The Advertising Industry Has a Problem: People Hate Ads
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I’m a daily YouTube user, I have a rich watch history of (probably) 10,000s of videos.
Then it serves me an ad for beer with a bunch of beautiful woman, at a loud party, drinking with men.
I’m a non-drinking, introverted, gay, who hates loud parties. The advertisement couldn’t have been more irrelevant if it tried.
Needless to say, product still folded in the end.
Look at companies like Facebook and Google. They thrive on advertising, and despite that and having a myriad of other ethical issues, plenty of people consider these companies to be some of the most desirable to work for in the world.
How many Facebook and Google employees read threads like these and feel even the smallest pang of guilt? What percentage of those will actually take action based on what they know is right, quit, and go work for more ethical companies?
There's a reason the internet is a cesspool of advertising. Most people would rather have a big fat paycheck than do what they feel is right, if they even feel that what they do is wrong.. which I bet most people who work for these companies don't.
And yes that's out of about 900 people who bought. But only about 100 used even once, and only about 40-50 maybe used meaningfully, ever, so these customers almost don't churn.
That's from memory, and I don't remember who said it, so I can't give credit where due. But I think it's a great description of what you're saying - that ads are killing our self esteem and self image.
That's because there is a mismatch between what advertisers want to sell and what the people want to buy. Your topics of interest don't pay for them, so they shove something else in your pages in the hopes of making a conversion.
:)))
I'm astounded that YouTube has spent billions of dollars over a decade on the best software engineers and still cannot manage this simple optimisation.
It took six months for the company to ask someone to investigate further; he confirmed my estimation and had “the most impact anyone junior had within two months of joining the company”.
If they hit a couple of lone gringos and other ex-pats, whatever; the point is a wide net. Targeting you specifically isn't worth the trouble until your net worth is measured in 5MM or more, me thinks.
What’s important is that YouTube had another user to show ads to thereby inflating their metrics so they can sell more ads at a higher price.
Ads aren’t about you, they’re about convincing marketing departments to spend more money on more ads at a higher price.
Ads can be targeted to context, not user - web developer ads on JavaScript blogs.
Ad profiling and targeting can be done client side.
Users' could opt in to what they are targeted for to ensure it is the relevance they want. You will often find ad tracking technology on some very privacy invasive websites. I've seen it on HIV support, rape support, prayer, single parent dating, cancer advice, alcoholism, political party membership pages and many more; even tracking military intelligence recruitment. Are the relevant ads and infosec risks for these topics good for the user?
Tackling anonymised delivery and fraud prevention is a problem, but it's something that can be overcome with accepting it already happens and then minimising it through privacy respective methods like using auditors and testing, copying anonymisation protocols (maybe Tor), payment style validation (Brave?, zerocoin) and server side metrics.
So much this. I would turn my adblock off, if I had a directory with checkboxes/weights against interesting product topics. I would even browse the topics themselves regularly, as I did in google directory before it was gone. I (and the economy) want me to discover, not to hide from pushiest pushers around.
Modern marketing is just a slowpoke idiot who stalks me for two weeks after I already bought a <productname> via search.
Google’s system isn’t perfect but I can x-out individual ads. I’m hoping that Google will move away from a purely embedding-based targeting system into something more deliberate.
Facebook has [1] which is the closest to what you are asking for, although not used nearly enough to justify more investment in improving it.
But the reason I started blocking trackers was because the ads from tracking were basically antirelevant. I would spend an afternoon investigating what model of a specific tool to buy and where, then I would go buy it. For the next month, all the ads were for that exact tool; at which point, I was probably the least likely person in England to actually respond to those ads.
And that was before the whole Cambridge Analytica thing. I have money and I like to buy cool and useful things, and "good" advertising helps me find cool and useful things to buy. But I definitely do not like the idea of being targeted for psyops.
Most ads have sophisticated analytics, and not only about individual users. That means, basically, that they wouldn't spend their money advertising this way if it wasn't working at all or if there was a more profitable way.
Also, if I'm on a subway and start "reminding" the people around me that their clothes are out of fashion and they can buy new ones at my shop, do you think that people would consider that as friendly? Would you?
