Yeah our societies functioned for centuries without targeted ads, and we can do it again. It's only the past decade or two that we've had targeted ads. I think you could compare targeted ads to selling drugs: there's clearly a market for it and it will sustain many peoples' livelihoods, but as a society we've seen the ill effects of letting them run rampant and decided we're better off highly regulating them. It's time to reign in this massively detrimental business model. The businesses will adapt just fine.
We've had targeting for at least as long as we've had publications with different subscriber bases. Do you think there are the same ads in Wired magazine, Sports Illustrated, and the Wall Street Journal?
And even just traditional local newspapers targeted based on locale and readership. The New York Post is going to have different advertising than The New York Times.
When people say "targeted ads" these days, that's not what they're talking about. Perhaps it's a poor term. "Targeted ads" means ads that are targeted to a specific user, as opposed to a publication.
Yes, the tools are different and (very much in theory) more precisely targeted. But, at the end of the day, you're still mostly targeting populations based on their propensity to spend money with you. So you now target me with sports gear ads not just because I subscribe to Sports Illustrated but because I've bought sports gear and I'm in the Male 18-25 demographic.
I agree that attempts to target at an individual level feels different than just targeting a magazine's subscription base, but it's still targeting. So if someone wants to ban "targeting" they need to be more precise about what they're proposing to ban.
let me make a point about why i see one type of targeting as benign and the other (which i suppose could be called 'collaborative targeted marketing', because it involves sharing or aggregating data from multiple sources) as dangerous.
if i subscribe to a magazine about fishing and it includes an advertisement about some new fishing lure, well... it's obvious why the fishing magazine might think i'm into fishing.
but if i just bought a pack of diapers at walmart and then start seeing mailers for baby monitors from jc penny, that's when i start to get nervous.
my fear is of a world where i call up a health insurance provider, ask for a quote, and they say "according to facebook market research, your hobbies include BASE jumping based on the videos you watch on youtube. therefore your premium rate will be [$xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.00].".
no, i'm worried about health insurance providers drawing incomplete conclusions and making inaccurate assumptions about my hobbies based on my internet browsing habits alone.
in reality, at least in the US, they wouldn't tell you the details of how they arrived at that quote. i only spelled it out in my comment to make my point (my example was also an extreme and oversimplified one). in reality, i would call, they would give me a number that got spit out from a black box, and then i would need to either accept it or keep shopping around with other black boxes.
it's not just about health insurance, of course. it's a more general concern about how my internet browsing habits are affecting or will affect other arenas of my life.
i should never have to say to myself "hmm. this webpage offers legal content with information that interests me, but maybe i shouldn't view it because it might negatively affect my shadow profiles which are used to gatekeep my access to certain elements of my society.". i'm not saying we're there now, but as others have said, this type of data collection and sharing at this scale is fairly new, and it has the potential to go in that direction. (and has already made steps in that direction.)
All readers of these print publications are seeing the same ads. I think what most people mean with targeted advertising is when every reader sees a different ad based on extensive data collection.
Ads are the just visible forefront of surveillance capitalism. They're not the problem in themselves. In fact, nor is the 'targeted' bit. If I like a page about 'cars' on Facebook there's no reason whatsoever why Facebook should be stopped from showing me more adverts for cars. That makes sense. If anything, I've deliberately informed Facebook that I want more content about cars, and that includes adverts.
The problem is when Facebook goes further than the information I've directly given to them for the purpose of them targeting content and start using everything else I upload in order to target ads at me, like object recognition in photos I upload, or background conversations while I have the app open (allegedly). More than that though, the problem I have is when Facebook share the data the have about me with companies I didn't choose to share it with. That's what needs to be controlled.
To stop invasions of privacy it makes a lot more sense to ban invading people's privacy.
I'm a believe in "advertising leads to deadweight economic loss" theory but admittedly I've benefited greatly in my career working for ad tech companies...
Which are acceptable because people generally (in many places), are fine with discouraging, or certainly not promoting, the use of tobacco products (and some other product categories) even though they're legal. This is not true with the usage and purchase of most other legal products.
The irony is that, as with anti-smoking, massive ad campaigns would be necessary to convince the citizenry to favor a ban on ads. Time for "the ad to end all ads?"
It's very simple actually. No more sponsors, no more covering every square meter of public space with brands, no more commercials on TV, no more ads on websites. People will have to find other ways to make money, no one's entitled to a business model.
Alright, then ban displays of advertising if it has to reach eyes that didn't ask for it, the same way we ban pornography, gore or violent stuff on display.
So, does that mean everything has to be packaged in the same grey form factor as to not advertise their product? You walk around a city and see lots of Coca-Cola branding on the bottles people carry around. That's also advertising.
If you don't ban this, then whomever can pay the most at stores for product space would take over the market. Actually, that would likely happen even if you remove labels since people will be picking essentially at random.
Newspapers would need to be subscription-only or patronage-based.
Distributors become kingmakers. If the incumbent's product is in the grocery stores and the upstart can't advertise, there's no path to entry apart from winning over a distributor.
Niche products become nonviable. If you can't reach out to your customers, they have to reach out to you. That requires they know (a) they have the problem you solve, (b) you exist and (c) you solve the problem they have. That only happens organically for problems with scale.
>Newspapers would need to be subscription-only or patronage-based.
In my eyes, this would be a win. Journalism ideally should serve the readers. Aligning the business model (patronage/subscription-only) with the ideal seems like a good thing in the long run.
Journalism (including but not limited to print) is filled with essentially noise that wouldn't be economically viable if the publishers had to justify the value of their content to their audience.
It would be interesting to study the content creators with the highest patreon revenue and see what kind of content they're creating. Is it Outrage of the Day echo chamber content, how to DIY, storytelling, or something else. That might give us some insight into what a advertising free content creation world would look like.
It also means that people would have a lot less access to information about what's going on. I wouldn't subscribe to a single newspaper or magazine if it cost me money. I would guess that a lot of the people I know would do the same.
Knowing more about the world has been interesting and it probably has benefited my view of the world, but it hasn't given me anything tangible or anything I could point to. If anything it has occupied a lot of my time instead.
Seems to me just as likely we'd get a third option: Free journalism paid for by the super-rich and large corporations.
If there was no other free news, the costs to ExxonMobil or Boeing or Comcast to run a 100-person newsroom would pay for itself in favourable treatment from legislators.
>Newspapers would need to be subscription-only or patronage-based.
So be it.
>Distributors become kingmakers. If the incumbent's product is in the grocery stores and the upstart can't advertise, there's no path to entry apart from winning over a distributor.
>Niche products become nonviable. If you can't reach out to your customers, they have to reach out to you. That requires they know (a) they have the problem you solve, (b) you exist and (c) you solve the problem they have. That only happens organically for problems with scale.
Lots of speculation here, as if word of mouth didn't exist. Why is it so necessary that a brand tells me to buy things? Don't people have other ways to reach out to their audience that doesn't invade literally every public sphere, from billboards to websites?
> Niche products become nonviable. If you can't reach out to your customers, they have to reach out to you.
Umm, I think this is largely the reality for niche products right now, with advertising. I don't see ads for niche products, and I don't see producers of niche products paying for ads because a small campaign wouldn't reach the right audience and a large campaign would be too expensive for a niche product.
As concerned as I am for my privacy and control over my information I don't know that I would accept a straight theory of "Advertising is bad".
1. I appreciate, in principle, the notion that I may be informed of opportunities, products, services that might interest me. I'm more focused on my ability to control a) Information you gather on me and b) How when and what it is presented to me - rather than its existence.
2. As another poster pointed out, why are we focusing on advertising part (the outcome) rather than tracking and profiling (the cause)?
3. How do you define advertising? What definition do you propose that would without ambiguity allow indexes, listings, reviews, and sponsorships? In a world without "advertising", how do I find a product or service I require?
In other words, is this an even remotely in any parallel universe a thought-out, feasible suggestion?
>1. I appreciate, in principle, the notion that I may be informed of opportunities, products, services that might interest me. I'm more focused on my ability to control a) Information you gather on me and b) How when and what it is presented to me - rather than its existence.
You should research products that interest you, rather than being manipulating into choosing something that you otherwise might not.
>2. As another poster pointed out, why are we focusing on advertising part (the outcome) rather than tracking and profiling (the cause)?
Because I don't like any of those things: advertising, tracking, or profiling. Advertising in its own right is mind hacking and I am wholeheartedly against it.
>3. How do you define advertising? What definition do you propose that would without ambiguity allow indexes, listings, reviews, and sponsorships? In a world without "advertising", how do I find a product or service I require?
Word of mouth would be permissible (and within that, reviews), but it'd be illegal to pay for reviews. You could offer sponsorships, but only talk about them in your own domain (such as your company's blog). A key distiction I'd make is between "pull" advertising and "push" advertising, and would make the latter illegal. If the user "pulls" your ads, i.e. specifically indicates that they'd like to receive them, for example by signing up for your mailing list, then that'd be acceptable to me (opt-in, not opt-out, and harsh pentalties for buying or selling lists of emails).
There's a lot of nuance and you would find it difficult to find an unamgibuous definition, but that's also true of all other laws. The law is not a turing complete program, it's a system interpreted by humans.
>>You should research products that interest you, rather than being manipulating into choosing something that you otherwise might not.
I don't believe this is feasible:
1. For all people
2. In all circumstances
3. For all products - especially new ones, or radically changed/improved ones. I may simply be unaware something exists. And reviewers need to find out about it somehow. And to the point, how will ANYbody find out about ANY product if we "ban advertising"?
Believe it not, most people out there in the wide world are not fellow geeks who get bodily joy out of researching products that interest them :-)
That would only lead to more and more websites asking for payment info, so no thanks. I'd rather have ads that I can block or just tolerate than completely close off the web a part from some niche, personal websites. Ad tracking is nothing compared to having my real life identity linked to me everywhere on the web, and possibly get locked off most of it if they decide to ban me at some point.
