

Engineers irrationally hate advertising tech - subelsky
http://www.cogmap.com/blog/2012/03/15/engineers-irrationally-hate-advertising/

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crusso
The dislike of advertising isn't so much that ads pay for free content on the
internet. It has to do more with the slippery slope of qualities and
techniques that advertisers have and use to be successful.

To be a really good advertiser, you normally need to do some of the following
loathsome things (and others not listed):

1\. Outright spam. 2\. Force opt-out over opt-in notions of content
distribution. 3\. Collect information on people that normally violates user
notions of privacy. 4\. Abuse otherwise useful UI features like pop-up windows
in order to force ads into user view. 5\. Be obnoxious to get your message
heard, ie make the ad big, make the colors outlandish, add sound.

Engineers dislike advertising because we know details of how our privacy is
being violated. We don't have the bliss of ignorance.

~~~
brugidou
I work as an engineer for an advertising company (criteo) and call me naive
but I believe we do none of these. I still understand the stereotyped view of
advertising companies that we all hate.

Also, Google is (mostly) an advertising company.

~~~
JoelPM
I also work as an engineer for an ad related company (openx) and I similarly
believe we do none of the above. On the engineering side we mostly write code
that gets called billions of times a day and has to provide responses in a few
hundred milliseconds. It's kinda fun.

Google is definitely an advertising company, but they do it well.

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mkmcdonald
As a developer, I'll outline why I _rationally_ have great contempt for
advertising.

Television, print and radio advertisements have irrevocably caused me to gag
at most advertisements. I can see right though the lies and half-truths that
marketers spin to fool people into buying their mediocre products. Take any
McDonald's ad campaign over the past few years. Note that (at least in Canada)
that no overweight person is ever featured. Somehow, perfectly healthy people
are devouring Big Macs and we're expected to believe it.

Advertisements now often rely heavily on sexual overtones. Web advertisements
are quite guilty as well. As an adult male with a functioning brain, I find
ads that rely on sexuality disgusting. I wasn't compelled to purchase alcohol
before the commercial came on, and now I'm thoroughly repulsed. Decrement
another point of respect for marketers.

I'm also disturbed by ad companies tracking me whenever possible. I read a
forum thread on a public computer which described a custom suit company. For
the next week, I was inundated with ads for that company on the same computer.
I do not seek "personalization" as I never intentionally click on ads. If I
want something, I'll go out and look for it. On my own computer, I block as
many ad servers as I can through my hosts file.

Yes, the world really does revolve around money. However, advertising is not
the sole plausible revenue model for a web site. Wikipedia is a fine example
of a web site that doesn't need third-party advertising to exist. I have a
tremendous amount of respect for the Wikimedia Foundation because it's funded
so openly. GitHub seems to be chugging along without bombarding its users with
advertisements because it has a premium content model.

As was mentioned earlier, "engineers" are smart enough to see through
advertising. Disillusionment of web sites like Facebook and Google Analytics
is more than enough to propagate disgust for advertising.

------
lukeschlather
Someone recently posted a similar observation, except it was not at all
congratulatory: the best minds of today are all busy not curing cancer. The
author of this post is right, none of the companies named are doing much
that's interesting (except Google; search is incredible.) But I don't see that
as a point in advertising's favor.

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geophile
They don't hate advertising tech, they hate spending time on something as
useless as advertising.

An engineer wants to build something useful, and advertising is not useful. I
mean really, who cares if 1% of a particular demographic switches from Tide to
Wisk? Do you really want to put your talents to use in that way?

------
rfugger
Modern advertising is a parasite on people's evolved cooperation mechanisms.
We naturally feel moved to do what those around us are doing, and advertising
preys on that instinct by providing it false social cues to encourage behavior
that is profitable for the advertiser.

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jcmhn
I dislike advertising itself as much as the next engineer. I won't even
attempt to defend that position with logic, it's a visceral preference.

But I especially wouldn't want to work for advertisers. It seems natural that
such companies would be structured to have engineering work for sales and
marketing, with management acting as a funnel rather than an umbrella.

------
mikeash
First of all, how can you rationally hate something? Hate is inherently
irrational. Anybody who hates anything hates it irrationally. The title should
simply be, "Engineers hate advertising tech". The use of the word
"irrationally" is simply a lame attempt to paint us as being objectively
wrong, which doesn't even make sense.

Second, I think a lot of people have good reasons for disliking advertising
tech. Beyond a certain point, advertising essentially becomes a zero-sum game.
The people who see your ads are only going to spend so much money on stuff,
and once you've saturated that, the best you can do is move the money around.
It's unlikely that your product is vastly better than what people would
otherwise find. Advertising can certainly help get the word out about truly
excellent new products, but that use is vastly outweighed by simply trying to
switch people from one brand to another mostly equivalent one.

Because of this zero-sum nature of much advertising, it becomes a race to the
bottom. In most markets, if competing products A and B both improve an equal
amount, everybody benefits. In advertising, if competing ads A and B both
become more effective at selling, little changes. The better ad will continue
to work better, but the absolute effect will not change much. (In reality, all
ads compete against all other ads to an extent for people's money, but the
point still holds as long as you look at all of them.) The trouble is that an
ad's effectiveness is only loosely tied to its aesthetic value or utility to
the viewer. In other markets, when competitors race to improve their products,
the result is awesome products. In advertising, the result is ads that are
continually larger, louder, brighter, stupider, more difficult to bypass, more
insulting, and more annoying. Companies race to one-up each other's ads and
the rest of us are just collateral damage in their war.

Ads are intruding on more and more of our lives, including _things we pay
for_. Everybody I know hates sitting through ads after paying $BIGNUM at a
movie theater, but somehow the practice has become universal anyway. I suppose
it hurts sales less than it boosts revenues. This helps the theater, but it
doesn't help _me_. Tickets didn't get any cheaper when ads went in. For an
internet example, take Hulu Plus, which I understand is now showing ads to
paid subscribers.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, ads are probably the single greatest
non-government mechanism for invading our privacy today. Ads work better when
they're targeted based on personal information, and the result is private
companies with vast amounts of information about everybody's browsing habits,
held and used in a completely opaque and unaccountable fashion. Ad networks
are becoming vast spy networks that just happen to be used for the relatively
benign purpose of getting us to buy stuff. And you wonder why we don't like ad
technology?

------
nirvana
I'm an engineer and I'm fascinated by the advertising space. In fact, one of
the things on my side project list that's been there for the past four years
is creating a mobile advertising network. I know its a big job and the
technical challenges are one of the reasons I haven't done it.

If I were looking to work for other people, the primary reason I would likely
not work for any of the advertising companies or startups I've looked at is
not the engineering challenges they face, nor any irrational hatred of
advertising, but the fact that ad companies are run by ad men.

Maybe a better word would be "MBA Types". There is a culture/group/whatever of
people who are different from me, who in many ways I have trouble relating to
and who seem to make decisions, in my experience, that are bad for engineering
and bad for the product, but good for short term business wins.

I'm not saying they are wrong or bad or that I irrationally hate them, just
that I long ago added to the list of things I look for in an employer a very
senior person (CTO for instance) who is an engineer. And then I look to make
sure that engineer is the one who has final say on engineering decisions.

Looking at most add startups "Team" pages, there are no engineers there at
all.

Certainly there is a cultural segment of people who really seem to hate the
idea of marketing, advertising, SEO, etc.

There's overlap with engineers, but I don't think this perspective is
intrinsic to engineers.