The 'psyops' was related to Cambridge Analytica using hyper-targeted messages to affect the outcome of elections; see the "Do So" campaign designed to decrease Black voter turnout in Trinidad and Tobogo [1].
As I said, I don't mind finding out about cool things to buy. I definitely don't want to be sucked into misunderstanding and hating people, or being fooled into acting against my own interests.
[1] https://advox.globalvoices.org/2019/08/06/netflixs-the-great...
The “Do so” is a far better example of what they really did: develop a talent for race-based dog-whistle type messaging that _anyone_ could see but where one group would respond differently. The main differentiator that Cambridge Analytica would introduce was Social media vs. traditional press to split messaging by age-group. They tried to improve it using magazine subscription and car brand (from credit reports) but it wasn’t much better than using party registration datasets.
Now they are trying to create some magic algorithms to determine user interests and serve same ads everwhere, independent of current page context (including vacuum cleaner you bought last week, but maybe you need another?). But why they won't do the obvious thing, serving ads revelant to the page they are shown on..?
They pretty much do. Non-targeted ads will either require an unreasonable amount of effort to disseminate or they will not be relevant to the vast majority of people that see them. Contacting different sites about a specific topic to show your relevant ads is going to take an incredible amount of work.
What's probably even worse is if we get a situation like on YouTube, where it's just the same 5-10 companies buying ads for their products. This means that content creators will advertise NordVPN on their site, even if the product itself is bad, because you only have these few options to choose from.
I see a great opportunity here.
You absolutely can, the ad just needs to match the venue. If you are selling fishing tackle you buy an ad on Total Carp (a real magazine!) and you have guaranteed targeting to fishing enthusiasts. This is the same for any ad for any product.
The idea that tracking is needed for ad targeting is pure deception on behalf of those whose real objective is the tracking for other reasons.
But it's interesting that most people commenting here seem to loathe advertising. Can we really all be outliers?
Yes, absolutely.
People who have something to complain about will often do that waaaaaay in excess of people who don’t.
Compounded by HN tending to attract people who enjoy a text-only interface.
Within the past week, I've actually opted to watch more than one complete ad on YouTube, because it was relevant. (More to the channel than me, but interesting for the same reason that the channel itself was. Channel about making things, ads about high end (multi hundred thousand dollar?) CNC tools and the such.
This can even be generalized further. I am not a fan of targeted content anywhere if it goes beyond similar content that I recently watched.
The only context where ads don't leave a negative impression is while shopping. The way ads dominate topics if they happen to also match some random products name is infuriating.
But if ads must be played, just show the random content that you show everyone.
The ads were basically a fast slide show - they were changing frames so fast that I didn't even have time to see what the actors were doing. It seemed to be flashing - each frame had actors with different color clothes than the previous frame, there was no continuity. The audio was just as intense, lots of compression and high frequencies. A background narrator (salesman) was nearly shouting in a harried tone, bombarding me in their allotted 10 seconds with reasons I should do something. It was noise without rhythm.
Maybe this ad was the result of my friends automatically generated ad targeting profile and it reflected her search interests, demographic, digital purchase history, automated microphone/camera data collection, and location data history.
But it's also evidence that even the ones making the ads are probably bored with their own jobs (unless ads are automatically generated deep fakes by now).
I don't watch TV, but I'll go to public places where there are TVs playing and people in the room to respond to the content. A Dos Equis ad came up last week, father and son fishing sharing a meaningful moment that turned out to be the father telling the son that the glass beer bottle was recyclable for 5 cents in Iowa, Maine, and Georgia. The son says that means alot to him.
I really couldn't stop laughing for a good 45 seconds. And I remembered it. The pace of the ad was pleasant, gentle (which ultimately sets up the punch line), predictable, and had a format for television which means no skipping which translates to more thoughtful and competitive content (sports channels push 3-4 commercials in a row, YouTube interrupts you with one, maybe two). The room didn't feel like it was pulled into an unorganized frenzy for 10-20 seconds (though the channel will matter, this room was a casino sports betting room - there are so many TVs that I felt like I was sitting in Public Sentiment Mission Control).
But these ads are probably directed at people who have their hands on the controls, unlike hands free TV. A YouTube audience target is probably expected to be alone confined to their device, and the severity of the ad's information overload may reflect the high-bandwidth-internet-surfers reluctance to focus on one thing.