"The good old days" where the internet was mostly ad free (a very short amount of time after becoming mainstream) was nothing like the internet we have now. It was small, amateur websites that were akin to blogs. That's cool, but to completely cripple the much more useful internet we have now because people don't like ads would be a disaster. It's baffling to me how some people would prefer to just ban/restrict everything they don't like. Just block the ads!
And here is the rabbit hole. What is the personal information?
That you personally visited this site? Or is that not personal enough because we don't know who actually visited this site? Only that a browser visited this site. And if that's the case, couldn't any profile built out of a browser browsing many sites fall into the same bucket?
Yeah I could see that the knowledge that you have visited the site before and showing an ad based on that is a form of targeted ad. Personal information doesn't have to be accurate or complete to fit that definition. I think any information that falls into the bucket of profiling (answering "who is watching this ad?"), despite whether an actual real person can be identified just with that information could still be considered personal information.
To put it in shorter terms, showing ads based on personal information should be banned, no matter if the information is identifying or not.
I think you've hit on the most important question. The definitions and compliance guidelines sound like thorny issues. Companies, individuals, and the government will all twist any reasonable, "gray" interpretations of the bill to their favor. Maybe a bill with definitions and protections similar to HIPAA, but less strict? However, the strict compliance and penalties of a bill like HIPAA might be one of the main reasons companies work so hard to comply with it.
Wouldn't this cover bartering? I could also see someone trying to twist this definition to cover gift cards and other mediums that are not strictly "money." Such a skewed interpretation is why I think drafting such a bill would be difficult.
The argument for massive Pigouvian taxes on advertising seems much clearer. Advertising imposes massive costs on society and the viewers. These costs aren't borne by the advertiser, so they should be captured through massive taxes and put to good use.
And many brands wouldn't feel much of an impact: what matters to Coke is that it spends more than Pepsi. If their $6B on advertising only buys 1/10th as many ads as it used to it still has the same impact because they still have twice as many ads as Pepsi does.
Idk about budget colas but Fentimans Curiosity Cola is pretty nice, and you don't need billboards on streets to get me to buy some. (I don't think I've ever seen an ad for Fentimans'.)
People have finite attention tokens to spend per day. Attention tokens are consumed when you make a conscious and deliberate decision to invest time in something, but they are also consumed when someone approaches you and talks to you.
Of course, people close to us usually are mindful of not consuming too many of our attention tokens. And some interruptions are useful to you, so they are welcome. Advertisements, on the other hand, consume the attention tokens of everyone who views them, and because they are optimizing for the revenue to the company, and not the benefit to the person, the expected benefit of each advertisement to the person is extremely low, if not downright negative.
Ok. So we ban advertising. Now you have to spend your “attention tokens” earning money to purchase the content you were previously getting for free. Is that better?
How about we let people make this choice themselves, just as we do now?
People aren't forced to do anything. They don't have to use content supported by ads, plenty of it isn't. And the biggest/best online ad networks offer controls, which nobody uses because vanishingly few people care.
Banning targeted advertising would be ridiculous. I'll say it: I love targeted ads. I'd much rather have usefully targeted ads than go back to the days of DoubleClick punch the monkey garbage, or "these beautiful twins" generic garbage. No targeted ads doesn't look like a blissful utopia of clean web pages, it looks like the existing web but all the ads are 10x more distracting and manipulative. We've been there, we know how it is. If you want a reminder just go to a news website in incognito mode and see what lowest common denominator dreck gets presented.
When I look around trying to find people supposedly harmed by targeted ads, I come up blank. I've never heard of this being a problem and I resent the constant efforts of "privacy justice warriors" to screw up the internet for everyone else. My internet experience is made far worse by invasive cookie banners than by ad cookies, if I had to pick which one to disappear with a wand there'd be no hesitation.
You're not listening. Or, apparently, thinking critically about the issue.
Two things:
First, they—we—are forced to see it.
That, in itself, is already a cost to us all. It taxes our brains, in ways that have been measured.
And yes, I know that banning the targeting isn't the same as banning the advertising, but we should definitely be doing that in more of our spaces, too.
Now, second:
People do not have the choice to opt out of the data collection. Oh, sure, you can check the box on website X that says "don't sell my data," you can choose not to do business with Facebook, but you can't actually avoid the tracking and actually participate in the modern world. (Heck, in some places, you'll be tracked and profiled just from what you do in the physical world, too, through cameras and such.)
The point isn't that people are (by and large) being actively harmed by the targeting in the ads. We're being harmed by the invasion of privacy required to implement the targeting, and we're being harmed by the inability to avoid seeing the ads.
If the cost of showing 1000 ads is $5 [0], each advert is at worst replaced with needing 0.5¢ for a micro-transaction. It doesn’t take much time to earn that: Even if someone only earns $5/hour, it is 3.6 seconds. There are people on this site earning 30 times as much, for whom the delay between a new pattern of light hitting their retina and their conscious mind having the subjective experience of seeing a thing is longer than the time it takes to earn the money to cover the cost of the advert.
> How about we let people make this choice themselves, just as we do now?
What choice? We have ad blockers, we don’t have “I reject your ad, but here is some money” plugins.
[0] Numbers from ancient memory, treat with caution.
Assuming these numbers are in the ballpark, it seems we could easily get rid of all ads.
I tell my browser my max default micro-payment for a website view. If the site asks for that or less, I view the page. If the site wants more I can approve a larger payment or not view the site. Market dynamics will set the price levels for individual sites over time. The browser keeps track of my payment levels for different sites.
I get to set whether I want to do micro-payments or look at ads. It should then be illegal for web sites to violate that global preference set in the browser.
Bandwidth needs drop, my web viewing isn't cluttered with crap, and info providers still get rewarded for their efforts.
This seems simple, so I'm guessing it must have been discussed before. What happened? Was micro-payment security the issue? Is it just too expensive in typical scenarios?
Google tried this twice with Google Contributor, Brave already exists. Outside of the privacy/hand-wringing about tech bubble, people don't actually want this.
Maybe you could drive a wedge around bandwidth, particularly on mobile where people pay for data, but despite all the articles written about this, most people are clearly not concerned enough about this to do anything.
That conception of attention as harm has been circulating as a meme since Zine days and it frankly isn't very sane as focus, much less if the obvioud corralaries are considered outside if justifying what they want in a context.
Dressing to show off would count as harm. Just looking unusual would also qualify and justify all sorts of bullying and maltreatment because it "robs attention".
Onviously they would plead that it is different but accepting their framework it is still "robbing attention".
It brings to mind the farce of Marxist Exploitation where buying wheat for a dollar and milling your flour is fine but buying $20 of flour, milling it and selling it for $40 is suddenly robbing the farmer.
Well, for one, I pay for my internet bandwidth. Somewhere around 80% of all my bandwidth is used up with either advertising or all the infrastructure associated with tracking everything I do in order to sell my eyeballs.
From my point of view it's a fairly straightforward costing: 0.8 times what I pay for the internet, plus maybe 0.2 times my hourly rate to account for the waiting time I have to donate out of my billable hours.
Enough competitors will eventually realise that the only way to sell any units at all is to advertise, and so will start to ramp up their own efforts.
Eventually the advertising cost is in all products, and there is no cheap generic off-brand.
This is already the case in cars, houses (you're paying the brokers whether directly or indirectly), jobs (the recruiter fees comes out of your salary and training budgets), etc., etc.
Getting rid of "advertising" in a sector is possibly the biggest economic disruptor you could ever apply to it.
On the flip-side, businesses that rely on ad revenue would disappear. That means most of the commonly used websites. No more Google, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Twitch, almost all news sites etc. This also means that everything goes back to essentially subscription only and this without a credit card don't get much access to stuff (like it used to be).
Paper press has been disappearing for quite a while even with subscription fees. They're often bankrolled by rich people or companies and likely aren't impartial.
I'm not sure TV is a good example either. The number of TV channels isn't that great. At the same time TV channels have a ridiculous amount of ads and they engage in all kinds of shady practices to sell you on something you don't want. Or in the cases of things like the BBC they extort the taxpayer.
Paper press and TV did really well for decades. Sure, once targeted advertising came around, everyone jumped onto it and non-targeted advertising started to fall. But if targeted advertising would be outlawed, most of that budget would just return to other advertising channels. Other advertising channels as in not-targeted ads in websites/youtube/etc. Classic paper and tv are gone for good IMO.
> TV channels have a ridiculous amount of ads and they engage in all kinds of shady practices to sell you on something you don't want
Not much worse than interwebs if you disable AdBlock&friends...
I think TV ads are much worse than ads on the internet. Imagine YouTube, where you have to watch an ad that's a fifth of the length of the video for every video.
10 minute video? 2 minutes of unskippable ads. Right now we tend to have skippable ads that are much shorter.
Personally, I found the difference greater and more lovely than I expected and support reducing advertising. Other cities are doing it.
The parties that would suffer most are shareholders of companies that advertise products most people probably wouldn't want without all the advertising -- Coca-Cola, Gatorade, McDonald's, fast fashion, etc, generally multinationals. I imagine ones that would benefit: local businesses, vegetable and fruit farmers, manufacturers of lasting goods instead of fast fashion.
I doubt that Coca-Cola, Gatorade, and McDonald's would he the ones on the losing side of this. Their products are already everywhere. It's hard not to see them in a city, especially Coca-Cola.
Online, without personalization it's the other way around
Local and niche businesses can only advertise on Facebook/Google Ads because their clientele can be defined and targeted.
Without targeting we'll be watching ads for Coca-Cola and McDonalds and other brands that have 'mass' appeal.
Why can't they target content instead of visitors? i.e. articles and videos about X instead of people that showed even minimal interest in X in the past month or so.
There's been a lot of work in this area over the last few years, clustering and tagging text and video. Facebook even has an open source library for it called Starspace.
But the point is that Facebook is showing you ads based on your surfing behaviour outside Facebook - not the content you view on Facebook.
