's far more effective in the macro. The problem is that when your brain is engaged, you resent advertising and it has the opposite effect on you. Once you're wise to it, it just sours you on the whole thing. Advertisers could cultivate a lot more loyalty with me (and I assume most people) if they made honest pitches. You know, "hey you're looking for an x86 NUC with 2 ethernet ports, here's what we got, also here's some other socially responsible things we do". Anything past that ought to be banned. You can see the effect this has. Look at ever increasing ad budgets by large corporations, or small businesses wasting precious resources trying to compete with the huge ad budgets, people's general cynicism about businesses and endorsements, etc. It has an undermining effect culturally and an entrenchment effect economically. It's honestly just all bad.

manigandham 10y ago
You are never as rational as you think you might be when it comes to shopping or anything else. And advertising drives the economy and is quite literally the reason the company you work for is in business - so it's just not that simple to say "it's all bad" because it isn't. In fact it's quite the opposite.
- camgunz 10y ago
  Yeah my post gives that impression, but I know that rationality is elusive: people are very suggestible. That's precisely why I think we ought to protect people from advertising. I don't accept that business requires manipulative advertising. I don't want to get into the weeds of "what is advertising anyway?" or "if no one knows about your products, how can they buy them?", so let's just stipulate that there's "advertising" (i.e. what I describe above) and "manipulative advertising". People are entirely, obviously capable of buying things without a team of behavioral psychologists tricking them into it, and businesses are entirely capable of selling things without manipulating consumers into it. The problem arises when companies are free to put resources into manipulative advertising; it's a classic race to the bottom. Company A spends $X on ads; Company B spends $X + $Y on ads. We quickly reach the status quo, except we spent $$$ on manipulating people into buying products instead of improving them, wasting tons of resources and probably causing people to spend money buying our stuff unwisely by preying on their hopes and insecurities. It is at least unfathomably wasteful, and maybe also evil. (Also -- and this probably comes off as more hostile than I intend it to -- you don't know anything about me, if I work for a company, if I'm unemployed, if I work for a government, a university, etc. You can argue that modern business requires advertising without making assumptions like this).

libeclipse 10y ago

There have been reports that the WSJ articles that triggered this whole thing were fake. Source: h3h3

dillondoyle 10y ago

I made my first Medium comment, this article kind of doesn't make a ton of sense and made me a bit mad. Here is what I wrote: https://medium.com/@dillondoyle/first-medium-comment-hope-im-doing-this-right-f064186d9c4f https://medium.com/@dillondoyle/first-medium-comment-hope-im... Specifically in response the the author saying "Real advertising doesn’t do any of those things, because it’s not personal." That's the opposite of my work/goal in marketing, I do everything I can to make advertising personal, at the individual level. Using deterministic data and 'ad tech' to speak to voters/consumers 1:1 if possible. And also I hate the way the author kind of just lumps 'ad tech' together without really seaming to understand the current ads ecosystem. I guess talking about anything that's not an IO at a print newspaper or something similar seems to be his idea of not 'ad tech' - but even a 'simple' PMP deal or even an IO involves a lot of ad tech, to find the audience, to match audiences, to plan and execute. I do think there should be more conversation about ad tech bloat - please don't load 100 http requests for one 300x250 banner, and the amount of 1st party cookies/session data and other data the publishers don't even realize is leaked is insane. Fuck 'Add This' has made an entire ads data company because publishers are too fucking lazy to paste in their own FB share buttons. I buy addThis audience data all the time. So stupid, why would big publishers need to use this tool - and why don't publishers realize this is a revenue stream they seem to badly need but are mostly not getting.

BukhariH 10y ago

I feel like a lot of people here are really confused about how digital marketing works. I hope I can dispel a lot of assumptions people are making! Yes, there can be a lot of fraud (not that I've ever seen that much) when it comes to CPC but, clicks most new age marketers aren't that focused on CPC that much anymore. Instead they focus on CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) which is essentially how much you paid e.g £40000 and how many customers signed up as a result of that channel e.g 150. So, in this case your CAC would be ~£27. This calculation takes everything from fraud clicks, CPC costs, conversions into account. CAC is the first step, next step involves working out the LTV for that specific channel. Finally, the marketer compares the CAC to LTV and the ones with the best ratio are channels we focus on. The reality is most of the time the best channels are digital and targeted. If any would like me to go into detail about how marketers go about targeting people then I can do that too!