I always figured we should put advertising on the currency of exchange... seriously, just put what ever picture you want on an individual dollar bill (or a $10/$20/$50/$100) for a price you pay to the Treasury for printing it in volume. Different markets for different denominations and you could actually even target specific areas based on the Atlanta vs Frisco printing locations. The price of ads on a dollar bill could easily exceed the value of the currency itself, because of the multiple transactions (even if it's only in circulation for 21 months!) People would even buy them as collectors taking the rare ones out of circulation.
Now, of course you could put advertising on your dynamic (image updating) credit card so as you pull it out at the grocery store it reminds to get more SnackyPoofs for your lovely little Cartman at home. Or perhaps we'll be putting advertising on the blockchain so that they will mine, and we can get transaction costs down!
I would hope that there would be massive backlash if we as a country tried to put advertising on our currency, because that's insane. It would be a fairly fitting illustration of what's wrong with modern society, though.
The main issue is fraud detection. Having many different bills would confuse people, and you'd have hard time explaining which part of the bill you need to check and which part you don't. You're going to have the equivalent of fake download buttons.
This is an excellent idea, but it made me thinking... There are so many children born in this world. If we could tatoo various commercials on their faces, our country could earn so much free money! /s
I think the point that the article is trying to make is a lot less dramatic than the title would suggest.
Basically, there has been a long standing assumption that, netizens in general spend their time on a plethora of websites, and that instead of spending money on specific sites, one should spend money on audiences. In other words, advertise in accordance with a person's interests.
However, due to recent exploitation of this assumption by other fake sites, and fake bot-generated visitors, this assumption has met some strong evidence that would disprove it.
Could the advertisers simply get together and black list such advertising agencies that sell fake niche sites with fake bot-generated views? Or is that a naive view of things?
My suspicion is that it would become a game of whack-a-mole where the cost of identifying perpetrators is higher for the advertisers than it is for perpetrators to create a new identity and start again.
> this assumption has met some strong evidence that would disprove it.
There is no evidence either way. Behavioral targeting works to some extent, e.g. retargeting. I visit Ford Fusion specs, later on Fox News a Ford Ad for a different truck appears.
Detecting fraudulent sites is not only counter-productive for platforms (AOL One is shockingly lenient to pump up their "reach" numbers), but sites as well. Sites will pay for inflated automated traffic to consume advertising budgets. The foxes are decided how to parse up the hens.
I find most of the claims in this (obviously PR driven) piece misleading.
Online marketers are aware of fraud. The common wisdom is to assume ~30% of your budget went into fraud. Advertisers measure ROI, don't bother much to dig into which form/shape fraud takes place, the tech details, or how to identify or stop it. Because that's technically far from trivial. It's like a restaurant assuming 15% loss on fresh supplies. You factor that in and as long as you have a margin you're good to go.
>Online marketers are aware of fraud. The common wisdom is to assume ~30% of your budget went into fraud.
Common wisdom does not account for that some cash cow keyword/adnet combination you can approach to 90% of traffic coming from bots, or conversions being near nil even without clickfraud being involved, or for ad nets having interest to actually go soft on clickfraud.
Whenever I worked in media agencies, I do see people running digital ads for major brands (coke, nike, li ning, microsoft level) being at least moderately competent in technicalities, yet I can't say that any of them ever approached to even partial understanding of what a total "Wild West" is the online ads industry today.
I'm deeply involved in digital advertising and I don't even understand what you're trying to say, so maybe you could rephrase? At the very least, the "common wisdom" number is suspect (a random lampshade). I've measured bot traffic as high as 98% from quality news sites like the OCRegister.com
I want to say that most online ads people don't get that "you can be losing 30% of your ad spending, but things can be dramatically worse and you will not know it no matter how hard you try"
1. It doesn't satisfactorily make the case that targeting the audience rather than the topic-related websites doesn't work or make sense. (I'd argue that a deeper problem is that most simple online ads just don't work, for most people. And otherwise, if you're actually susceptible to online advertising, then actually getting served ads tightly targeted to your interests does make sense.)
2. I'm not sure that the data used (in support) supports the author's case that people stick to a small number of their favourite websites; rather, it looks like it shows that popular websites are popular. (Hard to be certain without examining the market research questions though.)