Chicken before the egg?
Personally I'm trying to avoid products where the ads manage to penetrate my "firewall" either by breaking the law (DMs even if I am registered not to accept those), public space advertisement or email spam where I didn't sign up for it. Both the email spam and DMs are illegal to do here if you don't sign up for it so I report them all to the local authorities.
Ad platforms are killing content: seems like to generate any revenue you either get very generic stuff at high audience, or a long tail of dark-pattern riddled crap. The middle ground where really good creative stuff happens basically doesn't exist/quickly dies, relies on Patreon and such, or gets so many ads it's unconsumable.
That's the same thing as a marketer approaching a dev at work trying to explain that shit code will create poor product experience, negative sentiment and lower sales.
What most people don't realize is that marketing isn't a input > output solution.
That's not how people work. That's not how society works.
No one wants to waste budget to reach the wrong people, because, just like on any other job - no one likes to do a bad job. Specially marketing/sales jobs have a direct measurable result.
I know that a lot of IT people have a lot of difficulty understanding this, but that's part of some marketing roles, to deal with all stakeholders and try to explain it to them (when/if necessary - else they should just say: "How about you do your job well and don't worry about other's people job?").
When you understand that when Coca-Cola approaches you with a briefing to sell "happiness in a bottle" and that poses a media challenge, then you're one step closer to understand the difficulty of the task.
Now, are there bad practices and bad professionals? Just like in any other job.
So what's the difference? Well unlike many other jobs, the outcome of a bad advertising is seen by a lot of eye balls, because that's the end goal.
A good analogy of a bad engineering job that received a lot of public attention and anger is for example the Boeing 737 Max Q. Or when ever there's a data leak from X company. Yet most poor/bad engineering jobs aren't noticeable to a large audience, aren't up for public scrutiny.
To sum up: when people are affected by bad practices, they don't like it.
Both have x-out options on every ad: feel free to use it, it helps training aversion models.
Maybe they changed that but I gave up on that strategy quite fast.
Most of the time, the campaigns will be estimated through some AB-testing. It could be a before and after test, or something even less significant like attribution. All of those have one thing in common: you assume that either you run a campaign, or you don’t. Given week enforcement, being louder wins.
If one the other hand you decide to only send that email to people with a high chance of being interested and changing their behaviour, you limit your messages to a much smaller, more relevant subset. There typically is some pushback: “Why not also try people with a less than 0.1% of responding?” In that case, you want to introduce a cost: the fraction of a penny is costs to send an email, chances of being blacklisted, legal process, etc. Even with a conservative estimation of that risk, most of your targets become not worth it.
On the web, I have never used an ad blocker and have just closed the page if the advertising gets to be too much in my face. It seems that it is getting worse all the time, because it is a war between the advertisers and ad blockers and people like me are stuck in the middle.
And then YouTube is showing longer ads every day, with many in the 5 minute range. And when you're trying to watch a video that is only 3 minutes long, why would you watch a 5 minute advertisement?... it doesn't make any sense.
Why? My recommendation to every single person is to install an adblocker right now and never ever turn it off again. It's such an easy thing to do which immediately significantly improves your quality of life.
The same reason that if I go into a cafe to sit down for a while, I'll buy a drink even if I'm not particularly thirsty. The cost of having a table in a downtown location for you to sit at is far higher than the cost of the beans and water; a drink for a place to sit is part of the "implicit deal".
Websites cost money to run, so I think it's only fair to accept a reasonable amount of advertising. But I don't think being silently tracked for just happening upon your website is fair, so I block trackers. If your advertising works without trackers, I'll see it just fine.
To extend the metaphor: Malls often have common areas where you can sit and just hang out. They also often have cafes with tables. The common areas are often nicer than the cafes -- less loud and less cramped. If you like common areas better than cafes, by all means, sit in the common areas. But if you do sit in a cafe for some reason, you should buy something, even if it's just a bottle of water.
By a similar reasoning -- if you prefer websites with no ads, then by all means only go to websites with no ads. But if you do go to a website supported by ads, I think it's part of the implicit bargain that you be willing to view ads that are presented in a reasonable manner (where "tracking you across the internet" is not reasonable).