If you use facebook purely for posting and viewing family baby photos, but view websites about tractors, you'll probably see ads on facebook from tractor related companies.
Starspace is used by FB to tag the sites that report that you've visited them to facebook. So they can target ads
I think the point is that FB could change to a contextual model. E.g. after seeing a post of a news article by Tractor Daily you would see an ad for a new John Deere.
You can assert that, but where is the evidence? Tracking exists today and I never see ads relevant to my large American city. I see the same gross out earwax scams as everyone in the world.
It's not a remotely controversial statement. If you take a minute to actually run a marketing campaign for your company you'll learn all sorts of things. Including how targeting works.
There are other options such as restricting the type and degree of targetting.
The 'big outdoor ads' thing is not related to targeted ads, it's not part of this discussion. I'm fine with banning all outdoor ads but not targetted ads. There we need regulation.
Here is what I know. I know if I open a newspaper, I see ads for businesses, both local and national. If I go to the newspaper’s website, I see ads for one weird trick, the same ads on every site and in every city, and essentially no meaningful local content.
Yes, things on Facebook are different, but Facebook is not a publisher, it’s a parasite, so who cares?
1) Banner ads on websites are often targeted via networks, often Google.
2) Those 'stupid ads' are often targeted, and they make money, sadly.
3) You're probably not accounting for the majority of ads you see. If you literally tracked/recorded every ad, you might see a different picture.
4) Many ads are not very well targeted, yes, and that's why you see irrelevance. Well-targeted ads are generally more relevant (sometimes not obvious) and this is 100% validated by returns to advertisers. This is not a joke.
5) Facebook and Google represent most of the ad market, so, the people that 'care' are basically everyone who wants to place an ad online.
1 and 2 are not a defense. That's a garbage ecosystem and we would all be happier without them.
3 is you're telling me not to believe my eyes. I'm sorry, there are some things that are so dumb you have to be very smart to trick yourself into believing them. You don't need a sophisticated statistical analysis to know what kind of advertisements you see where.
4 is circular reasoning. "Targeted ads are better than non-targeted, so if (per 1 and 2) I've already conceded that many targeted ads are garbage, I need to hypothesize (3) that the non-targeted ads are somehow worse even against the evidence of sense."
5: Google and Facebook are separate entities and need separate explanations. Facebook is a pure parasite. It does nothing for publishers except drive them traffic (which is in itself, a cost center, not a profit center). Publishers need to figure out how to convert traffic into profit. If we're talking about publishing, that requires the ads to be on their site, which means Google. But Google is screwing the publishers too because they can track and deliver eyeballs from anywhere.
It's just an obviously sick ecosystem. People have been doing advertising supported publishing since the 19th century, and it was fine until ten minutes ago, when suddenly tracking was possible. Coincidentally, ad supported publishing collapsed at the same time that tracking became possible. Is this really a coincidence? You've got to be pretty clever to convince yourself that it is…
1) I don't need to 'defend' the system. Targetting works.
1b) "That's a garbage ecosystem and we would all be happier without them."
This is demonstrably false, unfortunately.
The ads power Facebook, Google, much of Entertainment. Almost everywhere you see an ad - that place would disappear without that ad.
So a 'future without ads' is essentially a future without any of those things - and you and anyone else can stop using those things right now, and thereby avoid both the ads and the service.
People chose the crappy ads, with the service, instead of the alternative: nothing.
Granted, there could be more paywalls, but there wouldn't be enough 'pay' to keep the services alive.
2) Yes, I'm 100% telling you that I don't believe your self-assessment of the kinds of ads you see overall. I think most people have no idea of the true inventory they are witnesses, rather, they remember only the tiny fragment that sticks out.
'Your evidence of sense' - is telling you that 'ads are a waste' when 'evidence of a $100B economy' and 'science' is definitely telling you that ads are effective. Even untargeted, or crudely targetted.
3) I don't think it's circular reasoning to point out that many ads are not targeted. You're missing the underlying point - that not all ads land on target, irrespective of how sophisticated the targetting in.
That inefficiency is accounted for in the system.
FYI - as part of 'item #2' not only are you going to be unaware of how many and which ads you saw, you're also going to be completely unaware of their effect on your behavior in most cases.
BMW has been advertising to you since the moment you could recognize their logo, a decade before you could even consider buying a car. That programming 'adds up' to something, no pun intended.
5) Your view of Facebook as a 'parasite' is your own, it's not objective - they have a Billion people who like using it just fine. You're also confusing the collapse of print and the complete commoditization of information, with ads.
I'm going to assume that you've never placed an ad of any kind, and have no exposure to the industry. I'd encourage trying it, even by spending $50 on FB or Google perhaps trying to garner interest in your favorite Open Source Project. You'll learn a lot in the process.
The irony of your ire ... is that better-targeted ads are generally better for everyone - both consumer and advertiser. They are the least annoying and most informative. Though we don't like the invasion of our privacy, the 'targetting' part is really good.
You can't just wish away all of advertising before 2005. It wasn't perfect, but it was fine. Publishing has been collapsing since then and the reasons aren't confusing.
Yes, _as an advertiser_, having targeting is great. But as a mining company, dumping waste water in the river is great. Who cares? It matters what effect your actions have on the system as a whole.
Completely different tact here: I want you to think about people’s favorite ads. Many people have consciously chosen favorite ads—like Budweiser commercials or some of the Geico series or Flo from Progressive Insurance or the entire joke that the ads are better than the Super Bowl or “
MailKimp” from Serial or a million other things. People line their dorm rooms with vodka ads from magazines or Apple print ads. Many more things are ads but not consciously perceived as ads, like the Hollywood sign or Instagram influencers, or Rolex watches, or in your example the BMW logo.
What do people’s favorite ads all have in common? No one likes targeted ads. At best, people like when you do a search and get geographically relevant results. But that’s not even tracking, just IP location. Everyone loves ads but no one likes targeted ads.
I think you’re misunderstanding why people like soda and McDonald’s. You’re hardwired to love sugar, fat, and salt which soda and fast food provide in abundance. Advertising these products is about capturing dollars that might otherwise flow to competitors products.
This isn’t to say that ads can’t help drive overall consumption, but the lift isn’t huge and the demand has to already be there.
I think you are seeing it in a culture where soda were already pushed to people's eyeballs for decades. Perhaps removing ads now wouldn't bring a dramatic change in the next months or even years;
But for comparison, asian or european countries with more push on other drinks (e.g. tea, can coffee, sparkling water) have less of an inclination towards soda.
It might be a chicken and egg problem, but at least I think there are ways out of the situation.
> I think you are seeing it in a culture where soda were already pushed to people's eyeballs for decades.
That has nothing to do with your innate preference for sugars and calorie density. People liked sweet foods and dumped heaps of sugar into tea long before modern advertising existed.
> But for comparison, asian or european countries with more push on other drinks (e.g. tea, can coffee, sparkling water) have less of an inclination towards soda.
Soda is hugely popular in Asian and Europe. Out of the top 10 per-capita consumers of soda 4 are in Europe, including the Netherlands which has quite a few controls on ads[1].
As you point out people putting sugar in coffee or tea might be as old as tea or coffee in the western world. People even add sugar in their fruits when they feel they're no savory enough. I think though that it makes it all the more interesting that soda drinks succeeded in a market with a ton of other traditional alternatives.
In my eyes the very fact that all the other standard sugary drinks have been displaced by commercial soda in so many countries is a reflection of the power of advertising.
Interestingly from your link, in the last few years Chile has become the #1 soda drinking country...and of course:
Aside from the health argument, I think advertisement can have deep and long lasting effects on a society. For a completely different take, De Beers decades of campaign to push diamonds on wedding rings is another example of it.
The amusing irony is that the best way to elevate awareness about soda alternatives might be advertising. So by eliminating certain types of ads, the side effect might be to encourage people to stick with what they know, which in many parts of the world is sugary soda instead of other flavored fizzy water that either has no sugar or very little sugar in comparison.
I think the parties that would suffer most would be the companies that have specialized in providing and generating targeted advertising - ie. Google and Facebook, and the ad agencies which run ads on those platforms.
Regardless, I'm not sure recognizable megacorps would suffer much. A Big Mac is a known quantity, and everyone recognizes the Golden Arches, whether you're in Seattle or Shanghai. It's the local gastropub that would have a hard time promoting themselves to the tiny subset of the population that is 'vacationing foodies' without targeted advertising. At the same time, I don't see them advertising much - perhaps it's the middle of the road regional franchises that have the funds to employ ad agencies for that purpose.
> I think the parties that would suffer most would be the companies that have specialized in providing and generating targeted advertising
I don't think they would be hurt that much, they would still provide advertisement, just less. The small niche company is the one that will be hurt... they now will compete in every category which is going to be much more expensive than small niche categories.
If anything, it sound like remove targetting will make much more money for Google. The one paying higher CPM will increase the CPM for everyone instead of his niche.
> TThe parties that would suffer most are shareholders of companies that advertise products most people probably wouldn't want without all the advertising -- Coca-Cola, Gatorade, McDonald's, fast fashion, etc, generally multinationals.
The example you give are all global, they can pay advertising in movies, in generic website, everywhere. They won't be hurt, by removing targeted advertisment, or billboard.
The one that will be hurt are the one that most person probably want but wouldn't know without advertising. My SO is in the escape room industry, at least 80% of people that come through her door has never done one. It took a long time to take off, because there was no escape room closeby, so not only we had to tell we existed to people, but also tell them WHAT it was. You can't achieve that just by existing.
I think this is another example of wanting to ban a concrete outcome of problematic behavior. It's the tracking and targeting that should be illegal, in my opinion.
I've always found it weird that we don't explicitly recognize information about / profiles on people as property of the subject.
I am 100% ok with Google, Facebook etc. knowing that I live in Oxfordshire, UK; that I love cycling; that I play the church organ. That's who I am. If they want to target cycling, classical music, and local ads at me based on this information, that's great. I would happily log onto these sites and click checkboxes based on this (or do it via browser settings).
