Ad Tech Is the Worst Thing That Ever Happened to Advertising
adage.com
adage.com
http://blog.sumall.com/journal/optimizely-got-me-fired.html (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10872359)
Take a good look at it. Ignore the surface-level content about fixing the stats behind A/B tests. Read what else is there.
This article literally admits that marketing industry is destroying itself from inside, by applying on each other the same dishonest tactics they use on us. Now I don't know if it'll be enough to help users - maybe it's only buying us time before they figure out how to effectively manipulate people, or maybe it just makes adtech a stable, self-perpetuating resource waster - but it does feel good.
The ad industry doesn't have a problem with ad blockers. It has a problem with basic human decency.
Yes. Eventually humans appeared, and they were able to escape (some of) the mechanics of "eat or be eaten" by creating civilization.
Related: http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/17/the-goddess-of-everythi....
How about treating people like intelligent beings who know what they want for themselves and that stay informed ?
Make specialized advertising sites where companies can promote their products and services and let the users come when they want to check out what's new or look for something they need. They will come. And they will be happier and the companies will be happier.
This is a civilized advertising method in... my view.
You mean like a product website - or the physical version, a shopping mall?
I'm referring to a website where various companies can ADVERTISE their various products and services in any way they want. Basically just present their ads in a civilized way, instead of shoving them down our throat like it currently happens anytime, anyplace, anyhow.
I suppose this could be an extra feature of a virtual market or just a standalone site or both.. but the ad should be tied with places where people WILLINGLY go to buy things or discover new things to buy.
Not only that, but because advertising IS effective, it's like a trojan horse for your brain.
Turn your head and look in the wrong place, see an effective advert, and you are more likely to give your money to one company and less likely to another. And you probably don't even know it consciously - and you certainly haven't made the decision taking into account whether the company's wider actions make it one you want to support or not.
Advertising is an exploit. And like we close exploitable holes in software, like we try to guard against fallacious reasoning or biases in important decision making, we should also guard against exploitable holes in our thought processes when it comes to advertising.
We know advertising works, we know it makes people buy things based on what feels good/safe/trustworthy coming from a company with a good marketing department, rather than what's in a person's own interest. We know it works - that's why it shouldn't be allowed. Because it works.
And why we, individually, should block it aggressively.
Not to be flip, but when has advertising not been about trying to command the attention of those who would otherwise ignore what you have to say?
At the very least I'd like it to have:
- no tracking of visitors, it decides what ads to show based on the content of the site being viewed
- all ads are approved by a human before being displayed, and link bait will be banned
- ads are static images only, no js allowed
I'm also wondering about a feature so users can pay to support sites and in exchange they won't be shown ads.
If anyone wants to work on this, my email address is in my profile :-)
Still looking for an idea in this thread that moves us forward...
Two issues that come up:
- This pays less, not so much the static images and lack of link bait, but the lack of retargeting.
- They're still blocked by ad-blockers at the same rate as everything else
But ads that goes out of their way to force me to watch it, ads that show so often I loath the sight of it, ads designed to be irritating, etc., motivate me to go out of my way to never ever buy their stuff.
Interestingly, I have developed a sort of "ad blindness". My eyes do not see popover ads, banner ads, etc.
But the main problem is that the current model has been and still is extremely profitable. Ad-tech helps business grow their revenues. Click-baits, user tracking, pop ups, targeted ads... all these things exist because they make incredible amounts of money for many involved parts (publishers, ad-platforms, audience analyzers...), and because the majority of internet users are not like you and me, and they do respond to ads, click on them (or are tricked to do so) and don't give a shit that they are being profiled for profit.
I think, as users are more aware and ad-blockers become the default (which is awesome), we will move into a model where you either accept the ads (possibly better integrated), or pay, or find it more difficult to visit some sites (there will always be ways to circumvent). Ad-industry will never be truly on the side of the random internet users, as they are not the ones paying the ad-tech companies (publishers do). In any case, the ad-industry will continue on its own ways, perhaps less intrusively (most of what makes ad-tech you don't even see it, the ads are just the tip of the money making iceberg). This illustrates it very well: http://performancemarketingassociation.com/wp-content/upload...