3. It then takes a tangent to show that lots of ad exchanges are unreliable; this may indeed be true, but is totally unrelated to the original premise.
Judging from what kind of targeted advertising I get, pretty much any method would be better. Topic method would at least made sites I visit less annoying. I am totally wanting to investigate anti bed wetting method (or other kid related targeted ad) to buy when I am visiting sci-fi web or gaming web page page or ... get the idea.
Judging from experience if people I talked about it with causually, I am not alone nor special.
Absolutely! In the past year, I've been doing more computing on a tablet and I don't block ads on the tablet. I am logged in to a variety of sites and make zero effort to hide my activity.
I started paying attention to the ads about six months ago, because I'd manage to notice how poorly targeted they were when I did see them. They are terrible.
I think the best targeted ads have been from a company that sells barn doors. Really, they are in fact selling barn doors online. That's a very compelling ad for me. Except, you know, I already have doors for the barns. I am not actually in the market for new barn doors.
I don't actually need a bra, free for thirty days. I don't have breasts. The missus doesn't use my tablet and actually has her own network connection as I tend to saturate mine sharing Linux isos and stuff like that.
I don't need a used car. I have more than adequate automotive sources already. I'd buy a used car, but it would not be a Toyota that has just come off lease. Maybe try selling me a 900S Turbo from 1992?
I don't have any major medical problems, trying to sell me drugs is pretty silly. I don't need insurance, I'm already well insured. I'm not concerned about paying the least amount for insurance, I'm concerned with the best coverage and service. An ad for, "We are dirt cheep but just shoot you if you're involved in an accident insurance" is not very interesting.
They have vast amounts of information on me. Why not try to sell me a new plow? I'm kinda in the market for one. Why not something to do with hunting, fishing, gardening, or food preservation? Not one ad has has any of those things. They know I own a Kubota, why not advertise some new implements?
I don't get it... I'll buy stuff. I'm more than happy to buy stuff. I love buying stuff. I buy stuff I don't need - all the damned time. Yet, literally no ads have compelled me to click and make a purchase. I have clicked, I just haven't found anything worth buying. I've never bought anything from a placed Internet ad, except when I was searching specifically for that product.
>Ah, retargeting. Do a search once, be followed forever...
Yep, what I do normally first thing on monday morning is to do a google search for "drone" (not that I am interested in buying one, mind you, but they are actually nice little thingies).
This way - at least up to Wednesday - I see mostly ads for drones.
On Thursday I make a search for "led lamp", just like KGIII reported for barns doors, I have no actual need of any led lamp, but it is nice to have (mostly) "known content" ads.
> It doesn't satisfactorily make the case that targeting the audience rather than the topic-related websites doesn't work or make sense.
I've been saying this needs investigating for a long time. From my understanding of things like triggers, priming, threshold for action, etc -- you're probably doing yourself a disservice having out of context advertising.
When you advertise in context, you get constructive interference between the context and your message, leading to a more powerful effect -- your buyer was ready to hear what you wanted to sell; when you advertise out of context, you get destructive interference between the context and your message, leading to muddled or even negative effects -- advertising roast beef on a porn site is probably bad for all three parties! (No matter how much the person viewing porn likes roast beef.)
"Targeted" rather than topic based advertising ignores basic facets of human psychology (eg, that we're very context based animals) in order to pump up ad stock and sell more volume of a diluted product -- because all of the "targeting" is fundamentally a worse replacement for the signal shown by visiting a topical website. It's about inventory fluffing, not efficiency.
That said, the article didn't do the best job supporting that point.
Here's my view: advertising industry, being mostly about manipulating and scamming people, is even better at doing that to itself than to people outside. Between customers and the company that seeks them, there's so many ad-industry providers now that it's easier for them to manipulate tooling and metrics than to actually deliver in an efficient manner.
The ways I've personally seen this happen mostly boil down to marketing people with absolutely no understanding of statistics showing "metrics" to their customer, which "show" that they're indeed doing a great job. But since the customer has no fucking clue about statistics either (why should they, that's why they're hiring a marketing company, right?), they believe that - and they have no direct way to verify the effectiveness anyway. I.e. incompetent party selling bullshit to another incompetent party, but as long as both parties believe things are going in a good direction, money changes hands, and everyone is happy.
