
AdTech Sucks - tomlockwood
https://lockwood.dev/advertising/2019/06/07/adtech-sucks.html
======
spectramax
Is there a "pull" rather push aspect to advertisement? Sort of a trade-show
equivalent of digital advertisement?

Issues with pushing ads down my throat are as follows:

1\. I don't want to buy another Sony XM3 headphones. I just fucking bought
them and I am seeing more ads of the same thing.

2\. Even if I saw ads for relevant accessories, say, I bought an iPhone and I
am seeing ads for phone cases; I don't want to see them when I am browsing
Instagram or a lecture video on YT about how to meditate.

3\. Say the timing is right and the ad is relevant, I _still_ am repulsed by
advertisers. I don't like salesmen. I find them sleezy and annoying. It is
like walking into Radioshack and a platoon of salesmen are trying to sell you
Sprint cell phone and I am here to buy a goddamn electrolytic capacitor.

However, when I am searching for a pressure cooker, it would be great to go to
a centralized repository of ads and look through who markets this sort of
thing the best and may be have some objective reviews along with it. May be
have a standardized ad template and guidelines so the marketing dickheads
don't go overboard with flashing lights and sparkles. Have a standardized page
full of pressure cooker ads, let them fight over my business in a level
playing field. No psychological tricks, no sleezy techniques, I want to see
increased competition based on value they provide to consumers. Not weak anti-
competitive deceitful marketing.

I _love_ going to trade-shows. They're all salesmen but there is something
about serendipitous discovery of new stuff, seeing things that you may not
need immediately but it goes in the back of your mind and you remember it at
some obscure situation (especially in hardware engineering, I run a lab that
serves 50 engineers). Most importantly, I am in the mindset when I visit a
trade-show. That mindset is different than when I am desperately looking for a
tire shop nearby to fix my flat tire.

Fuck advertisement. It is the worst thing modern society is plagued with.

We need yellow pages, not 60 second interruptions during a cooking show. YC
folks are reading this - there is a huge gap for a "pull" advertisement model.
AdTech guys can still collect data and be assholes about it, but at least you
won't be bothering me when I need not.

~~~
maxxxxx
It used to be that when you looked at kiteboarding forums or blogs you would
see kiteboarding or travel ads. No tracking of individuals needed. I think
that’s what you are talking about.

Now you see ads for blenders because you bought one or looked at one last
week. Ads are not context sensitive anymore.

I would have no problem if HN made some money with advertising for dev tools.
It makes sense. Personalized ads are creepy and annoying.

~~~
j-c-hewitt
They are still context sensitive, just the retargeting guy is bidding higher
so that is what is showing.

~~~
maxxxxx
I don’t know much about ads but that’s something I have noticed. When online
ads started they are actually sometimes useful to me because of context. Now
they are totally useless to me. They are just noise.

------
bunderbunder
> I’d love for data to be seen as a liability - something audited and
> discarded often to minimise risk.

Perhaps it's just the industries I've worked in, which tend to be highly
regulated, but I have such a hard time seeing why this idea isn't more
intuitive to people. Every single scrap of sensitive information you have
laying around is something that has the potential to fuel a very expensive,
possibly even existential, crisis for your company.

Even for the non-sensitive stuff, keeping it around "just in case" increases
the risk that somebody who has taken a couple classes in how to use R or
Pandas and is still a bit starry-eyed about Big Data starts making
questionable business decisions based on unskeptical interpretations of biased
results drawn from convenience-sampled data of uncertain provenance.

The default shouldn't be collecting and warehousing everything, the default
should be, "when in doubt, throw it out."

~~~
tomlockwood
Author here. Yeah, and to expand on the idea of liability, I also additionally
mean the possibility of a financial liability. If we were to say, charge per
month for a retained customer date of birth, you'd see business analysts
internally constantly asking why the data needed to be stored so long, or
whether just age could be stored, or something. If the price was high enough,
the problem would sort of just... go away.

Obviously much smarter people than me would need to figure out those
regulations though.

~~~
afiori
On the liability side the GDPR was already good progress

------
nopriorarrests
From the article - "If you’ve been on the internet for any amount of time,
you’ve probably seen very poorly targeted advertising. In my experience, I see
a lot of car ads. I don’t own a car".

One can argue that advertising cars to person without one make some sense.

At least it's better then advertising vacuum cleaners to person who bought one
on amazon 1 week ago.

