
Brands need to fire adtech - hunglee2
https://artplusmarketing.com/brands-need-to-fire-adtech-f9d18edd2f9a
======
mdorazio
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.

~~~
tomjen3
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
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
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
I always assumed they showed those ads in case the order was cancelled or
returned.

~~~
Chaebixi
Never attribute to _intelligence_ that which is adequately explained by
stupidity.

------
Tistel
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
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.

------
phamilton
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
> 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
> 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
Exactly. They extract money by addicting people and taking advantage of them.
It should be criminal.

~~~
mschuster91
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...

~~~
Mithaldu
Almost nobody thinks of DLC when they talk about F2P games, except for the
people making decisions in the Google Play store dev while being clueless and
divorced from the actual market.

I think there's no need to worry about or bring that up.

~~~
mschuster91
I'm not talking about a definition for nerds, I'm sure everyone on this forum
knows the difference. I'm more after something that can be presented to a
politician and be acted upon.

And most politicians either have no clue or don't care about the difference
between DLC and IAP, for them it's the same - you pay for "new" content in a
computer game. Have enough voters complain to them and they'll cluelessly
enact crap as laws.

~~~
Jonnax
Well what's getting quite popular these days is the concept of a "loot box"
which is where you spend some real money to get a box of unknown items.

When you open it you get a randomised, by whatever factors, set of
items/powerups/whatevers. It adds a bit of a gambling aspect to it where a
user might want to pay again to have another roll of the dice.

That's pretty easy to distinguish

------
unabridged
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.

~~~
sfifs
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
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
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.

------
jlawer
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.

------
camgunz
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
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.

~~~
dredmorbius
Some people _may_ be.

But the vast majority, who feed the dynamic, are not.

And hence the downward spiral.

~~~
manigandham
What downward spiral? This isn't unique to adtech, this is human behavior. We
all influence each other.

When your friend recommends a product, they are influencing you, but might not
know what's actually good for you or what your needs/wants are and might not
even be honest with you. At least with advertising there are some standards
and it's that same human behavior/influence harnessed and purchased through
technology. Politics, news, communications, etc. It's all the same.

~~~
camgunz
Advertising companies do not act in the interests of consumers. We're not
their customers. Any benefit is totally coincidental. The following would be
helpful to us:

\- "These products from a different company look more like what you're after"

\- "Based on your income/debt/bills, you probably shouldn't buy this"

\- "A better version of this will be out in a few days, just wait!"

\- "This product explodes, buy this other one instead"

Of course advertising companies will never do this, because it would be acting
against the interest of their actual customers (companies). Can I even hire an
ad firm to help me shop? The very idea sounds ridiculous. It's just not what
advertising is for.

Advertising exists only to convince more people to buy goods and services. It
specifically employs devices to do this even if:

\- the consumer doesn't want or need them

\- the consumer can't afford them

\- the consumer could get a better deal or product elsewhere

\- the product is defective

Advertising is really good at reframing this stuff (your post is a pretty good
example of it actually), but given these facts I don't know how to think of
advertising in positive light.

------
kbos87
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.

~~~
baddox
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.

------
mark_l_watson
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.

~~~
manigandham
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
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
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.

------
cdata
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.

------
jonstokes
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.

------
tgragnato
> 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
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
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
Could you share the list of the laws to send? I find it quite problematic to
force companies on Malta to do that.

~~~
tgragnato
Please remember that the laws are only modeled on the EU directives, one have
to expect a substantial compatibility, but the specific terms may change on a
country basis.

One of the aims of the GDPR has been to standardize the protection, zeroing
the differences.

[http://194.242.234.211/documents/10160/2012405/Personal+Data...](http://194.242.234.211/documents/10160/2012405/Personal+Data+Protection+Code+-+Legislat.+Decree+no.196+of+30+June+2003.pdf)

Specifically ask the removal of any information that may lead to any form of
authentication (prior or post any processing, the deanonymisation trick is not
allowed).

You just need to prove they have obtained your data in violation of anyone of
the provisions.

In my case "they incorporated a company, embedding the data in the datastore
in such a way that they violated the term of service of the previous company,
their own tos (I never subscribed to their website yet they insistently phoned
and texted me) and the actual privacy law, adding to this the delete form was
unmaintained and didn't work, which is another violation".

Edit: sorry for the multiple updates, I am typing from my iPhone.

------
spamizbad
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.

~~~
logn
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.

------
SonOfLilit
Obligatory: [https://medium.com/@RickWebb/banner-fraud-doesn-t-matter-
fc8...](https://medium.com/@RickWebb/banner-fraud-doesn-t-matter-fc84413fe59c)

"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 s __tshow, 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. "

------
aviraldg
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.

~~~
exclusiv
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
People say horrible things in the public streets but billboard and shopwindow
advertising is still tolerated there.

~~~
exclusiv
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.

------
criddell
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
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.

------
rlongstaff
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...](http://parliamentlive.tv/event/index/ecd59f92-64b6-4450-96b6-83c94cbf1b68?in=14:22:07)

~~~
bitmapbrother
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?

------
arez
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

------
manigandham

      > 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.

------
cavisne
"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
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.

------
terravion
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
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)

------
sixQuarks
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.

------
generic_user
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.

------
BukhariH
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!

------
dillondoyle
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...](https://medium.com/@dillondoyle/first-medium-comment-hope-im-doing-
this-right-f064186d9c4f)

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.

------
intrasight
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?

------
fullshark
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
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.

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

------
libeclipse
There have been reports that the WSJ articles that triggered this whole thing
were fake.

Source: h3h3

------
oli5679
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/attach...](http://cn.cnstudiodev.com/uploads/document_attachment/attachment/550/tadelis.pdf)

[2]
[http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1399&c...](http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1399&context=heinzworks)

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

------
angry-hacker
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
> _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)

------
draw_down
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
Gresham's Law / Market for Lemons.

Both have very strong information-theoretical roots.

