Instagram Advertising: Do you know it when you see it?
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We recently had a baby girl, our first, and this has lead to quite a lot of internet searching. I’ve been completely unable to find anything resembling an authentic answer on google. It’s all commercial content trying to push products rather than give any form of useful information. The government sites, to their credit, work really well, but what happened to the actual people on the internet? People sharing their stories without getting paid to push a product?
In the end we ended up subscribing to a national NGO that does consumer testing and has an excellent decade long track record, but what good is the internet if you can’t find honest information?
Those days are long gone, since everybody streams now, and genuine user reviews have dried up. Last.fm was another great site, but it's a ghost town now, and the band comments sections are full of spam.
At least rateyourmusic.com is still chugging along.
Good old webforums. They are alive and well.
To be fair I only have experience with old car restoration groups but there may be some FB groups where people post selling / buying things but the real discussion is still in old-school vbulletin style forums.
I got back into a video game the other day that was released 15 years ago (also when I first played it). There were plenty of dedicated websites around the game, most of them with forums that contained guides, little details and secrets and whatnot (matter of fact, I ran one of them for a while).
All of those are long gone, with all associated content - which I suppose is not surprising, given its age. However, the issue remains - as interest in a topic dwindles, fewer and fewer people see the point in spending the money and effort to maintain these sites containing (mostly) unbiased information and the information, alongside potentially thousands of user-generated posts/content in the forum, gets lost in the void. If you happen to look something up you saw a decade ago, you might find it on the wayback machine, but certainly not via a search engine.
On-line, I didn't expect much. Any topic that's highly relevant to regular people is already gamed by advertisers to the extent there's nothing useful to be found on the mainstream Internet. It's all content marketing garbage. For good information, you have to visit places like official government sites, or niche subreddits & web forums.
I dream of the day, but unless the government makes it a requirement I don’t see them doing it as it could undermine their business model to some extent (although I think people who want to buy will make use of the “commercial search”)
If we put on our computer science hats on to attempt an algorithm to classify the "commercial" from "non-commercial", what would that look like?
Distinguishing ads that are disguised as innocent posts vs authentically innocent posts is a very hard problem. What would the AI machine learning rules be?
Let's take one example thread that's currently on the HN front page: "Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?"
(screenshot of HN: https://imgur.com/a/zK5IZ4E)
Was that post submitted for discussion to spur sales of the new Raspberry Pi 4? Or was it a genuine question free of any hidden commercial intent? How would a computer algorithm know? Likewise, how would we, as humans, be able to truly know? To me, the thread doesn't seem like it's advertising-motivated. But do you trust my judgement on this?
Let's take that post's indeterminate status one step further and look at the Google search results: https://www.google.com/search?q=what+do+you+do+with+a+"raspb...
(screenshot of Google: https://imgur.com/a/YGShV9r)
Notice that Google includes that very HN thread in its results. Should the hypothetical "non-commercial" search button include that HN thread or not?
Here's an example of the opposite effect where people misclassify something as commercial when it isn't: A HN user accuses me of selling something[1] even though I actually wasn't! I just happen to view hundreds of videos about entrepreneurship and I keep copious notes. It was easy to share my notes with HN readers. I have no commercial or even personal affiliation with any VC.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12507716 -- "There's so much selling in this post I get tired just by reading it."
I don’t mind the ads, but I do mind the content farms and useless fluff that ends up on the first SERP of a query. Or links to pages with no substantive content related to a query except SEO.
Well, it would be nice but it's not possible to implement a truly ad-free community at (large) internet scale.
The issue is that a supposed "ad-free zone" of the internet will become an attractive magnet for stealth ads that don't look like obvious ads.
Ad-free zones can work if the community is small and everybody knows each other -- such as an Amish community in a small town. Members can interact without ulterior motives of selling something.
But we can't scale that ad-free ideal all the way up to millions of anonymous and pseudonymous bloggers, webforum members, and website owners. When a community becomes too large, it exceeds the ability of its regular members to trace the money trail of everybody else that's participating in the commercial-free internet zone.
In the end, if you're interacting outside a small circle of trusted friends, you just have to keep your wits about you to hopefully detect hidden agendas of advertising.
https://addons.mozilla.org/es/firefox/addon/clean-links-webe...