~~~
asenna
I'll give you a better example - I'm an English speaking guy consuming regular
US content. I travel quite often and when I'm in non-english speaking places
like Thailand, I see ads on Youtube(mobile) purely in Thai language.

I use Google products extensively and Google most definitely knows I don't
speak Thai. I mean it's almost ridiculous the number of Thai ads I've seen on
Youtube. For a company that sophisticated with AdTech, I'm shocked how bad
they are with this.

Are they doing this on purpose just to sell more ads? The companies spending
the money to show me those videos are practically throwing money down the
drain if I don't even understand them.

~~~
MarkMc
This is exactly my experience. Go to Thailand, see ads in Thai. Go to France,
see ads in French. Go to Indonesia, see ads in Indonesian.

Google has paid thousands of engineers billions of dollars over 20 years and
somehow they have failed on this very simple optimisation!

~~~
cameronbrown
The advertisers you see have specified location but not language.

------
xixixao
> Why, oh why, would a company built on ad revenue want to reduce ad spend? >
> These companies are perfectly positioned to make ads more efficient - and
> they have absolutely no reason to do so.

The question is not really asking about reducing ad spend, it's asking about
reducing advertiser costs per outcome. It's pretty obvious that if you
decrease costs per outcome, return on ad spend will rise, and advertisers will
spend more. In fact, more advertisers will want to get in on the game (as
costs decrease, ads become profitable for more and more advertisers), and this
pushes costs up. This eventually creates an equilibrium, but even at that
point, it is still the case that decreasing costs increases revenues for ad
networks.

Attribution is a really, really hard problem. Ideally you want to do a Lift
test, and ideally you want to do it across all your ad spend channels. To do
this, you still need the attribution mechanisms ("tracking" in the article).

So I don't find the article coherent. It points out deficiencies in the system
(which there are many), it falsely claims that big players have no incentive
to improve, and it makes it sounds like all these advertisers are just burning
their money. It makes it sound like pervasive tracking is a problem, which it
might be for other reasons (privacy, unintended consequences), but certainly
is not making ad tech worse.

~~~
tomlockwood
Author here. I think your response only holds true if both the market acts
rationally (which isn't the case if people are optimizing-for-resume), and the
benefit from claiming more conversions isn't as low hanging as other
"efficiency" gains.

The "attribution mechanisms" you mention are precisely one of the drivers for
the pervasive data collection that is in AdTech.

------
joefkelley
The idea that ad targeting sucks because ad networks have no incentive to
improve it is extremely dubious.

Google and Facebook have an incentive to use up advertisers' budgets. But they
also have an incentive to keep advertisers happy by providing good returns so
that they will keep spending / increase spending in the long run. Advertisers
are not always perfectly rational, but I don't think they're as dumb as the
article makes them out to be.

The simpler explanation for poor ad targeting is the bidding component. If it
was the case that you were shown whichever ad had the highest predicted CTR,
I'm pretty sure you'd be seeing some damn relevant ads. But instead you're
seeing whichever ad has the highest (bid per click * ctr). Or worse,
advertisers can also bid per impression, in which case there might be no
relevancy component at all.

My guess is the car ads on YouTube mentioned in the article are that last
case. Both of those components (YouTube and car companies) are notable for
skewing towards "brand" advertising rather than "performance" advertising.
They're not trying to get you to buy a car right then. They're trying to get
you to feel good about their company in the long run so that five years from
now you're more likely to buy their car.

~~~
bogomipz
Might you or someone else mind explaining how this "bidding component" works?
I'm not familiar with it or with the specific bidding models at work - "bid
per click * ctr" etc?

~~~
joefkelley
Advertisers go to an ad network and configure their campaign with: "I want to
show X to users who are Y or are on a site about Y, and I'm willing to pay Z
for it".

X is just the content of the ad and is usually entirely advertiser-defined.
Some ad networks will allow you to do some fancy stuff to help determine the
best phrasing or arrangement or whatever of your ad.

Z can be in dollars per impression, per click, or per conversion. An
impression is one person being shown an ad one time. A click is a person
clicking an ad. And a conversion is advertiser-defined but is usually someone
buying the product being advertised. Bidding per click is the most common.

Then when a user loads a page with an ad on it, the ad network finds all
campaigns that are eligible - meeting the criteria defined in Y. It then runs
an "auction". It has to calculate which eligible advertiser is willing to pay
the most for that potential impression. But not all advertisers are bidding
per impression, so some prediction comes into play. If an advertiser bid per
click, then the expected amount they will pay is the probability the user will
click multiplied by the price if they do click. Their probability of clicking
is often called CTR which stands for "click-through-rate" so that's where the
bid * CTR comes from. Usually an ML model takes what is known about the user,
the ad, and the page, and predicts CTR. Similarly for conversion-based bids,
it's bid * CTR * CVR, where CVR is "conversion rate". Whichever ad comes out
with the highest result of this calculation is shown.

