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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 advertisi

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-...).
- elsewhen 10y ago
  Unfortunately, the is another space where ads are going to appear: in content... I am not talking about being blended into the content itself. Think paid placements in movies. podcast/youtube sponsorships etc.
  - mschuster91 10y ago
    > Think paid placements in movies. podcast/youtube sponsorships etc. Well, product placement in movies is well known. Nearly everyone should know that companies pay millions of dollars to e.g. have James Bond drive their car. What is way more evil is that what is called "influencer marketing", which you are addressing in your last part. It's especially evil because the target group for "influencers" is usually little kids. But, once again, regulation comes to the rescue - at least in Germany, it's outright illegal. To quote §5a, sect. 6 UWG (law against unfair business practice): (6) Unlauter handelt auch, wer den kommerziellen Zweck einer geschäftlichen Handlung nicht kenntlich macht, sofern sich dieser nicht unmittelbar aus den Umständen ergibt, und das Nichtkenntlichmachen geeignet ist, den Verbraucher zu einer geschäftlichen Entscheidung zu veranlassen, die er andernfalls nicht getroffen hätte. Translated (roughly, IANAL): He acts unfair, who hides the commercial purpose of a business transaction as long as this is not obvious from the circumstances, and the hiding is able to trick the consumer into a business transaction he would not have done otherwise. The illegal act hereby is, e.g. as a youtube influencer, hiding that you were paid by an advertiser/vendor to promote a certain item in a "review", because an unsuspecting consumer may not know that your "review" is bought. This is the reason why "sponsored content" is clearly marked as such in German newspapers. Youtubers, on the other hand, have mostly ignored the law (and I'm happy for the day once someone uses the law to shut down the more obnoxious of the bunch like BibisBeautyPalace).
    - srtjstjsj 10y ago
      the US has had "truth in advertising" always since before the Internet, but here they always fall down because cases go to court and the judge rules that "people should know that this was a lie, so it's not deceptive in an illegal way"
mozumder 10y ago
> 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. People actually do want to see ads in certain contexts. In many cases, they actually buy magazines like Vogue where it's filled with hundreds of pages of ads, because of the ads. People also buy local newspapers because of the ads & coupons. The context where people want ads are shopping contexts. If you design your media property around a shopping context, featuring buyers guides or exclusive shopping info, the public will be more appreciative of your ads.
- pixl97 10y ago
  >People actually do want to see ads in certain contexts Context is very important. That's why 'other recommended products' on sites like Amazon are important. They are a form of ad, but most people don't see it as one, and they don't mind it. People hate ads that attempt to capture your attention that are completely out of context. If I'm reading about network switches and flash ad for makeup pops up it annoys me. If it tries to exploit my computer it makes me ban all ads.
alkonaut 10y ago
> Companies want to know that their advertising dollars are actually producing results, and traditional advertising completely sucks at this. The argument can be reversed though: Despite the fact that traditional advertising is more or less blind to outcome and shows untargeted ads, it has survived for a very long time. This would indicate that businesses would be willing to pay to show untargeted dumb ads online too (if no other option exists).
- losteric 10y ago
  Or, that those advertisers are targeting a demographic that still prefers older mediums over the internet.
- srtjstjsj 10y ago
  Big brands will always be able to afford dumb advertising, like sponsoring the Olympics. adtech exists mainly for small brands, of which there are many, many more.
  - ithinkinstereo 10y ago
    I would argue that's a different type of advertising. Some campaigns are designed to increase some tangible result: more leads, more sales, etc. Other campaigns, such as your Olympics example, are more general brand awareness and brand reputation/prestige building.
  - alkonaut 10y ago
    Adtech enables a cottage industry of web sites that can get $100 or $5000 in ad revenue. It also allows small companies to advertise for e.g $100 or $5000. So if adblockers or something else kills online advertising and makes it the same as bus stop and magazine campaigns then without a novel form of micropayments a large fraction of the web will disappear, and a ton of business won't be able to advertise online at all. Getting rid of the whole adtech industry as it looks today would still be a very welcome change.
tomjen3 10y ago
I see ads on facebook so that I can laugh at how badly targeted they are. I don't believe this ad'tech' hype for a second, because there isn't any actual intelligence it it. Right now Facebook suggests I like some furniture store - it should know by now that I don't give a shit about furniture or shoes or womens clothing, just because I am friends with people who do (mostly, funny enough, women). Really facebook knows just about everything about me, yet they have never come up with an ad for a product I wanted to buy.
- brongondwana 10y ago
  My Facebook and every other site with adtech tends to spend most of its time filled with ads for the last major purchase that I researched online and then bought something for, often advertising the exact thing that I just got one of and won't need to replace for years.
  - Hasknewbie 10y ago
    A.K.A the Amazon Suggestion Effect ("You just bought a fridge, here are 12 more fridges!"). I thought Amazon was keeping their suggestions dumb on purpose, so as not to appear too creepy, apparently I was overestimating how smart adtech is in general.
    - losteric 10y ago