And that's just double incompetence. I suppose you can excuse people doing divination from whale charts. But how many similar things happen when the marketing provider party just straight exploits their clueless customers?
> But that's not really how people consume media. Most people don't spend time on thousands of websites.
I found it difficult to read past that bullet point. It's such an obviously stupid mischaracterization of what "the long tail" is that it makes the rest of the arguments suspect.
I am not familiar with the "long tail" book or the particular internet theory, but I used to work for a company which owned an actual windsurfing website. They only sold advertising to what they called "endemic" advertisers, which means they are of the industry that supports the niche; in this case windsurfing. They dealt directly with the advertisers. The reasoning was that "non-endemic" ads would sour their allegiance with the niche audience they served. I would be interested in some research on this theory.
It may be a reasonable theory. But there are lots of ancillary industries that help support the niche - boat manufacturers, plastics/cloth companies, clothing and misc gear companies that are native to windsurfing (such as brands like Revive, Vans, Sector 9, etc are to skateboarding), and dozens of other related brands. You may also be hurting your income if you are only doing direct buys/run-of-site buys, since you don't really know what the market value of placements on your site are, you only know what the few brands you consider "endemic" value your site for.
I could likely come up with a few other reasons given the time, but I think this makes the point decently.
EDIT: Also, remember the incentives of the many mainstream high-traffic sites who are pushing this narrative about advertising.
previously, companies couldn't focus on the long tail because there were many limitations. For example. say you want to sell sodas, there are only so many types you can fit on a truck / shelf, etc. Then came the internet, so the idea was you could chase the long tail and sell xyz soda that only .01% of the market would drink.
the part in the link thats important is that brands with lower market share aka 'niche' products, people also tend to buy less frequently.
I see this all the time dealing with people. someone will be like 'i love x, its the bset, i dont understand why people dont love x so much, people who love y aren't dedicated as i am'. (y being the mass liked thing). but when you crunch the numbers, almost always people who like y consume y more than the zealot x. even more damning, the majority of the time the x zealot actually consumes y more than x.
I honestly can't connect with the kind of people that ads (fully) work on.
The absolute /best/ case for an ad is that it might remind me that there's some consumable item that I buy every so often (food/etc) and that I either have some I can consume or that I'm getting low and might want to restock.
For example, an ad for a restaurant I already like might remind me of the positive prior experiences and encourage me to return sooner for more.
However, I'd probably go back there / buy more anyway without the ad. Is it really an /efficient/ use of their money? Couldn't they just make their products more attractive by cutting the costs (not spend on marketing)?
Other ads might be for products I don't already get/buy... those are probably most effective as 'suggested' results near the top of searches when I'm looking for a specific product or in a specific topic of inquiry that seems related to seeking a solution.
This is not new news. Suprised its getting up votes.
I would say most marketers are well aware of this. We try and measure down funnel. You learn who are the successful networks and who are not. Sure a percentage will be fraud but you should know your channel ROIs and be maximising that.
This article may as well be written that workers only work productly for 5 hours of thw day. Or 25% of food goes to waste.
There is always wadte. A good marketer will reduce this. And thwir claim about marketers not look at domains seems like hogwash to me. I and markwters around me have looked at this in ever company I've been at. Maybe Ive had a rare experience but I doubt this.
Being able to track what happen with your view is probably one of the big selling point with internet advertising. You can know precisely how effective your ad campaign is and optimize that. Sure maybe there's fraud but if you maximize your ROI, you will inherently minimize fraud.
I spend $5m a year on programmatic ads, so I think I can answer the author's questions.
> What made you think advertising on a few hundred thousand sites many any sense it the first place?
I'm intending to reach millions of people with my ads. Those millions of people visit a few hundred thousand sites. Why would I only buy ads on a few sites. Big brands buy tv ads and billboards on thousands of shows, whats the difference? Buying on many sites also allows me to reach a very niche audience that otherwise you could never reach (or it would be 10x as expensive).
> How much is being wasted on fraud protection that doesn't do the job?
This is a good question and I don't have an answer. I spend money on fraud/bot protection and can't always verify if it works. But as long as my ads are producing results and have a good ROI or the client is happy, I don't even need to know what the answer is.
> Why does every single publisher or ad tech company boast of working with three or four anti-fraud vendors at once?