I am not ok with them building up a detailed personal profile of my anxieties, day-to-day worries and preoccupations. Nor with them selling my information to other sites to which I haven't explicitly volunteered the information.
I think the line drawn would be easy: they cannot collect the data themselves, they can only use what you fill in on a form they present. Then the line is basically whatever you feel comfortable telling them, knowing it will be used for advertising. The incentive would be the standard reason ad companies give for targeted ads: given there are going to be ads, people would generally prefer they be relevant.
This is fine on the surface, but still has the potential for problems. Eg., if I were Muslim, I might be quite happy to declare that I'm interested in Halal food and would like to see advertising relevant to my interests. Win/win, right?
Now, let's say I own an apartment block and want to advertise for tenants, but I don't want any of them dirty muslims in my building. I can target my advertising to exclude people whose interests include Halal food.
Or, let's say I'm the propaganda department of an adversarial nation state, and I want to stir up communal tension. All I have to do is find people with an interest in Halal food, and target them with ads exhorting them to join other Christians in the next Crusade against the Moors. Or whatever. This was actually a common technique in the 2016 election: identify voters who, via their social connections and profile interests, are likely on the fence about Clinton vs. Trump, and also are a bit homophobic -- then target them with "Queers for Hillary" advertisments.
It's shocking how easy it is to weaponize this stuff.
I don't know about the rest, but for incentive to opt-in, I could see it as a way to keep up to date on new products. I'm starting to get into woodworking, and I've voluntarily signed up for advertisement emails from some retailers because I want to know when something I need goes on sale, or when a new product comes out that would be useful. If I could pick which advertisements I'm targeted with, I'd be happy to turn off my adblocker, but since the current option is either block all ads or have pervasive tracking for targeted ads chosen by an ML algorithm, I choose no ads.
Right, but then like "accepting cookies" or ToS/EULAs they'll just make explicitly giving them this permission a requirement for using their application, and we're back to where we were before.
I don't mean you put in a form like 'collect my age', 'collect my occupation', etc. I mean there's a form which you can enter your age, occupation, etc. If it's made mandatory you can just lie.
Targeted advertising is not the problem. The problem is it motivates them to collect too much data about you. And once they have it they can misuse it or give it (voluntarily or not) to someone else. There already have been cases when Google reported an innocent man to the police so he was put in prison.
Ban the collection of data for targeted advertising. Instead the only data that targeted ads can use would be provided by the user voluntarily. Not collected. No checkbox for consent.
If user wants the advertiser (say Google) to know something - they need to enter that in on a form.
2. if the user thinks they are missing out on recommendations or personalized deals, they can visit a website, enter their personal details, and the website will respond with ads.
This is the direction we need to head in. ML/AI peeps dont wait for regulation. Push back on misguided attempts from mgmt and point them in different directions.
I have had experiences with execs running large video services for content producers/publishers who would openly say (and therefore influence underlings and the next gen) - we know there are people who are addicted to our platforms, they have nothing better to do etc so how do we get them to consume excess Ad inventory we are holding? Can you use AI to improve our identification and targeting of such groups?
My initial reaction to such kind of requests was to say thank you no and walk out. But over time I realized they just find someone else and stay happily in denial of responsibility. Its not enough to then call them out. The only thing that works is to point them in a different more constructive direction. Feel free to make wild claims about how profitable its going to be, if you are dealing with mindlessly ambitious douchebags who don't understand any other language.
Maybe it's just me, but I have this vague feeling that feeding total bullshit disinformation to management in an effort to redirect substantial amounts of energy and resources towards your direction of choice might not always work out well.
Unless management is genuinely mindless, it seems to me like it might work no more than once.
I wish I could say there are rosy outcomes when dealing with hard decisions. It's always a messy fight. How messy is a good signal to decision makers of how much support or resistance there is.
This is fine in theory, but in practice you'd visit some site with an opt out cookie that gives auto approval just by visiting said site, who would then sell that to one of the huge adco's, and nothing would change.
Adverts pollute our lives in many ways, it's past time we stopped them IMHO.
If you want voluntary targeted advertising, then read sites or sign up for newsletters that cover these topics. These sites can show you ads that are relevant for their audience, without having to track your activity.
Sites that are not niche specific (like newspapers) shouldn't try to microtarget each user. They lose control of the ads they show near their content, making them less relevant. I'm tired of reading news about the coronavirus crisis surrounded by Amazon's offers on some items I visited a month ago. I still think ads are better when they are somewhat related to the content you are reading, rather than to the user's past activity on other websites.
> I am not ok with them building up a detailed personal profile of my anxieties, day-to-day worries and preoccupations
Luckily no company cares about those things...enough to buy the information. Theres a dissonance between people knowing ad targeting is basically useless and them imagining it is super subtly effective. Ads arent effective at leveragong purchases. The data is conclusive. Yes the brands might appear in your head when faced with the monumentally unlikely choice of not knowing ANYTHING about various products in the category. Its far more likely you pull out a cell phone and check reviews or your family/friends recommend something or you will do a comparison of which has more shelf space or
you will read the labels. More lkkely all of these things, none of which is "I saw an ad on twitch". In 15 years of digital advertising, this idea that demographic data (one of the pillars like geolocation), does anything to influence the market. With the corporate magic of attribution* the smoke and mirrors continue. *sales to people who saw an ad causes the adtech dept to be given credit for part of the revenue, as if the ad did something. No science that isnt decades out of date, just dissonance.
I'd argue that targeted advertising is actually a benefit to consumers and businesses a like. Consumers get ads for things they might actually buy, businesses waste less advertising spend.
Consumers may also get ads for things they were going to buy anyway or have already bought.
The problem, as I see it, is not businesses advertising stuff to you as a consumer. More, an ad-industry based on claiming attribution for the stuff you did buy because you just happened to click on an ad at some point in time.
Consumers don’t magically get more money to spend so as long as everyone has access it’s equally effective at scale. The only real difference is it’s ability to shift where advertising dollars are spent.
But consumers could get better services and products, because they'll know that there's a choice to be had. I always go to the same place to have my hair cut, because it's the only one I know. Maybe there are better options for me -cheaper, closer, faster, better. But I don't know about them and I'll probably never know about them as I don't really care enough about it to go out of my way to look into it. If someone threw alternatives in my face then I might consider them.
The real difference is that only targeted ads pay so much better that they can sustain a wealth of free products.
That effectively puts advertising dollars into the pockets of consumers who get services for free that they otherwise would have to pay for.
The only companies that are going to be pissing away money on untargeted ads have multinational brands that barely need advertising in the first place.
A few years ago I created an online business for serious cyclists and runners. Targeted Facebook ads enabled me to find customers for a few pennies each - I don't think I could have found customers any other way (apart from the trying to get 'free' ads via blogs/news/viral tweets etc).
Targeted ads are the only way that small, new, local, or just poor companies can do advertising.
It's a bit scary seeing what sites show facebook you've been to:
https://www.facebook.com/off_facebook_activity/
But if this is the price to pay to see quality ads within FB then so be it.
What I think is wrong, is then for facebook (or other apps) to sell, or leak that data in enough detail to match to our identity where it can be used for other purposes.
You don’t need targeted advertising to achieve that. You don’t need FB, Google, and a thousand other lesser-known companies tracking every step you make in order to know that you might be interested in cycling. Instead you, as a small advertiser, would target the right context and would only show your ads in articles specifically-dedicated to cycling or whatever other niche you are after.
Sure, there are niche categories that would be hard to get. But for your two specific examples you could use those simple sets of criteria:
1. Target specific articles with advice for older runners in running publications.
2. Target Italian recipes in cooking websites only for users located in Denver.
You don’t need to do those things manually, it can be automated. Sure, it might not deliver the scale that FB and Google are promising, but to say that it’s impossible to do contextually is not accurate.
Use Google Search ads to capture all direct intent.
> What I think is wrong, is then for facebook (or other apps) to sell, or leak that data in enough detail to match to our identity where it can be used for other purposes.
That's what everyone thinks is wrong. FB (and Google, and LI, etc) already tell you they won't use your data for other than ad purposes and that they won't resell your data as PII. The problem is
a) policing it
b) in case of inadvertent disclosure, there's no remedy. privacy compromises are permanent.
To date, it's a tradeoff we (society) have been willing to take.
Small distinction, but I wouldn't ban targeted advertising, but profiling instead.
So a site could absolutely show you ads according to the content you view or create, and companies can go to a site and ask them to show an ad to certain users. But it would be banned to pass on any kind of usage data that is not explicitly destined as public (profile page data, posts), and it would be forbidden for third parties to create profiles on you.
I think tracking is also not bad per se, I still want to be able to identify recurring visiters to my site uniquely. It's the centralized advertising brokerage and profiling that should go away.
It's fairly easy to forbid, but very challenging to regulate. Yes, it would be better to do it properly, rather than ban altogether, however chances of that succeeding are not great. For the end user it's not worth the effort and resources (and that's who would end up paying for any introduced processes around this).
I'm a suspect because I worked in digital media in a media agency some time ago, and let me tell you that this is quite a broad request.
Why? Let's start by asking: what is targeted advertising?
Is it based on interests? Behavior? Demographic? Psychographic? Contextual? Placement? Geolocation? Search queries? The list goes on.
Even if they want to narrow it down to collected data from users, this still has a lot of broad aspects to it.
What about what Kantar and GFK, and many other market research companies do, where they track people who consent to be tracked and share their opinions and behavior, to generate statistical inferences? Because that's one of the ways you target on TV for example.
So, I understand where they are coming from, but this is such a broad request that's naive.
A company that sells vegan supplements that places advertising in the POS (Point of Sale) is targeted advertising - why should we ban something that has the consent of everyone involved?
Or the solution is to randomize ad placement? The amount of wastage and the play field would destroy anyone who tried to compete with companies who could afford mass media platforms with budgets in the orders of millions+.