      I always assumed they showed those ads in case the order was cancelled or returned.
      - Chaebixi 10y ago
        Never attribute to intelligence that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
  - baddox 10y ago
    It took about six months for the online mattress ads to settle down after I quickly (within a day or two) researched and purchased one. I recently purchased an expensive pair of headphones and I suspect to see those for the next several months.
busterarm 10y ago
> 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". They want it this way. My company at its core relies on traditional advertising. Our leads are finally at the point that we're roughly 1:1 between traditional and online. We've built tools to determine the effectiveness of our traditional ad spend so that we can better target our spend, but we're getting a ton of resistance to us using them. This is from our own internal person who has been running the traditional side of our ad spend for 30 years. Every player in the traditional ads game benefits from keeping the people controlling the spending completely in the dark.
- gregw134 10y ago
  What kind of tool do you have to monitor traditional ad spend? According to op this should be impossible.
  - wtvanhest 10y ago
    Most large companies use a quantitative model with various inputs and outputs. For example, if you know you spend X in market Y, but not market Z you can measure lift within some confidence level between the markets. Imagine a model with every market, and sku, plus the inputs also know where you spent ad dollars and on what product.
    - robertlagrant 10y ago
      The "some confidence level" is the problem - how do you come close to quantifying and removing all the other effects that are involved? This stuff always just becomes something that can be debated away if the advertising lead is popular, or otherwise used as an excuse to fire him/her.
M_Grey 10y ago
I don't think that adtech is offering anything more than a lateral move. Instead of hand-waving and tarot cards, now it's lying spreadsheets and "targeted" ads that we all joke about because they're about as targeted as a SCUD. It's just another way to get ad money out of people who aren't ready to accept that advertising is dying. Sure, for a while you can "sponsor content" and all of the other tricks, but eventually people get used to it, and they block everything else. Basically the issue is that the argument, "You don't want everything to be a subscription/walled garden do you?!" turns out to have, "Actually yes, given the other options, yes we do!" as an answer. Especially when it turns out that the price of a subscription is highly negotiable when everyone is negotiating, and piracy exists.
- exergy 10y ago
  Fantastic points. I still cannot envision a world 100% without advertising, but my guess would be that the future would be more covert advertising, in the form of product placements etc. On the other hand, I think as the world becomes less materialistic (because it just isn't cool to hoard stuff now), perhaps the impact of having James Bond drive an Aston is going to become reduced. I will happily pay for Spotify, because it does what it says on the tin: all my music in one place, fuss-free and then it gets out of my way. On the other hand, Netflix is now boring because they don't have all that I want, and so both Netflix and the Movie/TV licensing companies lose my money. I really like your last point. The price of a subscription should be highly negotiable. The world is a more convenient place now (for a certain percentage of the world's population, admittedly), and expectations have shifted accordingly. Figure out a way of making me not jump through hoops, or you will lose.
aalimov 10y ago
Thank you..
clubm8 10y ago
>People straight up don't want to see ads. Ad blockers, Netflix, etc. are a natural response to this. Is Netflix totally ad free? I've gotten the impression they were paid for product placement a few times. (Ex: Frank Underwood plugging Sony)
- zeta0134 10y ago
  Very few mediums are totally ad free, and Netflix is no exception. If a movie or TV show on Netflix (including their original stuff) has product placement, the product placement remains a part of the media and is not altered. That would be generally prohibitively expensive. I notice this especially with criminal investigation shows, where for some inexplicable reason the whole division is using iPads, or every monitor you see features a prominent Dell logo, etc etc.
  - michaelt 10y ago
    If it's their original stuff, it wouldn't be cost-prohibitive to remove the product placement. They'd just have to not put that in in the first place
  - RugnirViking 10y ago
    Its worth pointing out that until recently, as I understand it, most forms of product placement were not allowed in the UK. As such, many american tv shows and movies literally had scenes cut out. Turns out, it rarely seemed to affect the content, but perhaps thats because anything important got another take without the overt product placement
- rpeden 10y ago
  I also noticed a ton of Windows phones in the latest House of Cards season. I'm not sure why they'd have used so many if it weren't a paid product placement. The phones were much more numerous in HoC than they are in the real world.
- rhino369 10y ago
  Definitely not totally ad free. Love s2 had like 5 uber placements. Their licensed stuff does but they can't rightfully edit it out since they didn't create the content.
guitarbill 10y ago
> 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. I think this is spot on. And some people are willing to pay. Another example of this is Youtubers and Patreon. Now, you can finally block ads without guilt and support those creators far more reliably. If the number of supporters dominates the ad revenue, it also encourages more quality and less quantity. For me, this is also where Youtube Red failed. It isn't transparent enough and I couldn't care less about all the "value-add" they tried to staple onto it. I'd rather pay ~$20/month distributed among roughly 6 channels via Patreon. Although it would be really nice to have a way to automatically give a few cents go to videos I watched and enjoyed (by some opt-out metric, e.g. watched more than 30%, or didn't hit dislike, or wasn't autoplayed "next up").
