Google had a brilliant advertising business with AdWords originally, where the ads were simply based on the search term and not a bunch of Orwellian surveillance on the person searching.
From the research I've seen, all this privacy-invading crap doesn't even improve ad performance much - it's small incremental gains at best. And per this article, those gains are clearly coming at the expense of user trust and goodwill, something not reflected in click thru rates and RPM.
Here's hoping we can get past all this invasive retargeting / surveillance / privacy-invading crap and get back to straightforward contextual ads, like car parts ads on a hot rod website - our world would be better for it, and maybe Google could restore a little of its rapidly fading goodwill.
The word advertising itself has been co-opted. It is like "freedom" or "justice" that is ambiguous and means one thing to advertisers and another to the public.
I'm reminded of the vitamin water lawsuit
"Coca-Cola criticized the suit as "ridiculous" on the grounds that "no consumer could reasonably be misled into thinking Vitaminwater was a healthy beverage"
The point being that normal people think "advertising" means showing a picture of a car or cereal, and google thinks advertising is identifying the individual.
I really hate that “reasonably think” defense. Yes most people, including myself, did think that vitamin water was healthy until reading the nutritional sheet. It’s one step away from selling chocolate as, “good for you bars,” and claiming no reasonable person would think they’re good for you.
I hate the lawsuit in the first place because nutrition information is printed on the back of every single bottle for exactly this reason and any actually concerned consumer (any reasonable thinking consumer) will simply look at the nutrition label when making purchase decisions. It was marketed as vitamin water because it does focus on providing additional vitamins. So what do we call it? Vitamin Sugar water? This drink has vitamins but please don't drink it persistently or you’ll develop type2 diabetes water? Relatively healthier than Coke but not as “healthy” as diet coke with added vitamins water? Does “smart water” make your smarter? Also most vitamins in dry form are mixed with 2-8 grams of sugar. Should those be renamed?
The real tragedy is people are woefully undereducated on the damage that over consumption of carbohydrates and sugars does to your body. So even when they do look at the label and see 13 grams of sugar per serving and 2.5 servings per bottle (the comparable bottle of Coke has 55g sugars so you don't have to search it) they’re helpless. And that seems, as far as I can glean, to be a giant corpo-political conspiracy because we had a lot of grains and corn syrup in the US and needed to make people believe it was okay to consume it all despite conflicting science. “A healthy (carbohydrate filled) breakfast (of Cheerios) is good for the heart kids.” So if anyone is to blame it’s essentially ourselves for letting capitalists control the narrative around what goes into a healthy diet and lacking the political wherewithal to develop dietary recommendations that are based in science and not big cereal marketing. There it is: advertising.
> It was marketed as vitamin water because it does focus on providing additional vitamins.
water + vitamins = vitamin water. But that's not what this is. So it's a misleading name.
People shouldn't have to be educated in order to make good decisions. A beverage company shouldn't be misleading people, it should be making beverages and helping people find the beverages they would want if they were educated about them.
To respond to your point, though, the application of your philosophy simply doesn't yield a remotely familiar society. I understand how it is alluring to, in an isolated example, argue that stupid people must be coddled. But if we have to build a society where nobody can make bad decisions then we have to apply this filter everywhere. What's the end result? Humans are no longer allowed to make any decisions because they could make the wrong one. Instead a central authority must decide for them. I don't see how this is even remotely tenable.
Now if you want to devolve into a discussion about how democracy itself is in fact a failure because it depends on an educated electorate, which we clearly don't have because we can't trust ourselves to make good decisions, that's a whole different topic. But I'm trying to apply my argument in the context of the world we live in currently to keep it somewhat grounded.
Fantasy names are a psychologically manipulative marketing tactic deployed to cause you to associate the thing you are consuming with something unrelated to the thing you are consuming so as to divert your attention from the thing you are consuming to some other (presumably more exciting) topic thereby increasing likelihood that you consume the product. Or they're a brand identity entirely divorced from the actual nature of the product which would also require you to look at the label into order to discern the healthiness of said product.
My side is that it’s absurd to hold Coke responsible for not choosing a name that might be misleading to somebody. And that I find the VitaminWater trial absurd. My point about fantasy names is exactly that they’re not any different from VitaminWater so what gives? It’s rhetorical.