Digital marketing as an industry moves super super fast. At least one of those four anti-fraud vendors will pivot in the next year, and another will focus on something niche like viewability. Having multiple vendors is necessary, and there isn't really a downside. The switching costs for me between two vendors is literally unticking one check box, and ticking another.
I'm not familair with the author, but it honestly doesn't seem like he understands advertising. Are you complaining about the use of third party data (but no mention of privacy?), that advertisers are lazy (personal attacks..okay. The whole industry is lazy?), that advertisers buy ads on and support small websites, or are you just feeding on the ever-popular disdain for advertising?
There are no doubt problems in the industry, but if you want to write about it you'll need to make a claim and support it with data. If you think 3rd party data doesn't work, or allowing ads on lots of sites doesn't work then claim that and prove it.
In theory, slide.com was going to manage its ad purchases using an arbitrage model, so at least in theory, it would be impossible in the long run for us to tolerate this (it would bankrupt us or we would stop purchasing ads from a fraudulent source). This means our risk would be based, at least somewhat, on the length of the impression periods since this would be the period during which an unknown ad vendor would be tested. However, from the point of view of evaluating the model, or adjusting parameters, the period between purchasing a user through an ad and, on average, recovering the investment, is when we are getting our investment back, so everything after that point in time is profit.
This article leaves me with several questions: once a website is revealed to be fraudulent, is there not a way for the advertisers to get their money back? And are none of the advertisers suing the people behind the fraudulent websites?
The article is poorly done. That being said, I don't disagree with the premise.
As I understand it, advertising is seen in terms of acquisition cost (and ROI more broadly). If ROI is a positive, the campaign is a success.
However, this binary view is incredibly limited, and thus leaves significant room for rent-seekers who add no real value to the process. These rent-seekers will leach away value until it is at the minimum acceptable value. If the (legitimate) advertising industry can cut out the fat, it stands to significantly improve results for its clients. Until those clients demand improvements, however, these costly changes will not be implemented and the industry will continue on.
49 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 97.4 ms ] threadNow, of course you could put advertising on your dynamic (image updating) credit card so as you pull it out at the grocery store it reminds to get more SnackyPoofs for your lovely little Cartman at home. Or perhaps we'll be putting advertising on the blockchain so that they will mine, and we can get transaction costs down!
You're not being serious.
Basically, there has been a long standing assumption that, netizens in general spend their time on a plethora of websites, and that instead of spending money on specific sites, one should spend money on audiences. In other words, advertise in accordance with a person's interests.
However, due to recent exploitation of this assumption by other fake sites, and fake bot-generated visitors, this assumption has met some strong evidence that would disprove it.
Could the advertisers simply get together and black list such advertising agencies that sell fake niche sites with fake bot-generated views? Or is that a naive view of things?
There is no evidence either way. Behavioral targeting works to some extent, e.g. retargeting. I visit Ford Fusion specs, later on Fox News a Ford Ad for a different truck appears.
Detecting fraudulent sites is not only counter-productive for platforms (AOL One is shockingly lenient to pump up their "reach" numbers), but sites as well. Sites will pay for inflated automated traffic to consume advertising budgets. The foxes are decided how to parse up the hens.
Online marketers are aware of fraud. The common wisdom is to assume ~30% of your budget went into fraud. Advertisers measure ROI, don't bother much to dig into which form/shape fraud takes place, the tech details, or how to identify or stop it. Because that's technically far from trivial. It's like a restaurant assuming 15% loss on fresh supplies. You factor that in and as long as you have a margin you're good to go.
Common wisdom does not account for that some cash cow keyword/adnet combination you can approach to 90% of traffic coming from bots, or conversions being near nil even without clickfraud being involved, or for ad nets having interest to actually go soft on clickfraud.
Whenever I worked in media agencies, I do see people running digital ads for major brands (coke, nike, li ning, microsoft level) being at least moderately competent in technicalities, yet I can't say that any of them ever approached to even partial understanding of what a total "Wild West" is the online ads industry today.
1. It doesn't satisfactorily make the case that targeting the audience rather than the topic-related websites doesn't work or make sense. (I'd argue that a deeper problem is that most simple online ads just don't work, for most people. And otherwise, if you're actually susceptible to online advertising, then actually getting served ads tightly targeted to your interests does make sense.)
