5 ms·

I work in the online advertising space. They also use AdBlock to basically steal content The whole problem with your industry is that you are still operating

by kyllo 12y ago

I work in the online advertising space. They also use AdBlock to basically steal content The whole problem with your industry is that you are still operating under the mistaken belief that "impressions" drive purchasing behavior. As if having some image forcibly burnt into my brain will influence my subconscious desires enough to cause me to make a purchase sometime later. This idea is and has always been pure snake oil. I don't want to see your ads, and I'm not going to click on them or buy what they are selling anyway. If anything I'm less likely to buy a product after I see it in a banner ad because they are annoying and I don't buy products that annoy me. You have no business telling me that it's "stealing" when I configure my browser client not to show me ads that I don't want to see. The implication is offensive. Do you think that running a spam e-mail filter is "basically stealing" too?

manigandham 12y ago
You're conflating a lot of issues. 1) Spam is not the same, you didnt ask for it so you are rightly refusing and actively blocking it. 2) Content is not free. Someone had to create it, and they can either charge you directly or let you see it for free by also showing you ads. When you block those ads but still read the content, you're stealing the access/time/production/value of that content without letting the publisher recoup any of their investment or make any profit. 3) I'm not really sure where this anger comes from. Advertising is such a big and growing industry because it works. This is not some evil conspiracy nor are all the companies full of idiots. You will find regular people much like yourself working at all of the advertising agencies, networks and publishers. Impressions do work. It's not a "belief", it's a fact. Think of it like an empty road with a billboard and a store at the next exit. You can have a blank billboard and see how many people stop at the store. Then put up an ad and measure again. That delta is a significant and measurable difference and with digital advertising, it can be tracked to a very specific level to prove it works. There are also many different types and formats of ads which work in different stages of the sales conversion funnel. YOU might not think it works, but that's not what the massive amount of data and results show every day.
- kyllo 12y ago
  Here's a thought experiment: Imagine someone invented "smart" sunglasses that detected billboard ads and filtered them out so the wearer saw only a blank billboard instead of an ad. By driving down the road while wearing them and not seeing the billboards ads, would I therefore be "stealing" from ClearChannel? My anger comes from the fact that businesses are constantly trying to sell me things by harassing me. I have no problem with paying for things that I actually want, and I gladly pay for content if it will make the ads go away, but it normally doesn't. If you buy a subscription to a news site you still see ads. I pay plenty for content when I buy books, though. If people are not willing to pay for the content on a site like BuzzFeed, it just shows how little that content is worth. And advertising is really not a growing industry, at least not as a share of GDP. It's basically a zero-sum game. Online advertising spending is only growing to the extent that it is replacing spending on radio, TV and billboard advertising. Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-03-03/advertisings-century-of-flat-line-growth http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-03-03/advertisings...
  - manigandham 12y ago
    You're talking about different things. 1) Impressions do work, that's what my example was about. 2) Ads are the trade for free access to content. If the ads paid for the road you're driving on, then yes you'd be "stealing" access to the road by ignoring the ads. The businesses aren't harassing you, they're just spending on ads and those ads show up on publishers who have opted to use the advertising model instead of subscriptions/paid access. There are lots of issues with paid access like not enough demand, price sensitivity, hard to gain new traffic/shares, etc. Advertising is just more reliable and easier to implement and allows for quicker growth. If sites are using subscriptions and still show you ads (and you're actually logged in as a paying member) then they're trying to extract more money or the price