- pmoriarty 10y ago
  "some people are willing to pay" Isn't it a little perverse that the willingness of people to pay to block annoying ads provides an incentive to make ads ever more prevalent and annoying?
  - fasquoika 10y ago
    http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-01-12 http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-01-12
  - guitarbill 10y ago
    Depends on your threshold for annoying. While there are terrible ads, I think Youtube is okay. And I don't see it as an arms race at all. It could be a win/win situation. For companies, getting people to watch video ads is a win. For content creators, it's a win cause they get paid. For Youtube, it's a win cause they have a revenue stream. For viewers, it's a win because they don't have to pay anything. The problem is in many cases, if you did want to pay, either to get rid of ads or to support content creators in a greater way, there's not much choice. (Which is puzzling as for a walled garden like Youtube the solution is much, much simpler than for the web.)
tomlock 10y ago
>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". The data to do this already exists in many cases. For example, Google, Facebook - both know when people visit a location, and could cross-reference this with store visits now. If advertising exists in a physical location, and is effective, there is the potential for either of these companies to determine whether the customer visited a location where that physical inventory exists. Traditional advertising only sucks at quantifying results because "new media" has no incentive to share the loads of data they are now collecting.
- maroonblazer 10y ago
  But how do you know if they were exposed to the advertising? You don't. Even if you did, how do you know they actually saw it/were paying attention? You don't. And even if you knew that, how do you know that it was because of that particular ad that they ventured to your location?
  - tomlock 10y ago
    That's also true of 99.99% of digital ads. Plenty of businesses are using attribution models that aren't that deterministic.
    - wastedhours 10y ago
      This is my current hesitancy with "view through conversions" and the industry's rather, optimistic, definition of an impression (especially when running remarketing with VTC... essentially paying to target people who have quite likely found us via organic means and aren't being influenced by our ads). Currently trying lots of experiments with direct, tracked clicks from specific ads through to the CRM. Seeing only a handful of ads get any kind of direct click > conversion response with a reasonable attribution window. So a larger scale programmatic campaign is either a much earlier part of the pipeline than a lot of the adtech companies would have you believe, or is fairly pointless.
phaed 10y ago
> 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. If Netflix was free but with ads (with ad-less subscriptions optional) their viewership and subscriptions would skyrocket, and end up supporting traditional advertising on a modern medium. The only thing I see in the way of something like this is ISPs refusing to give Netflix the bandwidth needed for something this massive. For this to be a possibility either the FCC makes ISPs a utility, or net-neutrality is repealed.
- chii 10y ago
  If Netflix turning free would produce the kind of business or revenue that you imply, why haven't they started doing it? I think the appeal of Netflix is that they aren't beholden to advertisers.
- njharman 10y ago
  Free but with ads is Hulu. Netflix crushes Hulu. Netflix is massive for three reasons. Original content, binge watch/no schedule, no adverts.
  - candiodari 10y ago
    You forgot "very cheap". Compare the price of a monthly netflix binge watch session with what it would cost on Amazon, or God help you, iTunes or Google play. It's like 90% cheaper. The reason for this is obvious on the Netflix balance sheets. They spent 3-5 times what came in. Of course, this is not what the content producers want. And that's where things have gone wrong in the past, and will go wrong again.
- throwaway91111 10y ago
  You're just describing why a) YouTube or Hulu is so popular, b) why they suck, but somehow c) they haven't brought down the internet yet. In fact, Netflix and HBO are virtually the only people who actually allow you to reliably avoid ads. Even Hulu finds ways to force them down your throat when you pay.
nonsince 10y ago
Adtech, I'd say, is less slimy than traditional advertising. With traditional ads, you pay for the product (newspaper, TV, etc.), and then you _also_ see ads on top of that, and significantly more than you'd see nowadays at that. As the cost of running an entertainment service have decreased, ads have become noticeably better. That said, adtech still fucking sucks, but I'd rather that than TV's alternative of almost as much ads as there is content.
- michaelt 10y ago
  I'd say, is less slimy than traditional advertising. Eh, traditional newspaper-billboard-and-broadcast-TV advertising doesn't try to follow me around and build an identifiable profile of me personally* - or serve up viruses then claim they're unable to stop doing that. The only virtue of online ads is you can remove them with an ad blocker (and that's not a benefit I've heard ad companies promoting). *Obviously, there's still some profiling, but it's orders of magnitude coarser than Google has.
josefx 10y ago
> 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. Often I don't care about ads. What I care most about is performance and usability. I don't want to wait the five seconds it takes the ad network to serve up an ad. I do not want hundreds of tracking scripts served from some ancient pre pentium box to make this worse. I also do not want to close 20 pop-ups. Give me a nice eye catching traditional ad that just sits in the corner and leaves me alone any day. The cancer that is used for ads currently can just drop and die.