To get information to those that are interested in it. While some dislike any kind of advertisment, many (me included) don't mind having ads, as long as they're not too intrusive and actually useful.
There are other ways that users can fulfill their information needs which don't require targeted advertising.
You mention you don't mind ads; would you also prefer to be subject to targeted advertising rather than to have software running on your own device which displays equally-relevant reference material without sharing your personal data?
But, you can't have targeted ads without some database out there tracking everything you do. A database that is ostensibly used to get information to you that you might find interesting, but in reality has been used for much worse, according to the article: proliferation of hateful and false content on social media & political manipulation, among others. This data is also an valuable target for ID thieves.
The ads themselves aren't the problem here, nor is it really what's being discussed.
You had targeted advertising before the internet, it's simply less targeted and less granular, with more wastage.
A quick example: if you wanted to reach health care works, or more precisely doctors, you'd advertising on magazines for health care professionals. Most of which were subscribed (name, birthday, profession, address, etc) - so you had already some data for some targeting.
> in reality has been used for much worse, according to the article: proliferation of hateful and false content on social media & political manipulation, among others.
This is where advertising is getting mixed with propaganda - those are very different things and the only cross section is that they are messages that use text, audio, images, video - in others words - they are distributed with audiovisual media. They have different legal obligations (depending on the country).
What is lacking is regulation and fines for abuse of propaganda. The problem is that the sheer volume of content being produced is hard to regulate.
Is this not what a search engine is for? When I want a good or service I'm interested in buying, I can search it, do my research, and/or find a place to buy it. I only want advertising when I explicitly opt into it. Otherwise, I never want to see an ad.
Do not forget that you represent a small minority of tech literate people.
There's plenty of people that don't know how to properly use a search engine, hell there's plenty who don't know what a search engine is.
Plus, search engines have a role in the consumer decision journey, but don't fulfill all the roles.
Just to add up, with SEM (paid ads + SEO) search results have a big chance of being biased nowadays, and you should always take that into consideration.
Targeted advertising allows you to deliver specific messages to specific audiences, and by specific audiences I mean a narrow cluster of people that has the potential to have an interest in your brand.
This allows you - the brand - to reduce wastage. And in theory, it should reduce Ad Fatigue in the audience.
Wastage because every time you miss a potential audience member, or you reach a wrong person, you paid to deliver a message that won't be heard/read/seen. If you think about it, this adds up - even with targeted advertising.
Ad Fatigue comes from you being shown advertising you have no interested in (why are you seeing bunions cream if you don't have bunions), or you see too many times the same ad you start to notice it for the wrong reasons (imagine you see a re targeted ad from amazon for a product you bought 3 weeks ago, and for 3 weeks you're seeing daily the same product being recommended to you).
In theory, everyone should win with targeted ads, in reality, it's being abused and it's saturating consumers. Not only abused by brands, but also by a consumer behavior/culture that aims to spend more.
You can argue that one fuels the other, well, I'm not so sure about that, because cultural shifts are too big to be the agenda of anyone. In my opinion, they feed on each other.
Ideally, advertising is a way for the seller (or teacher/advocate/government) to pay some of the buyer’s/researcher’s search costs.
Targeted advertising lets the advertiser pay for part of more expensive searches.
One of the problems with Google and Facebook is that they are businesses whose core product should be driving search costs very low, so they compromise their product so that their advertising remains valuable to close the gap.
I think it’s well defined in the article - the author means behavioural advertising that has to do with targeting any information specific to the user (whether we consider that personal or not).
The proposed alternative is contextual advertising which puts the targeting emphasis entirely on the context in which the ad is shown, not on the person seeing the ad. The idea is that if it is executed correctly, contextual targeting will lead to the same person anyway, just without sacrificing his or her privacy.
I understand completely your argument, and the article argument - I've used plenty of contextual advertising, and it's better than what we call ROS (Run Of Site), but it's worst than targeting based on interests.
But let me give you a inside view: there's been a war from major media groups to try to take down Facebook and Google (let's see what they come up with for Amazon).
This solution for them is the best solution for news websites, that since 2013 have seen their advertising budgets being siphoned to Google and Facebook.
All because they cannot compete with their level of data granularity - and trust me they tried! Hell some tried to build their own data systems to have more refined targeting.
I can even tell you one of the solutions on the table was to force Google and Facebook to share their data with media groups.
So this "white knight in shinning armor" article, despite showing valid arguments, is most definitely biased, because it's in their best interest that contextual advertising prevails and interest/behavioral falls. For years their agenda is to get back media investment from the big boys.
So bare this in mind when you read these articles.
Sure, it is in the author’s employer best interest for the industry to switch to contextual advertising. But it is also in the best interest of the end user. So why is that a bad thing?
I also don’t believe that behavioural advertising is better by definition. Even the article mentions some research to prove the contrary. I’ve seen it from first-hand experience as well. Which, of course, is anecdotal. But what is not is the fact that the world’s largest and most profitable advertising product, Google Search, is completely reliant on contextual rather than behavioural targeting.
The fact that publishers so far have not been able to do something about FB’s and Google’s duopoly doesn’t necessarily mean they will never be able to. Or at least I certainly hope that it doesn’t.
>But it is also in the best interest of the end user. So why is that a bad thing?
Like said, the bad thing would be more wastage and potentially less relevant advertising.
The problem with advertising is that a campaign success is a multi variable equation that fiddles with human attention/retention of attention/memory and many other factors that makes us humans and regulate our perception.
For example, I don't consider Google Search contextual base. I put it in a category of it's own, because you're tapping into people declaring their intent and interest, and reducing it to context is dangerous - because it's more than that.
I used to say to clients: Facebook knows what you like, Google knows what you're looking for, and Amazon knows what you're buying.
Google does have Contextual Segmentation but it's used mainly for display advertising (GDN - Google Display Network). There was a time you could even select/exclude domains, but I don't know if that's still available.
Also, Facebook tried to leverage their data for display advertising outside of Facebook and they ended up closing Audience Network... so even interest based targeting seems to work within a context itself.
>The fact that publishers so far have not been able to do something about FB’s and Google’s duopoly doesn’t necessarily mean they will never be able to.
This would be a long conversation, but in a brief way, I think they tried to compete by placing themselves next to Facebook and Google, while they should have set themselves apart and leverage their strengths - name content quality wise.
Thank you for the thoughtful comment. I do actually agree with many of your points. And you are right, this could be a much longer discussion. Let me just add this - your last sentence doesn’t have to be in past tense. I believe publishers still can set themselves apart and leverage their strengths. The next couple of years will show if GDPR and the CCPA can actually help to achieve that.
Author of the story here. Just made an account so I could chime in to say how great it is to see such a substantive discussion. On the point about being biased in favor of the media: Yes, absolutely, I believe a democratic society requires a thriving independent press to function, and that public policy should try to help that happen.
> A company that sells vegan supplements that places advertising in the POS (Point of Sale) is targeted advertising - why should we ban something that has the consent of everyone involved?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but is the consumer also consenting?
Unless they have no other choice to buy from, they enter the shop by their own terms and can leave any time.
Unless you're trying to say that the consumer didn't consent to have messages being displayed around him, and this is just once again too broad... the solution would be any media (or for the sake of simplicity, any surface) would need to be plain white with no text. Walls, shelves, windows, clothing of staff, even products on display.
I think when entering a store, it is reasonable to assume that there will be messages about the products carried in the store. I think it is much less reasonable to assume that there will be messages about products not carried in the store that "may" be relevant to customers there.
Seems like quite a leap to me to suggest that consent to see the later type of message is implied by mere presence in the store; maybe this is exactly the point you are making, but I think by extension any advertisement seen anywhere is "consented" to by nature of being in the place (physical or virtual) where the advertisement is?
On a side note, this seems more like "contextual advertising" rather than "targeted advertising"?
Usually POS Advertising is indeed for products within the store, you just give an incentive to have your product being supported with visual display. Sometimes on those displays you have product lines ups, or products soon to be released - so those don't necessarily have to be available in store. I'm sure you've seen "Coming Soon"/"Pre-Order" signs.
Advertising being displayed only needs the consentment of the owners of the media, and to follow all the legal terms of the country where it's being displayed. Because it's a message, and you only read/acknowledge a message if you want to, that's why consent on the on the part of the consumer for display doesn't seem right.
>his seems more like "contextual advertising" rather than "targeted advertising"
This is a matter of semantics, because for me contextual placement is a form of targeting. You target by context, and that was the premise of my first reply - they're quite broad terms to be generalized.
There is a very important point made in this article that is unfortunately lost in-between all the other arguments:
“Meanwhile, the ability to track users wherever they go tends to shift ad revenue from higher quality sites to less reputable ones. “The way the adtech system works is, it follows the reader from Wired.com all the way down to the cheapest possible place, the basement bottom-feeders on the internet, and will serve you the ads there.””
Many people don’t like seeing ads. But they do like receiving the free content that those ads pay for. And would find it far more annoying if all the content was locked behind paywalls. Whether we like it or not, digital advertising is a powerful equaliser that gave free access to vast amounts of information to anyone from any country and from any income bracket.
But the shift towards audience targeting has stripped high-quality content creators of their share of the value they create and has instead spread it out to countless click-baity websites and apps designed entirely to profit of off targeted advertising.
So diminishing our reliance on targeted advertising is not only great for the user, it would be truly game-changing for high-quality content providers as well. For some reason, this mutually beneficial outcome is often forgotten and I’m glad that Wired pointed it out.
The claim about quality sounds incredibly dubious and really gives away the game is about felony interference with a business model. "High quality" is downright narcissistic witg delusions of grandeur.
High production value can and is absolute shit. Gell-Mann amnesia effect says hi. The problem isn't the competition but that the old guard sucked at their job.
I am no fan of targetted advertising but I despise attempts to control the internet for the sake of dinosaur propagandists. They need to just die already and stop crapping out bullshit.
I hate obtrusive ads but targeted ads? They are terrible at targeting me.