~~~
bogomipz
Thanks for the clear and thorough explanation. The parent comment makes good
sense now.

One follow up question - is the "bid per impression" sort of the campaign of
last resort then? In other words its the cheapest type of campaign for an
advertiser to run as well as the least profitable for the ad network?

Cheers

~~~
joefkelley
I think bidding tends to just be about what the advertiser cares most about.
If they are a "brand" advertiser (Coca-Cola is the canonical example) they
might bid per impression since they're not really looking for clicks, and they
have some idea of how much an impression is worth to them. Compared to say
some app where they want installs and so might bid per conversion.

As for the network, it's also not as clear what's profitable. Bidding per
click or conversion probably gives them more opportunity to do well with good
targeting. But high per-impression bids are also useful for the users the
network knows very little about.

------
reallydude
AdTech is wonderful, from a technical perspective. The standards are rich
while the ecosystem is rife with opportunity.

If you are a developer in AdTech, you will NEVER hear about interaction, or
see contract, with most of the companies listed...other than a handful (maybe
FB, maybe Yahoo, maybe Instagram). I've worked for Experian (the US Company)
and talking about them in the AdTech space is the same as talking about HN in
the cooking recipe space. There's a tiny bit of overlap, but it's largely
pointing to shoehorned third parties because that isn't something Experian's
existing infrastructure performs.

AdTech is fun, it pays well, and you get to be at the ground level of these
moral compass debates. I have refused some pieces of work and AdTech is
tolerant to negotiating concerns. I think most developers would benefit from
experience in AdTech, even if it's just a short time.

~~~
seibelj
I worked in adtech for a bit and thought the tech was really subpar. The
engineer’s goal is try and find edge cases where the privacy controls of the
OS / browser have gaps so you can better target and serve more ads. The ads
themselves are garbage. Very underwhelming experience. Also it’s a race to the
bottom. No VC’s want to invest in adtech anymore given that old tech has
monopolized it and regulations are coming. No career path. Stay away.

------
dpflan
"""The systemic issue occurs because marketers and AdTech companies
unreflectively increase surveillance and data collection in the hopes of
increasing media attribution. Even the most trivial data point, the most
granular site visit or location data, stored on a person-by-person basis,
could conceivably be used to demonstrate that a customer may have come into
contact with one of your campaigns."""

I'm genuinely intrigued by AdTech. It exists, but no one likes it -- i.e.
before internet ads --> TiVo, internet ads --> ad blockers. I understand it
can attract talent due to profits and the engineering + data problems, but is
that the main attraction for developers? If you worked in adTech, what
attracted you to it? Is there a hope you could make more ethical or privacy
aware or (<insert positive idea here>) ad tech systems?

Does adTech even work? Is there an active campaign somewhere / grassroots
movement to "boycott" recruitment to ad tech companies?

(Just trying to get a better understanding here, ad tech has become symbiotic
with the current state of the internet, so I would like to better understand
it.)

~~~
adwww
I also worked in Ad Tech - outside of a major tech area, it was the biggest,
fastest growing tech employer around.

The pay was only average for the area, but the company clearly had money and
was experiencing rapid growth which is always exciting.

As you mention, massive data sets, tens of billions of HTTP requests per day,
etc, are simply not challenges you get outside of FAANG, so there was a lot of
interesting work.

The really shady stuff only came to light once you'd worked there a while, and
realised the entire industry is basically built on fraud and money laundering
with almost nobody incentivised to stop it.

~~~
rbinv
> tens of billions of HTTP requests per day

Could you elaborate? Seems very high, even for ad impressions.

~~~
fsaintjacques
rtb bid request volume can easily go 1m/sec, this is not impressions, but
offers to buy for an impression.

~~~
rbinv
Makes sense, thanks.

------
baybal2
My first ever "earning money in Internet" experience was in my teen years when
I ran my own ad farm as a part of an ad farming collective 2005-2007. Back
then, things were simple: you open a website, sign for 100+ banner networks,
then drive in traffic with all tricks imaginable, including "buying it." Part
of your revenue goes to group's 'big papa' who does all the "business cover"
in the West: setting up companies, bank accounts, accounting, tax reporting,
and cashing out payments from ad nets.