Marketing is all manipulative tactics born out of a desire to push more product not help people be healthy. Assuming Coke is somehow responsible for our health is skirting personal responsibility and passing the blame no different than the “fast food makes you fat let’s tell McDonalds what type of oil to use but not the restaurant down the street which is twice as unhealthy” mentality. It’s downright irresponsible to operate under the assumption that a company’s marketing department is going to give you an unbiased wholesome view of reality. I don't see how pretending Coke is some angel of healthy drink knowledge and herald of good diets that fell from grace with vitaminwater because they neglected to mention in the title “oh btw there’s some sugar” so must be punished is anything other than blissful ignorance at best.
My visceral reaction to the absurdity of the trial is derived from what I perceive as lazy inconsistency in how we approach the ethics of advertising. Cherry picking VitaminWater, a drink where the facts are spelled out explicitly on the label on every bottle, of all things, feels more like an effort to dodge responsibility by attacking big soda than a true attempt to ask whether we should be allowing corporate propaganda to influence certain aspects of society. I really don't want the courts having an opinion on what makes a healthy diet. And I don’t want companies doing so either. It’s not a disagreement that we shouldn't try to stop manipulative marketing. It’s that I don't want any company anywhere trying to tell me what is healthy and what isn't when there is money to be made based on the message they present.
Essentially I believe all marketing is manipulative and we should do away with all of it of we truly want to build a smarter society.
I knew parents who didn’t let their children consume media with commercials. The internet has certainly made that more difficult and I don’t know how it turned out for them.
So everything that has sugar in it but doesn't explicitly spell it out in the name must be renamed to include a reference to sugar in the name? Frosted flakes -> sugar frosted flakes, rice crispy bars aren't just rice + crispy, they're rice + sugar + crispy. Orange juice -> orange juice and added sugar. I mean come on it doesn't work.
All that said, the term vitamin is also entirely subjective. Nothing about "vitamin" to me ever implied "healthy". It simply implied "has vitamin". It's just all around absurd.
Having a small (200ml or so) glass of orange juice once a day is going to net you most of your daily vitamin C requirement and a third of your recommended daily sugar intake. Whether it's healthy really depends on what the rest of your diet looks like: if you mostly live on sugary cereal, pizza, and chicken nuggets, OJ means you've got something vaguely fruit-like in your diet. If it's possible to substitute it for actual fruit, actual fruit is better, but the perfect is the enemy of the good.
Sometimes I worry that "X is unhealthy!" can make people eat an even worse diet.
> any actually concerned consumer (any reasonable thinking consumer) will simply look at the nutrition label when making purchase decisions.
That isn't the definition of a reasonable consumer. Reasonable people don't have infinite time to second guess everything that people trusted to give them health information are saying. If they imply it's healthy and they're trusted to tell you whether it's healthy or not (i.e. they're trusted to publish nutritional information on their bottle), then a reasonable person should be able to trust the implication. We've all got too much to do to assume that someone is both misleading and telling the truth at the same time.
As for names, the could have called it Nigglepuff Drink. Nigglepuff Drink does not imply any untrue health claims and it is not associated with any f&b products.
You've trusted Coca Cola to give you health advice? No offense but that's patently insane. Your doctor gives you health advice not a sugared soft-drink company with a motive to withhold any negative information about its products from you so you'll continue to consume them. I assume you trust Google to give you privacy advice, no?
I don't know what a reasonable consumer is then. The first thing I usually do when reaching for a new drink is glance at the nutrition label to make sure I'm not consuming 55 grams of sugar. It takes less than 10 seconds. I learned this from my mom, who was generally concerned as a parent about making sure her children were eating healthy. It's not rocket science.
I personally don't understand how Vitamin == Healthy. Maybe I'm N == 1, but the claim "has vitamins" which is what "vitamin" in the name implies to me is not, in fact, false. The leap from "has vitamins" to "is healthy to drink with abandon" is the problem here. Maybe if you could prove that the company knew the drink was unhealthy and deliberately fabricated the name so as to mislead their consumer base into making unhealthy choices, you might have a case?
But by this argument any instance of a name where somebody could plausibly make that type of jump must be regulated. If I was taught that fish are healthy because they have healthy fats then I could reasonably make the association that fish stix are healthy. Couldn't I?
