
Ad Tech Is the Worst Thing That Ever Happened to Advertising - huac
http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/ad-tech-worst-thing-happened-advertising/301992/
======
TeMPOraL
There was a very interesting article posted here yesterday:

[http://blog.sumall.com/journal/optimizely-got-me-
fired.html](http://blog.sumall.com/journal/optimizely-got-me-fired.html)
(discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10872359](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10872359))

Take a good look at it. Ignore the surface-level content about fixing the
stats behind A/B tests. Read what else is there.

This article literally admits that marketing industry is destroying itself
from inside, by applying on each other the same dishonest tactics they use on
us. Now I don't know if it'll be enough to help users - maybe it's only buying
us time before they figure out how to effectively manipulate people, or maybe
it just makes adtech a stable, self-perpetuating resource waster - but it
_does_ feel good.

The ad industry doesn't have a problem with ad blockers. It has a problem with
_basic human decency_.

~~~
zer0gravity
There is a BIG problem with the current model of the advertising industry.
It's based on STEALING attention from people. This is an outstanding lack of
respect.

How about treating people like intelligent beings who know what they want for
themselves and that stay informed ?

Make specialized advertising sites where companies can promote their products
and services and let the users come when they want to check out what's new or
look for something they need. They will come. And they will be happier and the
companies will be happier.

This is a civilized advertising method in... my view.

~~~
maroonblazer
It seems HN likes to complain about the ad industry when in fact what they're
really criticizing are ad tech firms. Ad tech makes up a small fraction of the
ad industry. Defaming the ad industry because of ad tech firms is like
slamming the entire automotive industry for faulty airbag manufacturers.

~~~
adam_kleinberg
Yes, I was criticizing the whole industry. Publishers abuse the tools ad tech
provides to basically steal money from brands and often at the expense of
consumers. Brands are so eager to cut costs, they ignore the basic principal
that you get what you pay for. Big agencies use these tools to mask hidden
profits. VCs invested gleefully at the opportunity to "disrupt" the agency
business. And the anarchistic emergence of ad tech is what's made this all
possible.

------
WalterBright
The thing about ads is, if they are done right, they are very useful. For
example, I buy hot rod magazines specifically to get the ads (the articles are
the fluff). I enjoy the previews of coming attractions when I watch a movie,
and use them to decide what to watch. I enjoy watching "Detroit Muscle" shows
on TV because they are about product placement (they show how to use the
products to work on your car.) Etc.

But ads that goes out of their way to force me to watch it, ads that show so
often I loath the sight of it, ads designed to be irritating, etc., motivate
me to go out of my way to never ever buy their stuff.

Interestingly, I have developed a sort of "ad blindness". My eyes do not see
popover ads, banner ads, etc.

------
alexandrerond
I work in the ad-industry. Many of the concerns here are true. If you are like
me, you use ad-blockers and ghostery with much reason.

But the main problem is that the current model has been and still is extremely
profitable. Ad-tech helps business grow their revenues. Click-baits, user
tracking, pop ups, targeted ads... all these things exist because they make
incredible amounts of money for many involved parts (publishers, ad-platforms,
audience analyzers...), and because the majority of internet users are not
like you and me, and they do respond to ads, click on them (or are tricked to
do so) and don't give a shit that they are being profiled for profit.

I think, as users are more aware and ad-blockers become the default (which is
awesome), we will move into a model where you either accept the ads (possibly
better integrated), or pay, or find it more difficult to visit some sites
(there will always be ways to circumvent). Ad-industry will never be truly on
the side of the random internet users, as they are not the ones paying the ad-
tech companies (publishers do). In any case, the ad-industry will continue on
its own ways, perhaps less intrusively (most of what makes ad-tech you don't
even see it, the ads are just the tip of the money making iceberg). This
illustrates it very well: [http://performancemarketingassociation.com/wp-
content/upload...](http://performancemarketingassociation.com/wp-
content/uploads/DISPLAY-LUMAscape_full.jpg)

------
loudandskittish
I'm a freelance writer. What little money I make is usually connected to
advertising in some way. So, I've generally been against ad blockers.

But lately, I've been considering it.

More and more I'm coming across web sites that are just supposed to display a
text article that are unusable, either loading painfully slowly on my aging PC
that isn't getting upgraded any time soon, or completely freezing my browser.

While I couldn't say for certain the exact cause, the problem almost always
exists on a site with an auto-playing video ad in the sidebar.

Heck, I have no problem watching an HD stream on Twitch.tv while having 40
browser tabs and other apps open but as soon as there's an ad break, my whole
computer grinds to a halt.

I don't want to deprive anyone of money but in the last few months, online ads
have started affecting my ability to use my computer. And that's on top of the
privacy issues and the occasional malware dumps through ads.

~~~
mej10
It is really the pop-up ads and ones that auto-play audio or have any kind of
animation that are terrible.

Also the sites that make you click through a bunch of pages to read an
article.