But lately, I've been considering it.
More and more I'm coming across web sites that are just supposed to display a text article that are unusable, either loading painfully slowly on my aging PC that isn't getting upgraded any time soon, or completely freezing my browser.
While I couldn't say for certain the exact cause, the problem almost always exists on a site with an auto-playing video ad in the sidebar.
Heck, I have no problem watching an HD stream on Twitch.tv while having 40 browser tabs and other apps open but as soon as there's an ad break, my whole computer grinds to a halt.
I don't want to deprive anyone of money but in the last few months, online ads have started affecting my ability to use my computer. And that's on top of the privacy issues and the occasional malware dumps through ads.
Also the sites that make you click through a bunch of pages to read an article.
I don't mind the rest.
I thought it might be fun to add a request header like "X-AdBlock-Reason" that lets them know why I blocked their ads.
"X-AdBlock-Reason: too-many-ads"
"X-AdBlock-Reason: overbearing-ads"
"X-AdBlock-Reason: poor-ad-performance"
"X-AdBlock-Reason: stop-paginating-unnecessarily"
"X-AdBlock-Reason: i-dont-like-supporting-web-content-creators"
On the other hand, I probably wouldn't use it. I would stick out like a sore thumb to people tracking me.
Ad Age is obviously an ad industry publication—-probably the biggest one--but within that there are a diverse audiences it caters to. You can google the term "lumascape" to see a ton of images showing just what a chaotic mess of companies and kinds of companies are involved in digital advertising, but there are typically four groups involved: the brands that are paying for all this marketing, the agencies who they hire to help them reach their customers, the publishers that produce the content, and the ad tech companies that provide the tools to get the ads from the brands and agencies to their potential customers as they spend time on publisher's sites.
One criticism I've gotten on this piece is that it's not ad tech's fault, it's the publishers who use these tools. I think that's like saying it's not the drug dealers fault that his user OD'ed.
A key point I was trying to make was not that the tools themselves are the problem, but that the environment they've emerged in is. All of those audiences I've described play a role in that environment.
Imagine if you'd seen an article about Shaq being a giant, and it only had ONE ad for mayonnaise instead of 38. Imagine all the great stories Folgers Mayonnaise (or whoever) could have told!
I claim (with no evidence) that you can't tell great stories about mayonnaise with digital, or with anything. I claim similarly that people don't want to see or read great stories about mayonnaise.
Sure, you can interrupt a TV show and put a mayonnaise advert there, where a roughly-captive audience will see it, you can put an advert by a road or on a building, where people can't reasonably avoid it, and from that there will be more recognition of some brands than others. Within the context of a TV ad which is going to exist, there are better and worse adverts, and adverts which try (successfully) to manipulate feelings about mayonnaise by connecting them to happy family mealtime scenarios and so on.
But people are not clamouring for George R. R. Martin's latest "Game of Mayonnaise" installment. Nobody is hanging on Stephen King's publishing schedules looking for something, anything, about mayonnaise. People aren't quoting "top 10 films of 2015" and including Spielberg's latest mayonnaise epic, or desperately hoping that the decision between Amazon Prime and Netflix will be settled once and for all by whichever one finally gets on the missing mayonnaise content.
This is collective intelligence at work. This will be how the Wild West is won. The industry hasn't been able to police ourselves, so consumers will force change upon the industry themselves.
Yes. But if you read that as "the stories we are telling about mayonnaise aren't good enough", then I think you're not receiving the same message that the collective intelligence is sending.
You clicked three adverts a day, every day, on your phone - every single one by accident - a hundred adverts and not a single one you were interested in - and you read that as "advertising is great, just think how good adblockers will make it"?