For every story about Target knowing a woman was pregnant before her family did there are a ton of stories about irrelevant ads.
Lost of people have talked about getting ads for things they have already bought.
Last fall Facebook suggested I join a group for liberal Asian Christians. I am not Asian or Christian.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 222 ms ] threadAnd even just traditional local newspapers targeted based on locale and readership. The New York Post is going to have different advertising than The New York Times.
I agree that attempts to target at an individual level feels different than just targeting a magazine's subscription base, but it's still targeting. So if someone wants to ban "targeting" they need to be more precise about what they're proposing to ban.
if i subscribe to a magazine about fishing and it includes an advertisement about some new fishing lure, well... it's obvious why the fishing magazine might think i'm into fishing.
but if i just bought a pack of diapers at walmart and then start seeing mailers for baby monitors from jc penny, that's when i start to get nervous.
my fear is of a world where i call up a health insurance provider, ask for a quote, and they say "according to facebook market research, your hobbies include BASE jumping based on the videos you watch on youtube. therefore your premium rate will be [$xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.00].".
If so, are you really just upset about the idea of not being able to easily lie to them?
If not, why do you think other policyholders should pay more to cover your risky hobbies?
in reality, at least in the US, they wouldn't tell you the details of how they arrived at that quote. i only spelled it out in my comment to make my point (my example was also an extreme and oversimplified one). in reality, i would call, they would give me a number that got spit out from a black box, and then i would need to either accept it or keep shopping around with other black boxes.
it's not just about health insurance, of course. it's a more general concern about how my internet browsing habits are affecting or will affect other arenas of my life.
i should never have to say to myself "hmm. this webpage offers legal content with information that interests me, but maybe i shouldn't view it because it might negatively affect my shadow profiles which are used to gatekeep my access to certain elements of my society.". i'm not saying we're there now, but as others have said, this type of data collection and sharing at this scale is fairly new, and it has the potential to go in that direction. (and has already made steps in that direction.)
The fact that we functioned without something doesn't imply that we're better off without it.
And literally billions of people do function without targeted advertising, right now.
But we can function without lots of things. The fact that we can function without something isn't a strong argument in favour of getting rid of it.
I don't even like advertising. I'm not trying to support advertising. I'm just addressing the logical fallacy.
Ads are the just visible forefront of surveillance capitalism. They're not the problem in themselves. In fact, nor is the 'targeted' bit. If I like a page about 'cars' on Facebook there's no reason whatsoever why Facebook should be stopped from showing me more adverts for cars. That makes sense. If anything, I've deliberately informed Facebook that I want more content about cars, and that includes adverts.
The problem is when Facebook goes further than the information I've directly given to them for the purpose of them targeting content and start using everything else I upload in order to target ads at me, like object recognition in photos I upload, or background conversations while I have the app open (allegedly). More than that though, the problem I have is when Facebook share the data the have about me with companies I didn't choose to share it with. That's what needs to be controlled.
To stop invasions of privacy it makes a lot more sense to ban invading people's privacy.
If you don't ban this, then whomever can pay the most at stores for product space would take over the market. Actually, that would likely happen even if you remove labels since people will be picking essentially at random.
Newspapers would need to be subscription-only or patronage-based.
Distributors become kingmakers. If the incumbent's product is in the grocery stores and the upstart can't advertise, there's no path to entry apart from winning over a distributor.
Niche products become nonviable. If you can't reach out to your customers, they have to reach out to you. That requires they know (a) they have the problem you solve, (b) you exist and (c) you solve the problem they have. That only happens organically for problems with scale.
In my eyes, this would be a win. Journalism ideally should serve the readers. Aligning the business model (patronage/subscription-only) with the ideal seems like a good thing in the long run.
Journalism (including but not limited to print) is filled with essentially noise that wouldn't be economically viable if the publishers had to justify the value of their content to their audience.
Knowing more about the world has been interesting and it probably has benefited my view of the world, but it hasn't given me anything tangible or anything I could point to. If anything it has occupied a lot of my time instead.
If there was no other free news, the costs to ExxonMobil or Boeing or Comcast to run a 100-person newsroom would pay for itself in favourable treatment from legislators.
So be it.
>Distributors become kingmakers. If the incumbent's product is in the grocery stores and the upstart can't advertise, there's no path to entry apart from winning over a distributor.
>Niche products become nonviable. If you can't reach out to your customers, they have to reach out to you. That requires they know (a) they have the problem you solve, (b) you exist and (c) you solve the problem they have. That only happens organically for problems with scale.
Lots of speculation here, as if word of mouth didn't exist. Why is it so necessary that a brand tells me to buy things? Don't people have other ways to reach out to their audience that doesn't invade literally every public sphere, from billboards to websites?
Umm, I think this is largely the reality for niche products right now, with advertising. I don't see ads for niche products, and I don't see producers of niche products paying for ads because a small campaign wouldn't reach the right audience and a large campaign would be too expensive for a niche product.
1. I appreciate, in principle, the notion that I may be informed of opportunities, products, services that might interest me. I'm more focused on my ability to control a) Information you gather on me and b) How when and what it is presented to me - rather than its existence.
2. As another poster pointed out, why are we focusing on advertising part (the outcome) rather than tracking and profiling (the cause)?
3. How do you define advertising? What definition do you propose that would without ambiguity allow indexes, listings, reviews, and sponsorships? In a world without "advertising", how do I find a product or service I require?
In other words, is this an even remotely in any parallel universe a thought-out, feasible suggestion?
You should research products that interest you, rather than being manipulating into choosing something that you otherwise might not.
>2. As another poster pointed out, why are we focusing on advertising part (the outcome) rather than tracking and profiling (the cause)?
Because I don't like any of those things: advertising, tracking, or profiling. Advertising in its own right is mind hacking and I am wholeheartedly against it.
>3. How do you define advertising? What definition do you propose that would without ambiguity allow indexes, listings, reviews, and sponsorships? In a world without "advertising", how do I find a product or service I require?
Word of mouth would be permissible (and within that, reviews), but it'd be illegal to pay for reviews. You could offer sponsorships, but only talk about them in your own domain (such as your company's blog). A key distiction I'd make is between "pull" advertising and "push" advertising, and would make the latter illegal. If the user "pulls" your ads, i.e. specifically indicates that they'd like to receive them, for example by signing up for your mailing list, then that'd be acceptable to me (opt-in, not opt-out, and harsh pentalties for buying or selling lists of emails).
There's a lot of nuance and you would find it difficult to find an unamgibuous definition, but that's also true of all other laws. The law is not a turing complete program, it's a system interpreted by humans.
I don't believe this is feasible:
1. For all people
2. In all circumstances
3. For all products - especially new ones, or radically changed/improved ones. I may simply be unaware something exists. And reviewers need to find out about it somehow. And to the point, how will ANYbody find out about ANY product if we "ban advertising"?
Believe it not, most people out there in the wide world are not fellow geeks who get bodily joy out of researching products that interest them :-)
"The good old days" where the internet was mostly ad free (a very short amount of time after becoming mainstream) was nothing like the internet we have now. It was small, amateur websites that were akin to blogs. That's cool, but to completely cripple the much more useful internet we have now because people don't like ads would be a disaster. It's baffling to me how some people would prefer to just ban/restrict everything they don't like. Just block the ads!
That you personally visited this site? Or is that not personal enough because we don't know who actually visited this site? Only that a browser visited this site. And if that's the case, couldn't any profile built out of a browser browsing many sites fall into the same bucket?
What is personal information?
To put it in shorter terms, showing ads based on personal information should be banned, no matter if the information is identifying or not.
And many brands wouldn't feel much of an impact: what matters to Coke is that it spends more than Pepsi. If their $6B on advertising only buys 1/10th as many ads as it used to it still has the same impact because they still have twice as many ads as Pepsi does.
Of course, people close to us usually are mindful of not consuming too many of our attention tokens. And some interruptions are useful to you, so they are welcome. Advertisements, on the other hand, consume the attention tokens of everyone who views them, and because they are optimizing for the revenue to the company, and not the benefit to the person, the expected benefit of each advertisement to the person is extremely low, if not downright negative.
How about we let people make this choice themselves, just as we do now?
Removing the advertising would, in fact, give them back choice they currently lack.
Banning targeted advertising would be ridiculous. I'll say it: I love targeted ads. I'd much rather have usefully targeted ads than go back to the days of DoubleClick punch the monkey garbage, or "these beautiful twins" generic garbage. No targeted ads doesn't look like a blissful utopia of clean web pages, it looks like the existing web but all the ads are 10x more distracting and manipulative. We've been there, we know how it is. If you want a reminder just go to a news website in incognito mode and see what lowest common denominator dreck gets presented.
When I look around trying to find people supposedly harmed by targeted ads, I come up blank. I've never heard of this being a problem and I resent the constant efforts of "privacy justice warriors" to screw up the internet for everyone else. My internet experience is made far worse by invasive cookie banners than by ad cookies, if I had to pick which one to disappear with a wand there'd be no hesitation.
You're not listening. Or, apparently, thinking critically about the issue.
Two things:
First, they—we—are forced to see it.
That, in itself, is already a cost to us all. It taxes our brains, in ways that have been measured.
And yes, I know that banning the targeting isn't the same as banning the advertising, but we should definitely be doing that in more of our spaces, too.
Now, second:
People do not have the choice to opt out of the data collection. Oh, sure, you can check the box on website X that says "don't sell my data," you can choose not to do business with Facebook, but you can't actually avoid the tracking and actually participate in the modern world. (Heck, in some places, you'll be tracked and profiled just from what you do in the physical world, too, through cameras and such.)
The point isn't that people are (by and large) being actively harmed by the targeting in the ads. We're being harmed by the invasion of privacy required to implement the targeting, and we're being harmed by the inability to avoid seeing the ads.
“Better” by what metric?