>To those men in their oddly similar dark suits, their cold eyes weighing and dismissing everything, the people of this valley were a foe to be defeated. As he thought of it, Dasein realized all customers were "The Enemy" to these men. Davidson and his kind were pitted against each other, yes, competitive, but among themselves they betrayed that they were pitted more against the masses who existed beyond that inner ring of knowledgeable financial operation.
>The alignment was apparent in everything they did, in their words as well as their actions. They spoke of "package grab level" and "container flash time" -- of "puff limit" and "acceptance threshold." It was an "in" language of militarylike maneuvering and combat. They knew which height on a shelf was most apt to make a customer grab an item. They knew the "flash time" -- the shelf width needed for certain containers. They knew how much empty air could be "puffed" into a package to make it appear a greater bargain. they knew how much price and package manipulation the customer would accept without jarring him into a "rejection pattern."
>And we're their spies, Dasein thought. the psychiatrists and psychologists - all the "social scientists" we're the espionage arm.
Reminds me of a video I'd seen on nestle chocolate drink/nutella being advertised as healthy foods[1]. Marketing/advertisers are the real villains in 2XXX.
Yeah they should really teach that at school: There are only a few things that are true on food packaging and they are government regulated. The rest is baloney and should be ignored. Oh and for next week prepare an essay on why some still thing small government is a good idea.
Insightful reasoning. The moat that Google built and maintains with privacy invasion is a legal moat rather than a business moat.
A competing ad service, naturally much smaller at first, would be hard pressed to replicate[1] even part of Google's privacy-invasive targeting, due to the costs involved. Even more importantly, a competing ad service would be nigh unable to replicate even part of Google's privacy-invasive targeting, due to the legal protections and regulatory oversight of privacy. It is much easier for a large, well established business to "continue as it always did" and get either a nod of understanding, or at worst a slap on the wrist from the regulators - than for a newer, smaller player to start doing anything shady. In the later case, stiff penalties and "making an example of" can be expected for variety of reasons - the new player tends to not be well connected in the regulatory circles, and tends to be less influential on the local economy either, thus there's little downside for slapping the new player hard.
This is yet another case where regulatory framework with somewhat arbitrary enforcement (relevant fines have wide ranges; judicial injunctions are optional and discretionary) entrenches and unfairly protects from competition the existing large market players.
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[1] sadly, ability to replicate minute features is key to provide "bullet-point engineering" and getting sales to casual buyers who are easily impressed by long feature list - and to advanced buyers who are trying to squeeze every last bit of advantage from the service.
My opinion is that the target ads is just a cover, the real reason they want to track users is to give more data to their in-house AI system that learns what people do once they reach certain page. This knowledge (what people will do) is what is important to them, rather than simply showing certain ads. For example, if Google knows the profit potential of certain actions, they will raise the ad cost on that property by the true value, instead of relying on non-targeted auctions.
If this was true then every single ad campaign would be worth it then, no? I thought that lots of people try Google or FB ads with a couple thousand dollars and never recoup operating costs. If Google knows how much profit a certain page could bring then they could also tell you exactly what to price your product at to maximize returns.
> From the research I've seen, all this privacy-invading crap doesn't even improve ad performance much
Which research? From my experience, personalized ads perform ~50% better than non-personalized ads. This would also explain why Google and Facebook are fighting tooth and nail to keep their tracking infrastructure.
You shouldn't lump search ads in with display ads -- search ads are relevant to the search terms, and are much more valuable than display ads. Search ads get a much smaller lift from personalization.
Well, Google lump search and display ads together themselves. You can run display ads as retargeting campaigns from search ads.
> Search ads get a much smaller lift from personalization.
Search itself has seen huge improvements from personalization. It's hard to imagine that the same shouldn't be the case for the ads shown for a particular query as with the results.
It depends a lot on the content. If you're targeting a lucrative niche, contextual ads can be effective. But for the majority of (mostly low-quality) content, it's hard to find well-matched ads. The study you cited is based on "a rich dataset of millions of advertising transactions completed across multiple websites owned by a large media company". It's probably not that representative.
That’s not what a fiduciary duty is. The fiduciary duty is for a broker dealer to act in your best interests rather than rip you off.
A company’s management has a duty to shareholders to work on behalf of the shareholders and not on behalf of their own well being. That usually means profit because that’s what most shareholders own the company for, not for charity. But there is no particular duty to maximize it at all costs. Damage to reputation and legal risk and the like are real concerns.