is not covering all of their costs or something in between. That's an issue with the publisher, not the ad companies. Everything is zero-sum when measured to GDP because there's only 100% of the GDP to go around. GDP is a VERY big number and it's growing, and thus the absolute dollar amount of advertising is also growing and outpacing supply of inventory. That being said, advertising won't become a larger part of GDP because there are only so many buyers that also have to grow as businesses first to increase their total budgets. It makes sense that it tracks in line with the economy and it's not really feasible to make big changes because businesses are not going to stop spending on something like manufacturing their product to instead divert it to advertising.
smtddr 12y ago
>>As if having some image forcibly burnt into my brain will influence my subconscious desires enough to cause me to make a purchase sometime later. This idea is and has always been pure snake oil. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand_awareness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand_awareness This absolutely does work on a non-trivial amount of people. Even when said people are aware they are being influenced. Anecdotal; I grew up with McDonald's fast food. Even though today I've taken up a much healthier diet for years, I'm still a bit sad McD's cannot be a part of my family's life. I'm aware it's because of those golden arches and that Ronald person that was always in commercials during my Saturday morning cartoons. My superMarioBros.3 toys came from McD's happymeals. To this day I still buy many Nintendo-brand t-shirts for myself, and even Nintendo stuff for my kids, and I know it's because Nintendo has etched into my head their marketing from before I was even 10 years old.... but I can't shake it off. McD's mixing Nintendo characters into their marketing image makes it even harder for me to ignore them... but I do because I see the real effects of eating unhealthy. Otherwise anything that doesn't have a very clear negative effect, the Ads do work on me. If I see something advertised often enough without running into any negative commentary about it, the next time I need whatever that company was advertising I will look to them first.
throwawaymsft 12y ago
The idea that banner ads which, when clicked, can be traced to a specific purchases is snake oil? That telling someone about a service doesn't increase purchase intent?
wcummings 12y ago
"Advertising doesn't work on me" -everyone But it does, lots of smart people spend lots of money on it and recoup their investment. People spend a lot of time and money figuring out exactly how impressions drive sales. Do you think no one measures ROI on ads?
- kyllo 12y ago
  Advertising companies spend a lot of time and money convincing industry companies that ads work and that their ROI can be measured. In reality you cannot attribute a particular instance of someone seeing an ad to a specific purchase except in the case of a click-through online purchase, which I think is a pretty small portion of sales.
  - manigandham 12y ago
    Serious question: What are you basing this "reality" on? I'm really trying to understand why you think this is all fake. We can and do measure ads pretty accurately. Attribution is far from perfect but aggregated against a large audience who's exposed to ads vs a control group, and with tracking all the way down to conversions, we can see there is a difference. My company works with Nielsen to certify and double-check our results as well as numerous other partners that only do attribution which is why our clients trust us. It's not impossible. It's done everyday and it's backed by science, technology, data and results.
    - kyllo 12y ago
      I simply give no weight to your assertion that it isn't fake, because I haven't seen any convincing, independently researched evidence of that, and because your livelihood depends on convincing people that it isn't fake. Your clients trust you, and that's why they're your clients. I don't trust you, and that's why I'm not. I think that modern advertising is based on faulty, outdated psychological theory and that all the statistics you can come up with to demonstrate otherwise are tainted because the studies are all funded by ad company dollars.
      - 12y ago
JoeAltmaier 12y ago
Maybe impressions don't 'drive behavior'. But being aware of a product WILL change the chance that I will purchase it. Still, I'm in charge of my device; I'll browse/block/ignore whatever I damn well please thank you.