I don't mind the rest.

I thought it might be fun to add a request header like "X-AdBlock-Reason" that
lets them know why I blocked their ads.

"X-AdBlock-Reason: too-many-ads"

"X-AdBlock-Reason: overbearing-ads"

"X-AdBlock-Reason: poor-ad-performance"

"X-AdBlock-Reason: stop-paginating-unnecessarily"

"X-AdBlock-Reason: i-dont-like-supporting-web-content-creators"

~~~
J_Darnley
Now that makes me wonder whether there's an extension that will let me add
that header and randomise the reason. Sounds like an interesting thing to
shove into someone's log.

On the other hand, I probably wouldn't use it. I would stick out like a sore
thumb to people tracking me.

------
golergka
The author talks about "ad industry" as "us", and the website's name is "Ad
Age". I want to understand this context better: is it a big industry
publication? And what audience inside ad industry does it cater to, exactly?

~~~
adam_kleinberg
I'm the author.

Ad Age is obviously an ad industry publication—-probably the biggest one--but
within that there are a diverse audiences it caters to. You can google the
term "lumascape" to see a ton of images showing just what a chaotic mess of
companies and kinds of companies are involved in digital advertising, but
there are typically four groups involved: the brands that are paying for all
this marketing, the agencies who they hire to help them reach their customers,
the publishers that produce the content, and the ad tech companies that
provide the tools to get the ads from the brands and agencies to their
potential customers as they spend time on publisher's sites.

One criticism I've gotten on this piece is that it's not ad tech's fault, it's
the publishers who use these tools. I think that's like saying it's not the
drug dealers fault that his user OD'ed.

A key point I was trying to make was not that the tools themselves are the
problem, but that the environment they've emerged in is. All of those
audiences I've described play a role in that environment.

~~~
lpsz
The very insightful chart mentioned above:
[http://www.lumapartners.com/wordpress/wp-
content/uploads/201...](http://www.lumapartners.com/wordpress/wp-
content/uploads/2012/04/Display-LUMAscape_2012-04-05.jpg)

------
jodrellblank
_Advertising doesn 't have to suck. We can tell great stories with digital._

Imagine if you'd seen an article about Shaq being a giant, and it only had ONE
ad for mayonnaise instead of 38. Imagine all the great stories Folgers
Mayonnaise (or whoever) could have told!

I claim (with no evidence) that you can't tell great stories about mayonnaise
with digital, or with anything. I claim similarly that people _don 't want to
see or read great stories about mayonnaise_.

Sure, you can interrupt a TV show and put a mayonnaise advert there, where a
roughly-captive audience will see it, you can put an advert by a road or on a
building, where people can't reasonably avoid it, and from that there will be
more recognition of some brands than others. Within the context of a TV ad
which is going to exist, there are better and worse adverts, and adverts which
try (successfully) to manipulate feelings about mayonnaise by connecting them
to happy family mealtime scenarios and so on.

But people are not clamouring for George R. R. Martin's latest "Game of
Mayonnaise" installment. Nobody is hanging on Stephen King's publishing
schedules looking for something, anything, about mayonnaise. People aren't
quoting "top 10 films of 2015" and including Spielberg's latest mayonnaise
epic, or desperately hoping that the decision between Amazon Prime and Netflix
will be settled once and for all by whichever one finally gets on the missing
mayonnaise content.

 _This is collective intelligence at work. This will be how the Wild West is
won. The industry hasn 't been able to police ourselves, so consumers will
force change upon the industry themselves._

Yes. But if you read that as "the stories we are telling about mayonnaise
aren't good enough", then I think you're not receiving the same message that
the collective intelligence is sending.

You clicked three adverts a day, every day, on your phone - _every single one
by accident_ \- a hundred adverts and not a single one you were interested in
- and you read that as "advertising is great, just think how good adblockers
will make it"?

~~~
morgante
I strongly disagree. Advertising can be enjoyable and fun to watch.

Probably the best example of this is Super Bowl advertising. Every year, I
make a point of looking up many of the ads on YouTube even though (a) I hate
football and (b) I have about 0 interest in most of the products advertised.
Why? Because they're, in a sense, the pinnacle of commercial storytelling. Per
second, they're the most expensive stories ever told—and that leads to
amazingly high production values and, often, some very fun advertisements.

There's a reason that the best ads have tens of millions of voluntary views on
YouTube.

------
dwc
I'm a little surprised that there weren't more and better examples of how ad
tech is misused. Also missing was any sort of vision of how things should be.
It's nice to see this attitude in Ad Age, though.

------
fumar
Ad Tech was born out of the marketer's need to target, display, and track user
web actions (even offline), and content creators need to monetize their
creations. It is not just content creators, but large enterprises like Walmart
and Kohl's, Amazon who have ad space on their homepage.