2. I'm not sure that the data used (in support) supports the author's case that people stick to a small number of their favourite websites; rather, it looks like it shows that popular websites are popular. (Hard to be certain without examining the market research questions though.)
3. It then takes a tangent to show that lots of ad exchanges are unreliable; this may indeed be true, but is totally unrelated to the original premise.
Judging from experience if people I talked about it with causually, I am not alone nor special.
I started paying attention to the ads about six months ago, because I'd manage to notice how poorly targeted they were when I did see them. They are terrible.
I think the best targeted ads have been from a company that sells barn doors. Really, they are in fact selling barn doors online. That's a very compelling ad for me. Except, you know, I already have doors for the barns. I am not actually in the market for new barn doors.
I don't actually need a bra, free for thirty days. I don't have breasts. The missus doesn't use my tablet and actually has her own network connection as I tend to saturate mine sharing Linux isos and stuff like that.
I don't need a used car. I have more than adequate automotive sources already. I'd buy a used car, but it would not be a Toyota that has just come off lease. Maybe try selling me a 900S Turbo from 1992?
I don't have any major medical problems, trying to sell me drugs is pretty silly. I don't need insurance, I'm already well insured. I'm not concerned about paying the least amount for insurance, I'm concerned with the best coverage and service. An ad for, "We are dirt cheep but just shoot you if you're involved in an accident insurance" is not very interesting.
They have vast amounts of information on me. Why not try to sell me a new plow? I'm kinda in the market for one. Why not something to do with hunting, fishing, gardening, or food preservation? Not one ad has has any of those things. They know I own a Kubota, why not advertise some new implements?
I don't get it... I'll buy stuff. I'm more than happy to buy stuff. I love buying stuff. I buy stuff I don't need - all the damned time. Yet, literally no ads have compelled me to click and make a purchase. I have clicked, I just haven't found anything worth buying. I've never bought anything from a placed Internet ad, except when I was searching specifically for that product.
Something is broken.
Perfect summing up.
I never had bad targeted ad but I did update that page maybe 3 times in the past decade, that's maybe why.
Yep, what I do normally first thing on monday morning is to do a google search for "drone" (not that I am interested in buying one, mind you, but they are actually nice little thingies).
This way - at least up to Wednesday - I see mostly ads for drones.
On Thursday I make a search for "led lamp", just like KGIII reported for barns doors, I have no actual need of any led lamp, but it is nice to have (mostly) "known content" ads.
I've been saying this needs investigating for a long time. From my understanding of things like triggers, priming, threshold for action, etc -- you're probably doing yourself a disservice having out of context advertising.
When you advertise in context, you get constructive interference between the context and your message, leading to a more powerful effect -- your buyer was ready to hear what you wanted to sell; when you advertise out of context, you get destructive interference between the context and your message, leading to muddled or even negative effects -- advertising roast beef on a porn site is probably bad for all three parties! (No matter how much the person viewing porn likes roast beef.)
"Targeted" rather than topic based advertising ignores basic facets of human psychology (eg, that we're very context based animals) in order to pump up ad stock and sell more volume of a diluted product -- because all of the "targeting" is fundamentally a worse replacement for the signal shown by visiting a topical website. It's about inventory fluffing, not efficiency.
That said, the article didn't do the best job supporting that point.
The ways I've personally seen this happen mostly boil down to marketing people with absolutely no understanding of statistics showing "metrics" to their customer, which "show" that they're indeed doing a great job. But since the customer has no fucking clue about statistics either (why should they, that's why they're hiring a marketing company, right?), they believe that - and they have no direct way to verify the effectiveness anyway. I.e. incompetent party selling bullshit to another incompetent party, but as long as both parties believe things are going in a good direction, money changes hands, and everyone is happy.
And that's just double incompetence. I suppose you can excuse people doing divination from whale charts. But how many similar things happen when the marketing provider party just straight exploits their clueless customers?
Also some thoughts on this topic from the times of Optimizely debacle: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10873226.
I found it difficult to read past that bullet point. It's such an obviously stupid mischaracterization of what "the long tail" is that it makes the rest of the arguments suspect.
I could likely come up with a few other reasons given the time, but I think this makes the point decently.