If the cost of showing 1000 ads is $5 [0], each advert is at worst replaced with needing 0.5¢ for a micro-transaction. It doesn’t take much time to earn that: Even if someone only earns $5/hour, it is 3.6 seconds. There are people on this site earning 30 times as much, for whom the delay between a new pattern of light hitting their retina and their conscious mind having the subjective experience of seeing a thing is longer than the time it takes to earn the money to cover the cost of the advert.
> How about we let people make this choice themselves, just as we do now?
What choice? We have ad blockers, we don’t have “I reject your ad, but here is some money” plugins.
[0] Numbers from ancient memory, treat with caution.
I tell my browser my max default micro-payment for a website view. If the site asks for that or less, I view the page. If the site wants more I can approve a larger payment or not view the site. Market dynamics will set the price levels for individual sites over time. The browser keeps track of my payment levels for different sites.
I get to set whether I want to do micro-payments or look at ads. It should then be illegal for web sites to violate that global preference set in the browser.
Bandwidth needs drop, my web viewing isn't cluttered with crap, and info providers still get rewarded for their efforts.
This seems simple, so I'm guessing it must have been discussed before. What happened? Was micro-payment security the issue? Is it just too expensive in typical scenarios?
Maybe you could drive a wedge around bandwidth, particularly on mobile where people pay for data, but despite all the articles written about this, most people are clearly not concerned enough about this to do anything.
Isn't that what Brave does?
Dressing to show off would count as harm. Just looking unusual would also qualify and justify all sorts of bullying and maltreatment because it "robs attention".
Onviously they would plead that it is different but accepting their framework it is still "robbing attention".
It brings to mind the farce of Marxist Exploitation where buying wheat for a dollar and milling your flour is fine but buying $20 of flour, milling it and selling it for $40 is suddenly robbing the farmer.
From my point of view it's a fairly straightforward costing: 0.8 times what I pay for the internet, plus maybe 0.2 times my hourly rate to account for the waiting time I have to donate out of my billable hours.
Find a generic no-brand ibuprofen. Check the price.
Find a branded ibuprofen that is advertised on TV. In the UK, Nurofen is popular. Check the price.
The difference is advertising.
Same goes for detergent, breakfast cereal, AA batteries, etc., etc.
Eventually the advertising cost is in all products, and there is no cheap generic off-brand.
This is already the case in cars, houses (you're paying the brokers whether directly or indirectly), jobs (the recruiter fees comes out of your salary and training budgets), etc., etc.
Getting rid of "advertising" in a sector is possibly the biggest economic disruptor you could ever apply to it.
I'm not sure TV is a good example either. The number of TV channels isn't that great. At the same time TV channels have a ridiculous amount of ads and they engage in all kinds of shady practices to sell you on something you don't want. Or in the cases of things like the BBC they extort the taxpayer.
> TV channels have a ridiculous amount of ads and they engage in all kinds of shady practices to sell you on something you don't want
Not much worse than interwebs if you disable AdBlock&friends...
10 minute video? 2 minutes of unskippable ads. Right now we tend to have skippable ads that are much shorter.
Personally, I found the difference greater and more lovely than I expected and support reducing advertising. Other cities are doing it.
The parties that would suffer most are shareholders of companies that advertise products most people probably wouldn't want without all the advertising -- Coca-Cola, Gatorade, McDonald's, fast fashion, etc, generally multinationals. I imagine ones that would benefit: local businesses, vegetable and fruit farmers, manufacturers of lasting goods instead of fast fashion.
Local and niche businesses can only advertise on Facebook/Google Ads because their clientele can be defined and targeted. Without targeting we'll be watching ads for Coca-Cola and McDonalds and other brands that have 'mass' appeal.
If you use facebook purely for posting and viewing family baby photos, but view websites about tractors, you'll probably see ads on facebook from tractor related companies.
Starspace is used by FB to tag the sites that report that you've visited them to facebook. So they can target ads
It's not a remotely controversial statement. If you take a minute to actually run a marketing campaign for your company you'll learn all sorts of things. Including how targeting works.
There are other options such as restricting the type and degree of targetting.
The 'big outdoor ads' thing is not related to targeted ads, it's not part of this discussion. I'm fine with banning all outdoor ads but not targetted ads. There we need regulation.
Yes, things on Facebook are different, but Facebook is not a publisher, it’s a parasite, so who cares?
2) Those 'stupid ads' are often targeted, and they make money, sadly.
3) You're probably not accounting for the majority of ads you see. If you literally tracked/recorded every ad, you might see a different picture.
4) Many ads are not very well targeted, yes, and that's why you see irrelevance. Well-targeted ads are generally more relevant (sometimes not obvious) and this is 100% validated by returns to advertisers. This is not a joke.
5) Facebook and Google represent most of the ad market, so, the people that 'care' are basically everyone who wants to place an ad online.
3 is you're telling me not to believe my eyes. I'm sorry, there are some things that are so dumb you have to be very smart to trick yourself into believing them. You don't need a sophisticated statistical analysis to know what kind of advertisements you see where.
4 is circular reasoning. "Targeted ads are better than non-targeted, so if (per 1 and 2) I've already conceded that many targeted ads are garbage, I need to hypothesize (3) that the non-targeted ads are somehow worse even against the evidence of sense."
5: Google and Facebook are separate entities and need separate explanations. Facebook is a pure parasite. It does nothing for publishers except drive them traffic (which is in itself, a cost center, not a profit center). Publishers need to figure out how to convert traffic into profit. If we're talking about publishing, that requires the ads to be on their site, which means Google. But Google is screwing the publishers too because they can track and deliver eyeballs from anywhere.
It's just an obviously sick ecosystem. People have been doing advertising supported publishing since the 19th century, and it was fine until ten minutes ago, when suddenly tracking was possible. Coincidentally, ad supported publishing collapsed at the same time that tracking became possible. Is this really a coincidence? You've got to be pretty clever to convince yourself that it is…
1b) "That's a garbage ecosystem and we would all be happier without them."
This is demonstrably false, unfortunately.
The ads power Facebook, Google, much of Entertainment. Almost everywhere you see an ad - that place would disappear without that ad.
So a 'future without ads' is essentially a future without any of those things - and you and anyone else can stop using those things right now, and thereby avoid both the ads and the service.
People chose the crappy ads, with the service, instead of the alternative: nothing.
Granted, there could be more paywalls, but there wouldn't be enough 'pay' to keep the services alive.
2) Yes, I'm 100% telling you that I don't believe your self-assessment of the kinds of ads you see overall. I think most people have no idea of the true inventory they are witnesses, rather, they remember only the tiny fragment that sticks out.
'Your evidence of sense' - is telling you that 'ads are a waste' when 'evidence of a $100B economy' and 'science' is definitely telling you that ads are effective. Even untargeted, or crudely targetted.
3) I don't think it's circular reasoning to point out that many ads are not targeted. You're missing the underlying point - that not all ads land on target, irrespective of how sophisticated the targetting in.
That inefficiency is accounted for in the system.
FYI - as part of 'item #2' not only are you going to be unaware of how many and which ads you saw, you're also going to be completely unaware of their effect on your behavior in most cases.
BMW has been advertising to you since the moment you could recognize their logo, a decade before you could even consider buying a car. That programming 'adds up' to something, no pun intended.
5) Your view of Facebook as a 'parasite' is your own, it's not objective - they have a Billion people who like using it just fine. You're also confusing the collapse of print and the complete commoditization of information, with ads.
I'm going to assume that you've never placed an ad of any kind, and have no exposure to the industry. I'd encourage trying it, even by spending $50 on FB or Google perhaps trying to garner interest in your favorite Open Source Project. You'll learn a lot in the process.
The irony of your ire ... is that better-targeted ads are generally better for everyone - both consumer and advertiser. They are the least annoying and most informative. Though we don't like the invasion of our privacy, the 'targetting' part is really good.
You can't just wish away all of advertising before 2005. It wasn't perfect, but it was fine. Publishing has been collapsing since then and the reasons aren't confusing.
Yes, _as an advertiser_, having targeting is great. But as a mining company, dumping waste water in the river is great. Who cares? It matters what effect your actions have on the system as a whole.
What do people’s favorite ads all have in common? No one likes targeted ads. At best, people like when you do a search and get geographically relevant results. But that’s not even tracking, just IP location. Everyone loves ads but no one likes targeted ads.
This isn’t to say that ads can’t help drive overall consumption, but the lift isn’t huge and the demand has to already be there.
It might be a chicken and egg problem, but at least I think there are ways out of the situation.
That has nothing to do with your innate preference for sugars and calorie density. People liked sweet foods and dumped heaps of sugar into tea long before modern advertising existed.
> But for comparison, asian or european countries with more push on other drinks (e.g. tea, can coffee, sparkling water) have less of an inclination towards soda.
Soda is hugely popular in Asian and Europe. Out of the top 10 per-capita consumers of soda 4 are in Europe, including the Netherlands which has quite a few controls on ads[1].
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/12/which-countries-consu...
In my eyes the very fact that all the other standard sugary drinks have been displaced by commercial soda in so many countries is a reflection of the power of advertising.
Interestingly from your link, in the last few years Chile has become the #1 soda drinking country...and of course:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/coca-cola-to-invest-13-bln...
Aside from the health argument, I think advertisement can have deep and long lasting effects on a society. For a completely different take, De Beers decades of campaign to push diamonds on wedding rings is another example of it.
Regardless, I'm not sure recognizable megacorps would suffer much. A Big Mac is a known quantity, and everyone recognizes the Golden Arches, whether you're in Seattle or Shanghai. It's the local gastropub that would have a hard time promoting themselves to the tiny subset of the population that is 'vacationing foodies' without targeted advertising. At the same time, I don't see them advertising much - perhaps it's the middle of the road regional franchises that have the funds to employ ad agencies for that purpose.
I don't think they would be hurt that much, they would still provide advertisement, just less. The small niche company is the one that will be hurt... they now will compete in every category which is going to be much more expensive than small niche categories.
If anything, it sound like remove targetting will make much more money for Google. The one paying higher CPM will increase the CPM for everyone instead of his niche.