The Ad Tech crew came in and connected the pipes in order to provide a
solution to marketers and in return content creators. The consumer (of content
and goods) was left behind, dropped into the background of the conversation,
what was their experience - who cares. It is like a cruel cycle of content
creators willing to sell more ad space for incremental revenue and marketers
willing to buy it for incremental views (revenue, clicks, conversions).

I think the ability to measure the effectiveness (likely low, very low) impact
of digital advertising dollars will add a balance to the equation. Right now,
it is two parties moving in cyclical unison towards higher expenditure and
worse user experiences. A third party is required to reset expectations and
show a more realistic impact of digital advertising.

\- Currently, working in ad tech, I find marketers have lofty goals in terms
of revenue or leads generated by digital advertising...

------
Shivetya
I am not easily offended by ads, but there are a few techniques that can
infuriate me. The overlay with near impossible close option which usually is a
X so small you spend valuable time hunting it down or just going back to the
previous site. The second of course are automatic playing videos accompanied
by obnoxious sound or volume.

Really they need to move to a standard side bar or bottom bar and have
everyone get on board or just be blocked.

~~~
WalterBright
> obnoxious sound or volume.

I have the speakers turned off on my machine. They are only on if I run a
youtube video or Skype.

~~~
chillwaves
A lot of us listen to music.

~~~
WalterBright
I use a separate machine to play the music, as I don't like the bleeps and
bloops Windows normally generates, either.

------
WalterBright
I have some TV shows I recorded in the 1980s. Ironically, the shows today are
far less interesting than the advertisements that were inadvertantly captured.

~~~
ethbro
I've observed the same on some of my old tapes. I think ad's by their nature
always try to speak directly the zeitgeist, which creates more interest when
viewed from the future than shows themselves.

------
AndrewKemendo
I think the future of advertising is where the experience is the ad - kind of
like showrooms are. You actually drive the car, or sit on the couch.

Twitter kind of started this by making their ads just another tweet, but even
then it's still very generalizable and the experience you get is not with the
product but with a depiction of it.

So that's what we are doing with our company by virtualizing the showroom
experience in Augmented Reality.

~~~
frik
You mean "Native advertising":
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_advertising](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_advertising)

Do you really want to read half of an article just to find out you wasted your
time because it turns into an sponsored article (advertisement of a product)?
People hate blog spam here on HN. And often as well other forms of "native
advertising" like the slightly yellow colored sponsored search results on
Google or your example of sponsored feed posts on Facebook and Twitter. What
you probably mean with "experience is the ad" is more what is called product
placement in movies, games and theme park rides.

~~~
AndrewKemendo
Not just native, because that implies it is similar in function. I mean the
whole point of going into the platform is because you are looking to buy or be
sold to.

------
makeitsuckless
The lack of any kind of introspection is painful. Sure, new tech will be
abused for anything, but no industry has so completely and totally unethically
abused tech as the advertising industry.

The only other field that has been so utterly unencumbered by any ethical
concerns has been state intelligence, and at least they have had enough sense
of shame to do it in secret, and can claim they do it "for the greater good".

Ad tech has exposed the utter moral void of the advertising industry.

------
frik
So true. And it correlates with this article:
[http://idlewords.com/2015/11/the_advertising_bubble.htm](http://idlewords.com/2015/11/the_advertising_bubble.htm)

It's time to go back to 2004 style ads, before or around when Google Adsense
disrupted the advertisement world. Dumb plain advertisement based on jpeg,
animated gif or formatted text.

~~~
elorant
AdSense gave the opportunity to many small-to-medium sites to earn a decent
living. If you take that away you could break the very fabric of the web,
which in my opinion is content generated by hobbyists and dedicated
communities. Bigger corporations won’t have a problem because eventually they
all run their own advertising platforms.

In the same context, I don’t see how advertisers could trust any web site to
run their ads. Who’s to check if the content is consumed by real humans or a
botnet some small publisher has set-up as a side project? Even today with all
the technology available at least a quarter of ad traffic is fraudulent.
Imagine what would happen if there were no third party agencies to validate
traffic.

~~~
vertex-four
> AdSense gave the opportunity to many small-to-medium sites to earn a decent
> living. If you take that away you could break the very fabric of the web,
> which in my opinion is content generated by hobbyists and dedicated
> communities.

It's easier and cheaper than ever to run your own website or community forum -
and the vast majority of these that exist are not significantly funded by
advertisements. Ads don't make money on a small scale, as every mobile game
developer will happily explain. I think that it's very unlikely the web would
lose significant value through losing third-party ad companies.

------
dschiptsov
...churches to religions and Java to programming..)

------
phamilton
Effective programmatic advertising is arguably the best thing that ever
happened to advertising.

~~~
bsg75
Would your provide some more detail or reasoning here?

~~~
brtt
Presumably, statement (emphasis on effective) was based on the inference that
content would be more relevant given additional AIO/behavior parameters. But
programatic opponents could cite URL masking and other fraudulent practices
that are rampant across ad-tech.

~~~
phamilton
See my follow-up. It's about more than just relevance.