If anything, it’s the self-interested managers violating their duty who cut the most corners and burn goodwill, in the name of hitting short term goals and chasing their bonus.
As an example, if shareholders invest in your company despite saying you will never show targeted ads then they can't sue you for not showing targeted ads to increase profits.
Yes, company has fiduciary duty towards its shareholders. That term applies to any situation where there is trust involved, not only brokers. Though it's mostly applied to financial advisors and fund managers.
It's not much, and there's certainly room for considering ethics. In fact, you can do nearly anything that isn't actively repurposing part of the business for the directors' own use.
For example, one of the landmark cases affirmed the Chicago Cubs' right to leave tons of money on the table because their president believed that baseball was a "day-time sport" and wouldn't install lights for night games.
This is a huge oversimplification. Short term gains of breaching ethics might result in middle- and longterm reduced profit, regulatory action or opportunity for other players to eat their lunch. Businesses can follow ethics if they decide to, even when breaking them results in more immediate profits.
I've seen people state this before and it's just not true.
Companies absolutely can be good environmental stewards and pay their workers well in the interests of making money.Just like they can donate to charity while still doing proper fiduciary duty.
Do you mind if I ask you why it is you believe(d) that to be true? I'm really quite curious. I've seen others claim the same thing, as though it's some sort of law and doctrine.
Try turning on a VPN from another country, opening an incognito window and doing a google search for 'pizza'.
See how the results are nearly useless...? A bunch of delivery services that don't deliver in your country, who want payment in a currency you don't have, and all written in a language you don't speak.
Location at the local level matters less, but even so it makes some search results substantially more useful. That is a benefit that other search providers (who don't have strong control of the browser/platform) will not have. It makes the moat bigger.
This isn't normal? Due to ISP internal networking, my exposed IP address either gets geolocated to my state capital or a state capital on the other side of the continent. And I like it that way. Wrong country might be annoying, but preferred language will get that right enough.
I get mistargeted geographic ads all the time; not on a VPN.
Heck, I even get ads in the wrong language.
Hint: Instead of noticing that I’ve been doing manual labor recently, and inferring that I’m not a native English speaker, just use contextual targeting: show me ads in the same language as the content I’m watching.
Ad blockers are making the problems tracking-based much, much worse. Whatever signal is left after people block aggressively block trackers is actually just noise. Hopefully the market will see this and self-correct.
> From the research I've seen, all this privacy-invading crap doesn't even improve ad performance much - it's small incremental gains at best
but at their present scale this small improvement would mean a lot of money, wouldn't it? Lots of businesses find that it is harder to get significant gains (i think they call that the 'law of diminishing returns'), however the stock market is demanding steady growth figures.
i guess location data is important for targeting of local services: you can't push an add for a specific restaurant to a person living in a different city; now if you know that he may be going to that city, then that's a slightly different thing.
I think the alternative to all this tracking would be to push more yellow page directories like DMOZ or jasmine directories, but I don't know if you could do that in practice. Another direction would be to push a directory of specialized search engines, like duckduckgo bang! operators (shameless plug: here is my directory of these https://mosermichael.github.io/duckduckbang/html/main.html )
What research? Multiple companies which use these practices have grown from zero to trillion+ dollars in market cap, so I find it hard to believe the narrative that all of it is useless and ineffective.
It doesn't have to work. Your customers just have to believe it works. Even just have to believe it might work, since they are looking for any competitive advantage. You need research to show it help just as much as you need research to show it doesn't.
I think you will find both sorts of research, because it seems obvious that results will depend on what sort of web site you run and what sort of audience you have.
Note that contextual ads still perform better than personalized ads on search results, given how you still don’t see eg. Spotify ads on search results for anything other than music.
Can someone point me in the right direction regarding the mentioned research? My feeling is still that google know what they are doing when it comes to ads.
I think that big corp must always grow (in earnings ) or various manager hierarchies start having problem.. sometimes this need forget to consider ethic , trust , monopoly , roots , ...
From the research I've seen, all this privacy-invading crap doesn't even improve ad performance much - it's small incremental gains at best. And per this article, those gains are clearly coming at the expense of user trust and goodwill, something not reflected in click thru rates and RPM.
Here's hoping we can get past all this invasive retargeting / surveillance / privacy-invading crap and get back to straightforward contextual ads, like car parts ads on a hot rod website - our world would be better for it, and maybe Google could restore a little of its rapidly fading goodwill.