I don't like the concept of tipping -- I think people's salaries and/or bonuses should be determined by their managers, not random people who wander in. But if I go to a restaurant where tipping is expected, I tip, because that's the implicit agreement I made when I sat down.
I've always found it super depressing that in so many towns and cities virtually the only places where people can just hang out are commercial in nature.
It would be so much nicer if the towns and cities invested more in to providing such places themselves (beyond merely having a park here and there), where you didn't have to be a walking dollar sign to someone in order to participate.
Do you also make a point of buying some percentage of the products advertised to you? After all, isn't it ethical to support the advertisers that are supporting the websites that you read? It costs money to run those ads, after all, and without the ads the websites wouldn't run, according to your reasoning. Or would you rather externalize the cost of supporting those advertisers to others while you get a free ride?
Tracking is yet another thing you can avoid to some degree by using an ad blocker (and, better yet, by disabling javascript).
Finally, the best reason to use an ad blocker is to opt-out of the advertising ecosystem to make it less viable. We have to find a more ethical way to fund media than supporting this manipulative, privacy-invading industry.
This, of course, isn't a problem for the third-parties providing all this tracking because they get their slice regardless.
Relationship between consumers and business don't have to be adversarial : I'm glad to pay for a product that I consider worth it, and having the choice to pay with money instead of brain time with ads is a clear positive to me.
What if what you do is use youtube-dl?
When you pay for something, you expect service and support. Google is not known for support, especially if providing support requires staffing of actual breathing humans, so the rollout was delayed until at least a minimum of support standard could be met.
Definitively worth the money and I won't have to have a bad consciousness for running ublock.
Uhhh, can't you can press 'skip' after 5 seconds? I've never seen an unskippable YouTube ad longer than 30 seconds.
Although yes, they are upping amount of ads: a couple months ago they started doing two back to back pre-roll ads every once in a while.
Sidebar ads - usually something completely useless at best or outright spammy sometimes ("You're our 5000th customer, click to win!")
Feed ads - Twitter, Instagram, other social media. These actually manage to offer things that I care about because they probably have good tracking algorithms.
I've found that the few cases where I've actually paid attention to an ad or even, gasp, clicked on it were the feed ads. So, yeah, I hate the first two categories. Of course I do, they're absolutely useless and the first type is also intrusive.
The catch is... I dislike the third kind as well. Because it leeches off of my privacy. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
So actually people hate those old-fashioned ad banners and pop-ups, but currently the advertising industry is more about integrating hidden ads everywhere and personalizing it as much as possible. That speaking, if you are not deeply into privacy and anonymity or just turn off you ads/track blocking stuff, then you will see how personal ads could be. They are not entirely correct, but more and more often I found them horrifyingly personal and targeted.
I hate to be tracked, I hate to be harrassed (blinking, flashing ads, inappropriate ads), I hate to be exposed by malware.
There were times, when I actually liked ads - when they appeared in reputable magazines for specific topics, be they hifi, sports I have interes in or the national geographic magazine. They all were tasteful and actually interesting, as they were targetted. But not targetted by the stories some cookies seem to tell, but by the topic of the magazine. Much higher chance to show me something which actually interests me.
The cardinal mistake was selling off add space to networks which would decide which ads to place instead of traditional add placement. And to be too greedy and overdo ads until they couldn't be tolerated any more.
Bonus points in the almost globalized age: show me ads for things not available in my region.
I hate that giving an inch for ads means tracking, malware, harassment, etc. I hate that I have to be skeptical to give any personal information to any company/institution, as 999/1000 its sold and used for ads. I hate that this is a wealth of information for people to steal and use for nefarious purposes.
I want to pay for my services, and would like real micro transactions, maybe I read an article i really enjoyed - I want to be able to pay for this, as a donation.
I'm pretty sure we need to look beyond ads for funding services and websites. I'd much rather pay, and while I know not everyone wants to pay... if we could push this behavior, it would really make the web better.
Personally, I have adblockers, privacy badger and even AdGuard/PiHole on my network.
So to all creators, let me pay you, even a tiny amount. I'm aware that transaction fees are en enemy here, so maybe that's a problem to fix?