My second venture into Ad industry came rather unexpected. In 2016, when I had
to leave Canada because my employer was denied LMIA (a paper "certifying" that
you are not stealing a job from locals.) I called up all my friends with
whomever I had working relationship before I moved out of Russia.

A man who once was a guy behind of Russia's biggest ad farming group back in
mid-naughties called me back. Unbeknown to me, he worked day and night to up
his profile for 10 years, and became a "big name man" in Ad industry, moved to
USA, and opened one of the biggest DSP on the market today.

What shocked me, is that the nature of the industry and attitudes to the
client hasn't changed a dime since 2005. The slang for F500 clients there is
still a "whale" (the term itself originally came from either "ad farming"
circles or banking)

After passing through shock coming back to Russia after 8 years and coming
back to my senses, I said *ck with that and left. Been happily working in OEM
electronics again since.

------
tomrod
Online ads seem to perform poorly and, for larger companies with brand
recognition and large budgets, almost no lift. I've been under the impression
that adtech is a bubble, but I'm not an expert in the space.

~~~
libertine
It's not a bubble, but it definitely shouldn't be on a pedestal.

------
programmertote
> Imagine you’re a marketing-degree graduate in middle management. If you’re
> lucky, you may have done some statistics courses. In your day-to-day, you
> likely don’t apply these to a great amount. You hear about this great thing
> called “Machine Learning” which is sweeping marketing departments. You might
> have read a white paper or two about it, heard about it at a conference, or
> been schmoozed by someone from IBM trying to sell you Watson (ugh). You
> decide to talk to a consultancy about it, or are referred to one by upper
> management, who’s been living from cocktail-to-cocktail on the consultant’s
> corporate AMEX for their entire career.

Lets be real - when you’re in this position, the consultants say a lot of
words to you that you don’t understand and then you say yes to a contract
because the PowerPoint looks good. Not only do you get to mention your huge
new budget on your resume, thanks to the huge invoice, but you also get to
mention you implemented MACHINE LEARNING at your company. But what’s next?

I have been working in advertising industry (background in software
engineering) for 3+ years as an engineer (for one of the four biggest
agencies). I think the author overestimates how much data we can/do collect,
and how much we leverage on it. But the excerpt above is absolutely spot on.
I'm a mid-level manager and I sometimes baffled at how much bullshit some
companies try to sell to our clients (e.g., some big CPG companies), and how
much the management folks from our clients and our advertising agency/company
alike buy into that bullshit. "ML/AI" and "Media attribution" are really big
now. But I believe almost 99% of the people who are leading these efforts (at
least in my company) have no clue as to how to do it--thus, the snake oil
salesmen are taking advantage of this.

~~~
tomlockwood
Thanks for your kind words! :)

I worked at a Telecom for most of my time in AdTech so I think I might have
had a close encounter with some particularly high overcollection of data
there.

~~~
programmertote
Ah...I definitely see the Telecoms recording and hoarding a lot of data
without any regard to consequence/implication. I know a couple of coworkers
who decided to leave my current employer and work for big Telecoms, and they
said it's more chaotic there. :)

------
fromthestart
>Tracking is bad, because even if you don’t have anything to hide now, you may
find that your past activities make you a target under a future political
system.

I've been screaming about this for years, but everyone thinks I'm crazy.
Here's an interesting point of frustration: one one likes to give out phone
numbers in the context of online dating anymore. Usually the request is to
move from, say, tinder, to an app like Snapchat. People don't understand why
I'm hesitant, especially when they want to discuss relatively personal,
indirectly or directly politically charged politics on a platform built to
harvest literally everything you write, photograph, and send.

On some level I start to feel like society is deserving of the dystopia it is
building, because the average person simply doesn't care to understand the
dangers of anything they do when everyone else is doing it. But maybe that's
just vindictiveness brought on by jealousy of their blissful ignorance.

------
DailyHN
Yeah, it sucks for advertisers, too.

From another active thread concerning the ad industry:

> Using Google retargeting ads, less than 5% of desktop traffic goes on to
> click anywhere on my website. And it's worse for mobile than on desktops.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20124231](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20124231)

~~~
omarchowdhury
You mean it sucks for you. How can you speak for all advertisers, especially
based on a sample size of 200 clicks?

You have to diagnose what could be off on your end before making extreme
blanket statements.