EDIT: Also, remember the incentives of the many mainstream high-traffic sites who are pushing this narrative about advertising.
previously, companies couldn't focus on the long tail because there were many limitations. For example. say you want to sell sodas, there are only so many types you can fit on a truck / shelf, etc. Then came the internet, so the idea was you could chase the long tail and sell xyz soda that only .01% of the market would drink.
the problem is, people tend to do things that fit Dirichlet distributions, and a consequence of that is double jeapardy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_jeopardy_(marketing)
the part in the link thats important is that brands with lower market share aka 'niche' products, people also tend to buy less frequently.
I see this all the time dealing with people. someone will be like 'i love x, its the bset, i dont understand why people dont love x so much, people who love y aren't dedicated as i am'. (y being the mass liked thing). but when you crunch the numbers, almost always people who like y consume y more than the zealot x. even more damning, the majority of the time the x zealot actually consumes y more than x.
The absolute /best/ case for an ad is that it might remind me that there's some consumable item that I buy every so often (food/etc) and that I either have some I can consume or that I'm getting low and might want to restock.
For example, an ad for a restaurant I already like might remind me of the positive prior experiences and encourage me to return sooner for more.
However, I'd probably go back there / buy more anyway without the ad. Is it really an /efficient/ use of their money? Couldn't they just make their products more attractive by cutting the costs (not spend on marketing)?
Other ads might be for products I don't already get/buy... those are probably most effective as 'suggested' results near the top of searches when I'm looking for a specific product or in a specific topic of inquiry that seems related to seeking a solution.
I would say most marketers are well aware of this. We try and measure down funnel. You learn who are the successful networks and who are not. Sure a percentage will be fraud but you should know your channel ROIs and be maximising that.
This article may as well be written that workers only work productly for 5 hours of thw day. Or 25% of food goes to waste.
There is always wadte. A good marketer will reduce this. And thwir claim about marketers not look at domains seems like hogwash to me. I and markwters around me have looked at this in ever company I've been at. Maybe Ive had a rare experience but I doubt this.
Being able to track what happen with your view is probably one of the big selling point with internet advertising. You can know precisely how effective your ad campaign is and optimize that. Sure maybe there's fraud but if you maximize your ROI, you will inherently minimize fraud.
> What made you think advertising on a few hundred thousand sites many any sense it the first place?
I'm intending to reach millions of people with my ads. Those millions of people visit a few hundred thousand sites. Why would I only buy ads on a few sites. Big brands buy tv ads and billboards on thousands of shows, whats the difference? Buying on many sites also allows me to reach a very niche audience that otherwise you could never reach (or it would be 10x as expensive).
> How much is being wasted on fraud protection that doesn't do the job?
This is a good question and I don't have an answer. I spend money on fraud/bot protection and can't always verify if it works. But as long as my ads are producing results and have a good ROI or the client is happy, I don't even need to know what the answer is.
> Why does every single publisher or ad tech company boast of working with three or four anti-fraud vendors at once?
Digital marketing as an industry moves super super fast. At least one of those four anti-fraud vendors will pivot in the next year, and another will focus on something niche like viewability. Having multiple vendors is necessary, and there isn't really a downside. The switching costs for me between two vendors is literally unticking one check box, and ticking another.
I'm not familair with the author, but it honestly doesn't seem like he understands advertising. Are you complaining about the use of third party data (but no mention of privacy?), that advertisers are lazy (personal attacks..okay. The whole industry is lazy?), that advertisers buy ads on and support small websites, or are you just feeding on the ever-popular disdain for advertising?
There are no doubt problems in the industry, but if you want to write about it you'll need to make a claim and support it with data. If you think 3rd party data doesn't work, or allowing ads on lots of sites doesn't work then claim that and prove it.
As I understand it, advertising is seen in terms of acquisition cost (and ROI more broadly). If ROI is a positive, the campaign is a success.
However, this binary view is incredibly limited, and thus leaves significant room for rent-seekers who add no real value to the process. These rent-seekers will leach away value until it is at the minimum acceptable value. If the (legitimate) advertising industry can cut out the fat, it stands to significantly improve results for its clients. Until those clients demand improvements, however, these costly changes will not be implemented and the industry will continue on.
> thousands of websites.
The author of this has absolutely no idea how modern advertising works.
So, one part of the advertising industry lies to another part, and we are all supposed to be incensed by this?