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-...).

elsewhen 10y ago
Unfortunately, the is another space where ads are going to appear: in content... I am not talking about being blended into the content itself. Think paid placements in movies. podcast/youtube sponsorships etc.
- mschuster91 10y ago
  > Think paid placements in movies. podcast/youtube sponsorships etc. Well, product placement in movies is well known. Nearly everyone should know that companies pay millions of dollars to e.g. have James Bond drive their car. What is way more evil is that what is called "influencer marketing", which you are addressing in your last part. It's especially evil because the target group for "influencers" is usually little kids. But, once again, regulation comes to the rescue - at least in Germany, it's outright illegal. To quote §5a, sect. 6 UWG (law against unfair business practice): (6) Unlauter handelt auch, wer den kommerziellen Zweck einer geschäftlichen Handlung nicht kenntlich macht, sofern sich dieser nicht unmittelbar aus den Umständen ergibt, und das Nichtkenntlichmachen geeignet ist, den Verbraucher zu einer geschäftlichen Entscheidung zu veranlassen, die er andernfalls nicht getroffen hätte. Translated (roughly, IANAL): He acts unfair, who hides the commercial purpose of a business transaction as long as this is not obvious from the circumstances, and the hiding is able to trick the consumer into a business transaction he would not have done otherwise. The illegal act hereby is, e.g. as a youtube influencer, hiding that you were paid by an advertiser/vendor to promote a certain item in a "review", because an unsuspecting consumer may not know that your "review" is bought. This is the reason why "sponsored content" is clearly marked as such in German newspapers. Youtubers, on the other hand, have mostly ignored the law (and I'm happy for the day once someone uses the law to shut down the more obnoxious of the bunch like BibisBeautyPalace).
  - srtjstjsj 10y ago
    the US has had "truth in advertising" always since before the Internet, but here they always fall down because cases go to court and the judge rules that "people should know that this was a lie, so it's not deceptive in an illegal way"

mozumder 10y ago

> 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. People actually do want to see ads in certain contexts. In many cases, they actually buy magazines like Vogue where it's filled with hundreds of pages of ads, because of the ads. People also buy local newspapers because of the ads & coupons. The context where people want ads are shopping contexts. If you design your media property around a shopping context, featuring buyers guides or exclusive shopping info, the public will be more appreciative of your ads.