Search without the top 1m (or 100k) sites. Far from perfect, but it tunes out an awful lot of the commerce that Google prioritise. You start finding the old school forums and info sites that are mostly invisible to Google.
Those are a breath of fresh air in this day and age, when 90% of blogs appearing on search are SEO-optimized solopreneur websites that hit you with cookie warnings and "free ebook" email lead gen popups the second you arrive on the page.
Web forums are still great places to engage with real people and real opinions. I'm expecting that web forums will remain after the social media giants are privacy-legislated out of existence.
Far from perfect, but it's been a habit I've been taking more and more in order to avoid all the garbage SEO / Lead Gen / Promotional content out there that's diluting searches.
It's fine to consider it as an extra signal but many people do not realize that reddit accounts can be gamed by marketers for stealth advertising:
https://www.google.com/search?q=sell+old+reddit+accounts+to+...
Caught me slippin'. Reminded me to always use "site:reddit.com" after the search query.
This isn't new. Social Media is just another channel. http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
I jest but isn't that drink something:
Sugar, Nondairy Creamer (Partially Hydrogenated Coconut Oil and Soybean Oil, Corn Syrup Solids, Sodium Caseinate (a Milk Derivative), Dipotassium Phosphate, Sugar, Mono and Diglycerides, Silicon Dioxide, Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Soy Lecithin, Artificial Color, Artificial Flavor), Nonfat Dry Milk, Instant Coffee, Natural and Artificial Flavors, Cocoa Powder (Processed with Alkali), Silicon Dioxide and Sodium Aluminosilicate (to Prevent Caking), Carboxymethylcellulose, Salt.
How do we get sold into buying this stuff? Instagram? Inadvertent product placement on HN?
Seems that the product is cheaper than take out Starbucks, so it is a deal. But is it?
I drink tea (I am British) and my preference is for the cheap stuff. So that means the 40 Fair Trade bags for 50p from one store or 80 non-Fair-Trade bags for 58p ($1) from the other store. No milk, no sugar and certainly no Dipotassium Phosphate needed.
$4.99 for 15 cups? That is 33 cents per go. I am sure I could get hooked to it. To cost myself $2.50 a day or approximately $17 dollars a week more than my current beverage costs (ignoring electricity). That is getting on for $900 a year for getting Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate and the like into my arteries!
But, the Hill Brothers delicacy is still a bargain compared to one Starbucks treat a day.
Pffft. Are you new to "accidental" comment product placement? It's all about brand awareness. Brands like the delicious Lavazza coffee i m drinking right now.
Meanwhile, Hill Bros are anything but. They were owned by Nestle but are now part of this outfit:
http://www.mzb-group.com/en/brands
It is crazy how the core product is merchandised to different people around the world.
In the UK we get one of their brands at train stations and it all seems cool and locally British. But what is not so obvious is that the other coffee place at the station that seems not connected to the chain is also selling the same product with Italian branded beans. So the apparent choice is lining the same pockets of the global mega corp.
Obviously there is choice but sometimes the choice seems imagined, the megacorp can monopolise a locality such as a station.
Coffee is a product for grown ups but when you look at the MZB portfolio it seems that only in America do they treat their customers to a dumbed-down, sugared-up childish product with garish packaging. This is not just this mega-corp, if you go into a British supermarket and find a special shelf area with American products you will see some true crimes when it comes to ultrabright and childish packaging. Sometimes the cereal boxes have to have stickers over some of the nutrition claims on the pack as Trading Standards would just have those products off the shelves immediately if they weren't sanitised that bit.
The mega corp will sell the ultra adulterated products for the US market and have another brand to cater for the hipsters that want heritage, eco-whatever, taste and what not.
I think I really will be sticking with plain tea or skipping the intermediate steps and just going for sugar coated crack cocaine. It is all pulling the same levers in the brain.
- A real estate company in Denver, Colarado
- Sanitary pads for women
- A Dubai property brokerage
- BMW Las Vegas
I really don't know what's going on with these ads because geographic and gender exclusion would be the first step in any targeting
But on a serious note, the notion that any insurance company or even governments give any weight to the "data" from social media and the like makes me uneasy, specially when you realize how off they can be!