by kyllo 12y ago

manigandham 12y ago

You're conflating a lot of issues. 1) Spam is not the same, you didnt ask for it so you are rightly refusing and actively blocking it. 2) Content is not free. Someone had to create it, and they can either charge you directly or let you see it for free by also showing you ads. When you block those ads but still read the content, you're stealing the access/time/production/value of that content without letting the publisher recoup any of their investment or make any profit. 3) I'm not really sure where this anger comes from. Advertising is such a big and growing industry because it works. This is not some evil conspiracy nor are all the companies full of idiots. You will find regular people much like yourself working at all of the advertising agencies, networks and publishers. Impressions do work. It's not a "belief", it's a fact. Think of it like an empty road with a billboard and a store at the next exit. You can have a blank billboard and see how many people stop at the store. Then put up an ad and measure again. That delta is a significant and measurable difference and with digital advertising, it can be tracked to a very specific level to prove it works. There are also many different types and formats of ads which work in different stages of the sales conversion funnel. YOU might not think it works, but that's not what the massive amount of data and results show every day.

kyllo 12y ago
Here's a thought experiment: Imagine someone invented "smart" sunglasses that detected billboard ads and filtered them out so the wearer saw only a blank billboard instead of an ad. By driving down the road while wearing them and not seeing the billboards ads, would I therefore be "stealing" from ClearChannel? My anger comes from the fact that businesses are constantly trying to sell me things by harassing me. I have no problem with paying for things that I actually want, and I gladly pay for content if it will make the ads go away, but it normally doesn't. If you buy a subscription to a news site you still see ads. I pay plenty for content when I buy books, though. If people are not willing to pay for the content on a site like BuzzFeed, it just shows how little that content is worth. And advertising is really not a growing industry, at least not as a share of GDP. It's basically a zero-sum game. Online advertising spending is only growing to the extent that it is replacing spending on radio, TV and billboard advertising. Source: http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-03-03/advertisings-century-of-flat-line-growth http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-03-03/advertisings...
- manigandham 12y ago
  You're talking about different things. 1) Impressions do work, that's what my example was about. 2) Ads are the trade for free access to content. If the ads paid for the road you're driving on, then yes you'd be "stealing" access to the road by ignoring the ads. The businesses aren't harassing you, they're just spending on ads and those ads show up on publishers who have opted to use the advertising model instead of subscriptions/paid access. There are lots of issues with paid access like not enough demand, price sensitivity, hard to gain new traffic/shares, etc. Advertising is just more reliable and easier to implement and allows for quicker growth. If sites are using subscriptions and still show you ads (and you're actually logged in as a paying member) then they're trying to extract more money or the price is not covering all of their costs or something in between. That's an issue with the publisher, not the ad companies. Everything is zero-sum when measured to GDP because there's only 100% of the GDP to go around. GDP is a VERY big number and it's growing, and thus the absolute dollar amount of advertising is also growing and outpacing supply of inventory. That being said, advertising won't become a larger part of GDP because there are only so many buyers that also have to grow as businesses first to increase their total budgets. It makes sense that it tracks in line with the economy and it's not really feasible to make big changes because businesses are not going to stop spending on something like manufacturing their product to instead divert it to advertising.

smtddr 12y ago

>>As if having some image forcibly burnt into my brain will influence my subconscious desires enough to cause me to make a purchase sometime later. This idea is and has always been pure snake oil. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand_awareness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand_awareness This absolutely does work on a non-trivial amount of people. Even when said people are aware they are being influenced. Anecdotal; I grew up with McDonald's fast food. Even though today I've taken up a much healthier diet for years, I'm still a bit sad McD's cannot be a part of my family's life. I'm aware it's because of those golden arches and that Ronald person that was always in commercials during my Saturday morning cartoons. My superMarioBros.3 toys came from McD's happymeals. To this day I still buy many Nintendo-brand t-shirts for myself, and even Nintendo stuff for my kids, and I know it's because Nintendo has etched into my head their marketing from before I was even 10 years old.... but I can't shake it off. McD's mixing Nintendo characters into their marketing image makes it even harder for me to ignore them... but I do because I see the real effects of eating unhealthy. Otherwise anything that doesn't have a very clear negative effect, the Ads do work on me. If I see something advertised often enough without running into any negative commentary about it, the next time I need whatever that company was advertising I will look to them first.

throwawaymsft 12y ago

The idea that banner ads which, when clicked, can be traced to a specific purchases is snake oil? That telling someone about a service doesn't increase purchase intent?

wcummings 12y ago

"Advertising doesn't work on me" -everyone But it does, lots of smart people spend lots of money on it and recoup their investment. People spend a lot of time and money figuring out exactly how impressions drive sales. Do you think no one measures ROI on ads?

kyllo 12y ago
Advertising companies spend a lot of time and money convincing industry companies that ads work and that their ROI can be measured. In reality you cannot attribute a particular instance of someone seeing an ad to a specific purchase except in the case of a click-through online purchase, which I think is a pretty small portion of sales.
- manigandham 12y ago
  Serious question: What are you basing this "reality" on? I'm really trying to understand why you think this is all fake. We can and do measure ads pretty accurately. Attribution is far from perfect but aggregated against a large audience who's exposed to ads vs a control group, and with tracking all the way down to conversions, we can see there is a difference. My company works with Nielsen to certify and double-check our results as well as numerous other partners that only do attribution which is why our clients trust us. It's not impossible. It's done everyday and it's backed by science, technology, data and results.
  - kyllo 12y ago
    I simply give no weight to your assertion that it isn't fake, because I haven't seen any convincing, independently researched evidence of that, and because your livelihood depends on convincing people that it isn't fake. Your clients trust you, and that's why they're your clients. I don't trust you, and that's why I'm not. I think that modern advertising is based on faulty, outdated psychological theory and that all the statistics you can come up with to demonstrate otherwise are tainted because the studies are all funded by ad company dollars.
    - 12y ago

JoeAltmaier 12y ago

Maybe impressions don't 'drive behavior'. But being aware of a product WILL change the chance that I will purchase it. Still, I'm in charge of my device; I'll browse/block/ignore whatever I damn well please thank you.