Probably the best example of this is Super Bowl advertising. Every year, I make a point of looking up many of the ads on YouTube even though (a) I hate football and (b) I have about 0 interest in most of the products advertised. Why? Because they're, in a sense, the pinnacle of commercial storytelling. Per second, they're the most expensive stories ever told—and that leads to amazingly high production values and, often, some very fun advertisements.
There's a reason that the best ads have tens of millions of voluntary views on YouTube.
The Ad Tech crew came in and connected the pipes in order to provide a solution to marketers and in return content creators. The consumer (of content and goods) was left behind, dropped into the background of the conversation, what was their experience - who cares. It is like a cruel cycle of content creators willing to sell more ad space for incremental revenue and marketers willing to buy it for incremental views (revenue, clicks, conversions).
I think the ability to measure the effectiveness (likely low, very low) impact of digital advertising dollars will add a balance to the equation. Right now, it is two parties moving in cyclical unison towards higher expenditure and worse user experiences. A third party is required to reset expectations and show a more realistic impact of digital advertising.
- Currently, working in ad tech, I find marketers have lofty goals in terms of revenue or leads generated by digital advertising...
Really they need to move to a standard side bar or bottom bar and have everyone get on board or just be blocked.
I have the speakers turned off on my machine. They are only on if I run a youtube video or Skype.
Twitter kind of started this by making their ads just another tweet, but even then it's still very generalizable and the experience you get is not with the product but with a depiction of it.
So that's what we are doing with our company by virtualizing the showroom experience in Augmented Reality.
Do you really want to read half of an article just to find out you wasted your time because it turns into an sponsored article (advertisement of a product)? People hate blog spam here on HN. And often as well other forms of "native advertising" like the slightly yellow colored sponsored search results on Google or your example of sponsored feed posts on Facebook and Twitter. What you probably mean with "experience is the ad" is more what is called product placement in movies, games and theme park rides.
The only other field that has been so utterly unencumbered by any ethical concerns has been state intelligence, and at least they have had enough sense of shame to do it in secret, and can claim they do it "for the greater good".
Ad tech has exposed the utter moral void of the advertising industry.
It's time to go back to 2004 style ads, before or around when Google Adsense disrupted the advertisement world. Dumb plain advertisement based on jpeg, animated gif or formatted text.
In the same context, I don’t see how advertisers could trust any web site to run their ads. Who’s to check if the content is consumed by real humans or a botnet some small publisher has set-up as a side project? Even today with all the technology available at least a quarter of ad traffic is fraudulent. Imagine what would happen if there were no third party agencies to validate traffic.
It's easier and cheaper than ever to run your own website or community forum - and the vast majority of these that exist are not significantly funded by advertisements. Ads don't make money on a small scale, as every mobile game developer will happily explain. I think that it's very unlikely the web would lose significant value through losing third-party ad companies.
The situation greatly improved AFTER Adsense made it more remunerative for most legitimate websites to run what were originally text-only, non-invasive ads. Yes, with tracking, but much less annoying.
My impression is that falling CPM revenues are bringing us back to how it was before Adsense.
What you nowadays mean with AdSense, the ads that follow you around (tracking, little revenue) started in 2009/10: "Google AdSense started using search history in contextual matching to offer more relevant ads". [my pov: this started a new Ad Tech boom which is now again on a tipping point and waiting for another disruption - because site owners get little revenue and it sucks for end users (crash browsers, drain batteries, too invasive, already own advertised the products)]
Programmatic advertising is the notion that an ad isn't sold until it's requested. Lazy ad buying. Rather than bulk buy ads for a flat rate, each ad opportunity has its own individual cost.
Being able to find market value for an ad opportunity has completely turned the advertising industry upside down. When a few phone calls and a dense Rolodex were previously the secret to effective use of advertising money, today ad opportunities are sold in a fairly open auction in real time. That is a big deal. Sure it has caused its own problems, such as those cited in the article, but Ad Tech has disrupted traditional advertising and made it arguably more efficient economically.