(BMWs, by the way, are very expensive in India. An entry level 3-series costs roughly $70,000)
This makes me think that maybe Instagram depends heavily on your Facebook data for targeting, and that deleting your Facebook (not disabling; deleting) actually does delete your data from Facebook
That said, I don't see this being a data gap for too long.
There's at least 5 (!) different kinds of branded 'Hills Bros' merch filling the shot. It's hugely obvious that it's an ad.
Weird leading example for an article included "Do you know it when you see it?" in the title.
The They Live sunglasses should be an extension that can abstract these things to keywords like "CONSUME" for product promotion and "MARRY & REPRODUCE" for relationship updates / family pictures.
> Van Ness's posts are clearly labeled as ads, with the caption #advertisement or #sponsoredcontent [...] Altman is diligent about using those hashtags.
It wouldn't be too hard for the FTC to crack down on sponsored content that isn't tagged as sponsored. Of course they don't have the budget to go after everyone, but they can fine one big player and make a heavy handed example of a handful of small ones (who won't actually get hurt, the free publicity will be worth it to them). The cost of compliance is cheap, so everyone will make sure to display the "sponsored content" sign.
That, like the article, misses the point, however: like placebo drugs, ads work just fine even if you know they are ads.
The erstwhile online forums driven by volunteers and like-minded individuals are the only last known place remaining that don't seem to have hidden agendas. And I dread their demise.
The eternal october [0][1] of advertising is here. The only way I have managed to escape is firewalling them out of my home network, but that's like isolating myself in a cocoon and leaves a large part of today's internet inaccessible.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
[1] https://googlepress.blogspot.com/2000/10/google-launches-sel...
Maybe it's my past-experience of knowing many people in an MLM once and seeing the differences between them being themselves and them “working on their business”.
Maybe the answer to understanding what authentic advertising is, is being exposed to all sorts of it more, in a safe environment where your money doesn't evaporate, and being able to reflect and think critically about what you're experiencing and what the intentions of the other party are.
It's getting even tougher to find reviews of uncommon products. I had a family member ask me suggestions for a car DVD player. I got a fair amount of hits for different brands and players, but when I looked for reviews on these products outside of commerce sites, they were all lists with affiliate links with little blurbs likes, "10 in screens, 6 hours of battery life, headphone jack, and plays media via USB." Gee, thanks for the product description.
(I thought these might be multi-ad deals, but from scanning her page, I only see each product featured once.)
And yet, Instagram is adamant that I speak Serbian and that I am in Serbia. I don't speak Serbian, and I haven't been in Serbia since I stayed in Belgrade for the month of June last year.
Good job folks.
Absolutely bizarre.
In my comment I said I would rather see 100 lab mice euthanised than see a single child suffer from cancer.
Does Instagram just employ the world's stupidest people or what?
I'm definitely NOT the target demographic for fit teas, gym bands, detox treatments, bikinis or sports drinks. The pictures accompanying said products are nice to look at though.
The coffee photo in the article is a complete overkill, one must be an idiot to not realise it's an advertisment.
On a side note, plaintext site is a pleasure to read, and loads lightning fast - i really recommend it.
Influencers are basically a walking, breathing marketing platforms, that seem more down to earth or intimate than typical ads - basically a human version of targeted advertisement mixed with surreptitious advertising.
If only nobody did advertising... Only trustworthy and non-promoting information about products findable by search (pull instead of push)... It would also be a lot cheaper for the companies.
That's why I believe that advertising industry ultimately needs to be burned down to the ground through legal means. It'll be better off for everyone - including companies, who will be able to spend much less on the little informative advertising that would be allowed.
"Facebook adds 5 divs, 9 spans and 30 css classes to every single post in the timeline to make it more difficult to identify and block 'Sponsored' posts, oh my."
[0] https://www.fastcompany.com/90166955/i-have-a-secret-ad-free...
Edit: I had assumed the trick was using the mobile website, since I used to see ads when I used the Android app.
To be fair, the instagram accounts of people you know IRL aren’t ads. Probably.
But they won’t do that because it will expose the platform for what it really is.
Trying to protect people from content is an endless rabbit hole of ineffective strategies that usually end up doing more harm than good. Why not just leave it up to people to take some personal responsibility for how they consume instagram content?
I recall that in the UK, TV programs are already required to do this.
edit: oh this isn't about their targeting ads which are very very on point and are what actually make me upset, about how good it is