pixl97 10y ago
>People actually do want to see ads in certain contexts Context is very important. That's why 'other recommended products' on sites like Amazon are important. They are a form of ad, but most people don't see it as one, and they don't mind it. People hate ads that attempt to capture your attention that are completely out of context. If I'm reading about network switches and flash ad for makeup pops up it annoys me. If it tries to exploit my computer it makes me ban all ads.

alkonaut 10y ago

> Companies want to know that their advertising dollars are actually producing results, and traditional advertising completely sucks at this. The argument can be reversed though: Despite the fact that traditional advertising is more or less blind to outcome and shows untargeted ads, it has survived for a very long time. This would indicate that businesses would be willing to pay to show untargeted dumb ads online too (if no other option exists).

losteric 10y ago
Or, that those advertisers are targeting a demographic that still prefers older mediums over the internet.
srtjstjsj 10y ago
Big brands will always be able to afford dumb advertising, like sponsoring the Olympics. adtech exists mainly for small brands, of which there are many, many more.
- ithinkinstereo 10y ago
  I would argue that's a different type of advertising. Some campaigns are designed to increase some tangible result: more leads, more sales, etc. Other campaigns, such as your Olympics example, are more general brand awareness and brand reputation/prestige building.
- alkonaut 10y ago
  Adtech enables a cottage industry of web sites that can get $100 or $5000 in ad revenue. It also allows small companies to advertise for e.g $100 or $5000. So if adblockers or something else kills online advertising and makes it the same as bus stop and magazine campaigns then without a novel form of micropayments a large fraction of the web will disappear, and a ton of business won't be able to advertise online at all. Getting rid of the whole adtech industry as it looks today would still be a very welcome change.

tomjen3 10y ago

I see ads on facebook so that I can laugh at how badly targeted they are. I don't believe this ad'tech' hype for a second, because there isn't any actual intelligence it it. Right now Facebook suggests I like some furniture store - it should know by now that I don't give a shit about furniture or shoes or womens clothing, just because I am friends with people who do (mostly, funny enough, women). Really facebook knows just about everything about me, yet they have never come up with an ad for a product I wanted to buy.

brongondwana 10y ago
My Facebook and every other site with adtech tends to spend most of its time filled with ads for the last major purchase that I researched online and then bought something for, often advertising the exact thing that I just got one of and won't need to replace for years.
- Hasknewbie 10y ago
  A.K.A the Amazon Suggestion Effect ("You just bought a fridge, here are 12 more fridges!"). I thought Amazon was keeping their suggestions dumb on purpose, so as not to appear too creepy, apparently I was overestimating how smart adtech is in general.
  - losteric 10y ago
    I always assumed they showed those ads in case the order was cancelled or returned.
    - Chaebixi 10y ago
      Never attribute to intelligence that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
- baddox 10y ago
  It took about six months for the online mattress ads to settle down after I quickly (within a day or two) researched and purchased one. I recently purchased an expensive pair of headphones and I suspect to see those for the next several months.

busterarm 10y ago

> 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". They want it this way. My company at its core relies on traditional advertising. Our leads are finally at the point that we're roughly 1:1 between traditional and online. We've built tools to determine the effectiveness of our traditional ad spend so that we can better target our spend, but we're getting a ton of resistance to us using them. This is from our own internal person who has been running the traditional side of our ad spend for 30 years. Every player in the traditional ads game benefits from keeping the people controlling the spending completely in the dark.

gregw134 10y ago
What kind of tool do you have to monitor traditional ad spend? According to op this should be impossible.
- wtvanhest 10y ago
  Most large companies use a quantitative model with various inputs and outputs. For example, if you know you spend X in market Y, but not market Z you can measure lift within some confidence level between the markets. Imagine a model with every market, and sku, plus the inputs also know where you spent ad dollars and on what product.
  - robertlagrant 10y ago
    The "some confidence level" is the problem - how do you come close to quantifying and removing all the other effects that are involved? This stuff always just becomes something that can be debated away if the advertising lead is popular, or otherwise used as an excuse to fire him/her.