These ad systems are tools, and tools only work as well as how you use them.

~~~
DailyHN
I find it hard to believe that 97.5% of people can click a link to a website
and not even _accidentally_ click something on that website.

I'm not referring to _real conversions_ , where yes, skills in marketing and
using the tools does make all the difference.

All I'm saying is that I paid for 200 clicks that appear to not even have real
people clicking anywhere at all.

~~~
omarchowdhury
No doubt, there is fraud in the system. If you want to be successful in using
these ad platforms for your business, you will have to accept that as a fact
of life.

What you need to do is to exclude bad placements/websites from your campaign.
But even before that, you have to see if your ads + landing page are
compelling, or you'll just waste a ton of money.

~~~
navigatesol
> _But even before that, you have to see if your ads + landing page are
> compelling, or you 'll just waste a ton of money._

And how do you determine that, ex ante?

~~~
omarchowdhury
This part is more art than science, and requires being objective about the
subjective, and what I mean by that is: being honest about what you're
offering and if it's actually valuable to your prospects, and then seeing if
how you're presenting your offer is simultaneously clear and breaks through
the noise.

At the end of the day we're still talking about _sales_ , just in a new form,
in a multi-dimensional bazaar called the Internet.

------
gmurad
I joined AdTech just a few years after graduation (my formative years as a
software engineer) and that gave me the opportunity to work on very high
throughput systems.

Eventually I got to lead several different project like building ad servers
and real time bidder from scratch and scale them to the 100K+ requests per
second while maintaining single digit ms avg response times. I also had a head
start in the "big" data space because of AdTech.

I will always be thankful for the knowledge I got because of the nature of
AdTech, it positioned me really well in the market and just made me a much
better engineer.

After 5+ years working in AdTech is was time for a change, I was feeling
dragged down by similar reasons, I had a high leadership position and a lot of
domain knowledge so a lot to lose, but I made a change to mobile F2P gaming
and have been doing that for over 3 years, it's been a great change.

------
bad_user
The example of the pizza delivery selling the personal details of their
customers is precisely why GDPR has value.

People have been dismissing it as being unfriendly to startups. As a software
developer I totally get the complaints, but as an Internet user I couldn't
care less.

You could say that the free market will adjust itself when consumers will
figure out the damage and learn to protect themselves by choosing better
alternatives. But there's no way to protect oneself. For example in the pizza
delivery case, there's often no way to know that your address and phone will
be sold to third parties, unless it's against the law to do so without you
giving explicit consent.

~~~
pedro_hab
Selling personal data without permission is illegal without GDPR.

~~~
efdee
And made legal by some very fine print buried in the ToS.

~~~
pedro_hab
Yes, AFAIK GDPR makes it that you have to also opt into your data being
shared/sold besides the ToS.

------
geuis
Ironically that url is being blocked by Ublock Origin on my phone.

~~~
tomlockwood
Author here - I actually had to change some of the image URLs I made because
they had AdTech in the name, and uBlock was blocking them. Hahaha!

I solemnly swear that my website has no tracking installed on it (that I know
of, welp). Cheers.

~~~
geuis
Probably because of the combination of “advertising” and dates in the path.

------
matz1
Its not always sucks, as a consumer, if I can get cheaper pizza, with the
trade of they may sell my data, I'm fine with it.

What is the downside ? My email spammed ? not that much of issue, gmail spam
filter work reasonably well.

My phone being spammed by robocall ? smart app can filter those out too.

Ads on the web ? adblocker solve that.

~~~
tomlockwood
Author here. Would you be ok with your health insurer buying your pizza
purchase frequency from a data broker?

~~~
matz1
Whats the actual issue ? They might increase my premium if i I buy too much
pizza ? then it may be possible they might decrease my premium if I don't buy
pizza that much.

~~~
jdcro
Do you really want every decision you make to be available to everyone you
interact with, and then used to judge you? You're that confident in the dirty
details of your life?

~~~
matz1
Ideally yes, provided everyone else decision is also available to me. Do I
have dirt ? Of course. I would be okay if everyone else dirt is exposed too.

True that people can use information to judge me, but it can be both positive
and negative.

Right now, having "dirt" is not without its trade off and inconvenient, you
have to make effort to conceal it, hide it.

------
kgwxd
It should be referred to as Tracking Tech, it reflects the actual goal much
more clearly.

------
SPGWhistler
I commented on a different article earlier which was all fear mongering. This,
on the other hand, is exactly correct. This article is fantastic and spot on.

