
Separating advertising’s wheat and chaff - cpeterso
https://blogs.law.harvard.edu/doc/2015/08/12/separating-advertisings-wheat-and-chaff/
======
thecosas
There are so many technical challenges here, but the payoff is worth it, at
least for consumers.

I'm not convinced that advertisers or the companies which pay them will be
willing to make the changes necessary to enable the world outlined in this
article.

------
dsjoerg
Outstanding & thought-provoking, thank you.

------
shostack
(Disclosure: I've spent most of my career in digital media)

Taking a step back with this article, I think there's a few things going on
here. There's clearly frustration with the extent to which people are tracked
(often without their knowledge), and I don't disagree with that at all. Then
there's the point of "well, is that extra data actually paying off to be worth
the negative brand perception and invasiveness?" And the answer there totally
depends on whom you ask and how you ask that question.

Taking an even further step back I can say that the entire point of
advertising is and has always been to get a message in front of a target
audience, whether it is driving sales, retaining customers, fending off
competitors, promoting a non-profit cause, etc.

There are many channels to do that these days, and advertisers constantly
struggle with the question of "is this meeting our objectives?" The joke about
not knowing which 50% of your ad spend is being wasted is very much alive and
well today in a world the availability of data has vastly outpaced the
mainstream advertiser's ability to harness it. So I'd say overall, the answer
to the question around whether the extra tracking is worth it is largely a
question mark when you get into the nitty gritty of it.

If someone asked me what the hardest part of my job was, I would say it is
determining what the contribution was of a given
channel/campaign/placement/keyword/ad/etc. to my end goals, ie. attribution.
The display industry is massive and make no mistake, we've come a long way in
terms of understanding effectiveness. Ultimately though, most advertisers who
do any sort of branding campaigns will tell you that they don't know
definitively what value that contributed if you hold their feet to the fire on
questions around attribution. Did the personalized ecommerce retargeting ad
really remind them to buy or would they have done so anyway? What's the value
of a view-through conversion? If a video pre-roll unit autoplays without
sound, what is its value compared to a user-initiated play? Etc.

I say all of this not as an excuse (our industry has many issues, make no
mistake), but to highlight the fact that as an advertiser, I honestly wish at
times that it was as simple as the old glory days of Madison Avenue where the
creatives ruled the roost. Heck, I'd even be ok with the days before people
realized the shortcomings of last-touch attribution what with ignorance being
bliss and all that.

As an advertiser, I don't want to spend my dollars where they are not
effective. I also don't want to piss people off with it. I recognize that is a
hard line to walk and you can never please everyone. That said, I don't see
things going away or drastically changing on the data collection side. There
are enough companies who have conclusively determined that this is a more
effective approach for them than not using the data. It will take either some
revelation that their data is a lie and it is NOT in fact working, or it will
take policy and legal action to get them to stop.

The broader question should be around finding other business models that work,
and trying to find new approaches that remove ads from the picture. People
will vote with their wallets figuratively and literally, even if they disagree
with you.

For those that hate people like me and my industry on principle, the current
approach of finding technological solutions to limit data is a great start,
and I can't blame people for using them one bit. I can't say we'll ever see
eye to eye, but I can say that I respect your opinion because the industry as
a whole has not done a great job of earning your trust. I wonder if people
felt the same way back in the days of Madison Avenue when ads first started
encroaching on more and more media channels (despite the fact that many media
channels only grew to their current popularity BECAUSE of advertising).