M_Grey 10y ago

I don't think that adtech is offering anything more than a lateral move. Instead of hand-waving and tarot cards, now it's lying spreadsheets and "targeted" ads that we all joke about because they're about as targeted as a SCUD. It's just another way to get ad money out of people who aren't ready to accept that advertising is dying. Sure, for a while you can "sponsor content" and all of the other tricks, but eventually people get used to it, and they block everything else. Basically the issue is that the argument, "You don't want everything to be a subscription/walled garden do you?!" turns out to have, "Actually yes, given the other options, yes we do!" as an answer. Especially when it turns out that the price of a subscription is highly negotiable when everyone is negotiating, and piracy exists.

exergy 10y ago
Fantastic points. I still cannot envision a world 100% without advertising, but my guess would be that the future would be more covert advertising, in the form of product placements etc. On the other hand, I think as the world becomes less materialistic (because it just isn't cool to hoard stuff now), perhaps the impact of having James Bond drive an Aston is going to become reduced. I will happily pay for Spotify, because it does what it says on the tin: all my music in one place, fuss-free and then it gets out of my way. On the other hand, Netflix is now boring because they don't have all that I want, and so both Netflix and the Movie/TV licensing companies lose my money. I really like your last point. The price of a subscription should be highly negotiable. The world is a more convenient place now (for a certain percentage of the world's population, admittedly), and expectations have shifted accordingly. Figure out a way of making me not jump through hoops, or you will lose.

aalimov 10y ago

Thank you..

clubm8 10y ago

>People straight up don't want to see ads. Ad blockers, Netflix, etc. are a natural response to this. Is Netflix totally ad free? I've gotten the impression they were paid for product placement a few times. (Ex: Frank Underwood plugging Sony)

zeta0134 10y ago
Very few mediums are totally ad free, and Netflix is no exception. If a movie or TV show on Netflix (including their original stuff) has product placement, the product placement remains a part of the media and is not altered. That would be generally prohibitively expensive. I notice this especially with criminal investigation shows, where for some inexplicable reason the whole division is using iPads, or every monitor you see features a prominent Dell logo, etc etc.
- michaelt 10y ago
  If it's their original stuff, it wouldn't be cost-prohibitive to remove the product placement. They'd just have to not put that in in the first place
- RugnirViking 10y ago
  Its worth pointing out that until recently, as I understand it, most forms of product placement were not allowed in the UK. As such, many american tv shows and movies literally had scenes cut out. Turns out, it rarely seemed to affect the content, but perhaps thats because anything important got another take without the overt product placement
rpeden 10y ago
I also noticed a ton of Windows phones in the latest House of Cards season. I'm not sure why they'd have used so many if it weren't a paid product placement. The phones were much more numerous in HoC than they are in the real world.
rhino369 10y ago
Definitely not totally ad free. Love s2 had like 5 uber placements. Their licensed stuff does but they can't rightfully edit it out since they didn't create the content.

guitarbill 10y ago

> 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. I think this is spot on. And some people are willing to pay. Another example of this is Youtubers and Patreon. Now, you can finally block ads without guilt and support those creators far more reliably. If the number of supporters dominates the ad revenue, it also encourages more quality and less quantity. For me, this is also where Youtube Red failed. It isn't transparent enough and I couldn't care less about all the "value-add" they tried to staple onto it. I'd rather pay ~$20/month distributed among roughly 6 channels via Patreon. Although it would be really nice to have a way to automatically give a few cents go to videos I watched and enjoyed (by some opt-out metric, e.g. watched more than 30%, or didn't hit dislike, or wasn't autoplayed "next up").

pmoriarty 10y ago
"some people are willing to pay" Isn't it a little perverse that the willingness of people to pay to block annoying ads provides an incentive to make ads ever more prevalent and annoying?
- fasquoika 10y ago
  http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-01-12 http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-01-12
- guitarbill 10y ago
  Depends on your threshold for annoying. While there are terrible ads, I think Youtube is okay. And I don't see it as an arms race at all. It could be a win/win situation. For companies, getting people to watch video ads is a win. For content creators, it's a win cause they get paid. For Youtube, it's a win cause they have a revenue stream. For viewers, it's a win because they don't have to pay anything. The problem is in many cases, if you did want to pay, either to get rid of ads or to support content creators in a greater way, there's not much choice. (Which is puzzling as for a walled garden like Youtube the solution is much, much simpler than for the web.)