The bigger problem is taxes. A website getting paid directly by its viewers is selling something to each of those viewers, and has to worry about sales tax or VAT in every place those viewers reside.
A website getting paid by selling ad space to ad networks generally only has to worry about taxes in the country it is in.
The latter is orders of magnitude less of a pain than the former.
There are models for this (e.g. Blendle), however they suffer from the same problem as Spotify did and Netflix does: the content creators (newspapers, studios, labels) lose the direct connection to their audience and cannot upsell them any more or gather data about them.
This is why newspapers employ massive amounts of trackers and why studios build their own crappy streaming service instead of licensing to Netflix.
The only idea I see to fix this is regulatory: require rightholders to license their content under FRAND terms to aggregators. Otherwise the negative incentives of modern capitalism will block a user-friendly solution.
Here is an ad, a movie trailer, that has 232 million views: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ZfuNTqbHE8 People voluntarily seek out some forms of advertisement and jump through hoops to avoid other forms of advertisement. The nature of the ad in question is a huge factor. If the ad industry has a problem, it's being bad at their jobs.
I don't care how much the advertising industry tries to adapt, it's not going to help. I just want that entire industry to stop existing and I know many people (especially young-ish people like me) who share that view.
So I guess I'm pretty strongly pro-ad, even if they're occasionally annoying.
Plus I've gotten a decent chuckle out of some of those Geico ads.
"Get dominance on the market, establish a Monopoly"
1) Invest long-term, offer free attractive services, don't expect any profit during first several years
2) Implement locked-in methods
3) Wait until monopolic position secured and majority is locked into your free service
4) Start monetization and track feedback. Optimize to find perfect tolerance with long-term profit maximization as objective.
5) Enjoy! You are Monopoly.
This is fundamentally broken.
I was surprised at how effective that is for conversions
Its been hilarious to watch grifters think they could do it just by having followers
If you can figure out how to do either one better, faster, whatever, I do not mind those. And I remember who took the time to be considerate enough to create them too.
Got nothing else. Hate inane ADS right along with everyone else.
I guess around SuperBowl time there are some funny ads, but that's about it for me.
i dislike ads as 99.??% are effectively automated insults.
"buy this or you are lessened"
over my lifetime the ad industry has offered insult to me perhaps 100s of 1000s of times.
I 'm glad to see they are tackling advertising itself though, rather than fabricating stories about social platforms. The ad industry seems to be very much lacking in real metrics, and seems to be particularly dumb in innovating, holding up appropriate standards and protecting their art.
I'm not saying I'm opposed, just stating this observation!
But it's not acceptable for dozens of dodgy ads per page to crash my browser (so I use an ad-blocker). And it's not acceptable for fraudulent email spam to take up more space in my inbox than messages from friends and relatives: I've spent a lot of time over the last 20 years fine-tuning spam filters. Most of the phone calls I get seem to be from criminals, telling me that ISP X is about to close my account, when my provider is ISP Y. I haven't found a solution to that.
Youtube ads seem to have become more frequent and longer in just the last few months. My response: avoid Youtube. TV ads: I pre-record and fast-forward.
I don't understand why merchants and advertisers seem to think it helps their pitch to infuriate people.
Perhaps if the advertising industry would get together to drive out these crooks, fraudsters and scammers, and perhaps not treat everything on the face of the earth as an advertising medium, the honest merchants might get a clearer run at their consumers.
As far as I'm concerned, they missed the boat a long time ago - if you advertise at me without my permission, then I will remember your name and NEVER consider buying your product.
Unfortunately it seems that their tactics work, because we subconsciously remember their name but then lose track of whether it was a positive or negative association. Plus when "everyone does it", it becomes impossible when actually shopping to reward those who don't do it, because they are indistinguishable from a fly-by-night/fraudulent brand. So everyone continues to advertise in the most obnoxious way possible and the noise floor is permanently raised.
So you have to make your brand well-known, otherwise branding doesn't help. I get it. But covering everything in shouty ads isn't that - it's trying to manipulate people.
If everyone would adopt my "NEVER consider" policy, the problem would be gone in six months.
Try youtube-dl. It's free and there are no ads.