tomlock 10y ago

>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". The data to do this already exists in many cases. For example, Google, Facebook - both know when people visit a location, and could cross-reference this with store visits now. If advertising exists in a physical location, and is effective, there is the potential for either of these companies to determine whether the customer visited a location where that physical inventory exists. Traditional advertising only sucks at quantifying results because "new media" has no incentive to share the loads of data they are now collecting.

maroonblazer 10y ago
But how do you know if they were exposed to the advertising? You don't. Even if you did, how do you know they actually saw it/were paying attention? You don't. And even if you knew that, how do you know that it was because of that particular ad that they ventured to your location?
- tomlock 10y ago
  That's also true of 99.99% of digital ads. Plenty of businesses are using attribution models that aren't that deterministic.
  - wastedhours 10y ago
    This is my current hesitancy with "view through conversions" and the industry's rather, optimistic, definition of an impression (especially when running remarketing with VTC... essentially paying to target people who have quite likely found us via organic means and aren't being influenced by our ads). Currently trying lots of experiments with direct, tracked clicks from specific ads through to the CRM. Seeing only a handful of ads get any kind of direct click > conversion response with a reasonable attribution window. So a larger scale programmatic campaign is either a much earlier part of the pipeline than a lot of the adtech companies would have you believe, or is fairly pointless.

phaed 10y ago

> 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. If Netflix was free but with ads (with ad-less subscriptions optional) their viewership and subscriptions would skyrocket, and end up supporting traditional advertising on a modern medium. The only thing I see in the way of something like this is ISPs refusing to give Netflix the bandwidth needed for something this massive. For this to be a possibility either the FCC makes ISPs a utility, or net-neutrality is repealed.

chii 10y ago
If Netflix turning free would produce the kind of business or revenue that you imply, why haven't they started doing it? I think the appeal of Netflix is that they aren't beholden to advertisers.
njharman 10y ago
Free but with ads is Hulu. Netflix crushes Hulu. Netflix is massive for three reasons. Original content, binge watch/no schedule, no adverts.
- candiodari 10y ago
  You forgot "very cheap". Compare the price of a monthly netflix binge watch session with what it would cost on Amazon, or God help you, iTunes or Google play. It's like 90% cheaper. The reason for this is obvious on the Netflix balance sheets. They spent 3-5 times what came in. Of course, this is not what the content producers want. And that's where things have gone wrong in the past, and will go wrong again.
throwaway91111 10y ago
You're just describing why a) YouTube or Hulu is so popular, b) why they suck, but somehow c) they haven't brought down the internet yet. In fact, Netflix and HBO are virtually the only people who actually allow you to reliably avoid ads. Even Hulu finds ways to force them down your throat when you pay.

nonsince 10y ago

Adtech, I'd say, is less slimy than traditional advertising. With traditional ads, you pay for the product (newspaper, TV, etc.), and then you _also_ see ads on top of that, and significantly more than you'd see nowadays at that. As the cost of running an entertainment service have decreased, ads have become noticeably better. That said, adtech still fucking sucks, but I'd rather that than TV's alternative of almost as much ads as there is content.

michaelt 10y ago
I'd say, is less slimy than traditional advertising. Eh, traditional newspaper-billboard-and-broadcast-TV advertising doesn't try to follow me around and build an identifiable profile of me personally* - or serve up viruses then claim they're unable to stop doing that. The only virtue of online ads is you can remove them with an ad blocker (and that's not a benefit I've heard ad companies promoting). *Obviously, there's still some profiling, but it's orders of magnitude coarser than Google has.

josefx 10y ago

> 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. Often I don't care about ads. What I care most about is performance and usability. I don't want to wait the five seconds it takes the ad network to serve up an ad. I do not want hundreds of tracking scripts served from some ancient pre pentium box to make this worse. I also do not want to close 20 pop-ups. Give me a nice eye catching traditional ad that just sits in the corner and leaves me alone any day. The cancer that is used for ads currently can just drop and die.