The example you give are all global, they can pay advertising in movies, in generic website, everywhere. They won't be hurt, by removing targeted advertisment, or billboard.
The one that will be hurt are the one that most person probably want but wouldn't know without advertising. My SO is in the escape room industry, at least 80% of people that come through her door has never done one. It took a long time to take off, because there was no escape room closeby, so not only we had to tell we existed to people, but also tell them WHAT it was. You can't achieve that just by existing.
I've always found it weird that we don't explicitly recognize information about / profiles on people as property of the subject.
Ban _involuntarily_ targeted advertising.
I am 100% ok with Google, Facebook etc. knowing that I live in Oxfordshire, UK; that I love cycling; that I play the church organ. That's who I am. If they want to target cycling, classical music, and local ads at me based on this information, that's great. I would happily log onto these sites and click checkboxes based on this (or do it via browser settings).
I am not ok with them building up a detailed personal profile of my anxieties, day-to-day worries and preoccupations. Nor with them selling my information to other sites to which I haven't explicitly volunteered the information.
how would you draw a line between what's okay to collect and what isn't?
do you think a line could be drawn that would work for most people?
would sites offer different levels of invasive tracking, and the user opts-in as far as they want?
what incentive would users have to opt-in at all?
Now, let's say I own an apartment block and want to advertise for tenants, but I don't want any of them dirty muslims in my building. I can target my advertising to exclude people whose interests include Halal food.
Or, let's say I'm the propaganda department of an adversarial nation state, and I want to stir up communal tension. All I have to do is find people with an interest in Halal food, and target them with ads exhorting them to join other Christians in the next Crusade against the Moors. Or whatever. This was actually a common technique in the 2016 election: identify voters who, via their social connections and profile interests, are likely on the fence about Clinton vs. Trump, and also are a bit homophobic -- then target them with "Queers for Hillary" advertisments.
It's shocking how easy it is to weaponize this stuff.
If you give them that leeway, they'll claim everything is voluntary.
"Oh, you can go into [random place in settings that changes every week] and disable each one of your anxieties. It will remain disabled for 72 hours"
Ban the collection of data for targeted advertising. Instead the only data that targeted ads can use would be provided by the user voluntarily. Not collected. No checkbox for consent.
If user wants the advertiser (say Google) to know something - they need to enter that in on a form.
1. ban targeted advertising as it exists now
2. if the user thinks they are missing out on recommendations or personalized deals, they can visit a website, enter their personal details, and the website will respond with ads.
We can really have it both ways.
I have had experiences with execs running large video services for content producers/publishers who would openly say (and therefore influence underlings and the next gen) - we know there are people who are addicted to our platforms, they have nothing better to do etc so how do we get them to consume excess Ad inventory we are holding? Can you use AI to improve our identification and targeting of such groups?
My initial reaction to such kind of requests was to say thank you no and walk out. But over time I realized they just find someone else and stay happily in denial of responsibility. Its not enough to then call them out. The only thing that works is to point them in a different more constructive direction. Feel free to make wild claims about how profitable its going to be, if you are dealing with mindlessly ambitious douchebags who don't understand any other language.
Unless management is genuinely mindless, it seems to me like it might work no more than once.
Perhaps you've had different experiences?
Adverts pollute our lives in many ways, it's past time we stopped them IMHO.
Sites that are not niche specific (like newspapers) shouldn't try to microtarget each user. They lose control of the ads they show near their content, making them less relevant. I'm tired of reading news about the coronavirus crisis surrounded by Amazon's offers on some items I visited a month ago. I still think ads are better when they are somewhat related to the content you are reading, rather than to the user's past activity on other websites.
Luckily no company cares about those things...enough to buy the information. Theres a dissonance between people knowing ad targeting is basically useless and them imagining it is super subtly effective. Ads arent effective at leveragong purchases. The data is conclusive. Yes the brands might appear in your head when faced with the monumentally unlikely choice of not knowing ANYTHING about various products in the category. Its far more likely you pull out a cell phone and check reviews or your family/friends recommend something or you will do a comparison of which has more shelf space or you will read the labels. More lkkely all of these things, none of which is "I saw an ad on twitch". In 15 years of digital advertising, this idea that demographic data (one of the pillars like geolocation), does anything to influence the market. With the corporate magic of attribution* the smoke and mirrors continue. *sales to people who saw an ad causes the adtech dept to be given credit for part of the revenue, as if the ad did something. No science that isnt decades out of date, just dissonance.
The problem, as I see it, is not businesses advertising stuff to you as a consumer. More, an ad-industry based on claiming attribution for the stuff you did buy because you just happened to click on an ad at some point in time.
Those services and products are not necessarily better, they're just better advertised. (In fact, they're likely worse.)
That effectively puts advertising dollars into the pockets of consumers who get services for free that they otherwise would have to pay for.
The only companies that are going to be pissing away money on untargeted ads have multinational brands that barely need advertising in the first place.
Targeted ads are the only way that small, new, local, or just poor companies can do advertising.
It's a bit scary seeing what sites show facebook you've been to: https://www.facebook.com/off_facebook_activity/ But if this is the price to pay to see quality ads within FB then so be it.
What I think is wrong, is then for facebook (or other apps) to sell, or leak that data in enough detail to match to our identity where it can be used for other purposes.
Targeted ads are a response to the poor results from site/content specific ads
1. Target specific articles with advice for older runners in running publications. 2. Target Italian recipes in cooking websites only for users located in Denver.
You don’t need to do those things manually, it can be automated. Sure, it might not deliver the scale that FB and Google are promising, but to say that it’s impossible to do contextually is not accurate.
Use Google Search ads to capture all direct intent.
Who reads running publications these days? Unless you meant online blogs etc, in which case:
> 2. Target Italian recipes in cooking websites only for users located in Denver.
That is targeted advertising, IIUC. You are targeting users based on their geolocation, which should be banned as per the article.
That's what everyone thinks is wrong. FB (and Google, and LI, etc) already tell you they won't use your data for other than ad purposes and that they won't resell your data as PII. The problem is
a) policing it
b) in case of inadvertent disclosure, there's no remedy. privacy compromises are permanent.
To date, it's a tradeoff we (society) have been willing to take.
So a site could absolutely show you ads according to the content you view or create, and companies can go to a site and ask them to show an ad to certain users. But it would be banned to pass on any kind of usage data that is not explicitly destined as public (profile page data, posts), and it would be forbidden for third parties to create profiles on you.
I think tracking is also not bad per se, I still want to be able to identify recurring visiters to my site uniquely. It's the centralized advertising brokerage and profiling that should go away.
Why? Let's start by asking: what is targeted advertising?
Is it based on interests? Behavior? Demographic? Psychographic? Contextual? Placement? Geolocation? Search queries? The list goes on.
Even if they want to narrow it down to collected data from users, this still has a lot of broad aspects to it.
What about what Kantar and GFK, and many other market research companies do, where they track people who consent to be tracked and share their opinions and behavior, to generate statistical inferences? Because that's one of the ways you target on TV for example.
So, I understand where they are coming from, but this is such a broad request that's naive.
A company that sells vegan supplements that places advertising in the POS (Point of Sale) is targeted advertising - why should we ban something that has the consent of everyone involved?
Or the solution is to randomize ad placement? The amount of wastage and the play field would destroy anyone who tried to compete with companies who could afford mass media platforms with budgets in the orders of millions+.
You mention you don't mind ads; would you also prefer to be subject to targeted advertising rather than to have software running on your own device which displays equally-relevant reference material without sharing your personal data?
The ads themselves aren't the problem here, nor is it really what's being discussed.
A quick example: if you wanted to reach health care works, or more precisely doctors, you'd advertising on magazines for health care professionals. Most of which were subscribed (name, birthday, profession, address, etc) - so you had already some data for some targeting.
> in reality has been used for much worse, according to the article: proliferation of hateful and false content on social media & political manipulation, among others.
This is where advertising is getting mixed with propaganda - those are very different things and the only cross section is that they are messages that use text, audio, images, video - in others words - they are distributed with audiovisual media. They have different legal obligations (depending on the country).
What is lacking is regulation and fines for abuse of propaganda. The problem is that the sheer volume of content being produced is hard to regulate.
What advertisers care about is who is susceptible or vulnerable to persuasion.
There's plenty of people that don't know how to properly use a search engine, hell there's plenty who don't know what a search engine is.
Plus, search engines have a role in the consumer decision journey, but don't fulfill all the roles.
Just to add up, with SEM (paid ads + SEO) search results have a big chance of being biased nowadays, and you should always take that into consideration.
You're right haha, plus I'm more of a minimalist so I just want to have less stuff in general.
This allows you - the brand - to reduce wastage. And in theory, it should reduce Ad Fatigue in the audience.
Wastage because every time you miss a potential audience member, or you reach a wrong person, you paid to deliver a message that won't be heard/read/seen. If you think about it, this adds up - even with targeted advertising.
Ad Fatigue comes from you being shown advertising you have no interested in (why are you seeing bunions cream if you don't have bunions), or you see too many times the same ad you start to notice it for the wrong reasons (imagine you see a re targeted ad from amazon for a product you bought 3 weeks ago, and for 3 weeks you're seeing daily the same product being recommended to you).
In theory, everyone should win with targeted ads, in reality, it's being abused and it's saturating consumers. Not only abused by brands, but also by a consumer behavior/culture that aims to spend more.
You can argue that one fuels the other, well, I'm not so sure about that, because cultural shifts are too big to be the agenda of anyone. In my opinion, they feed on each other.
Targeted advertising lets the advertiser pay for part of more expensive searches.
One of the problems with Google and Facebook is that they are businesses whose core product should be driving search costs very low, so they compromise their product so that their advertising remains valuable to close the gap.
But let me give you a inside view: there's been a war from major media groups to try to take down Facebook and Google (let's see what they come up with for Amazon).
This solution for them is the best solution for news websites, that since 2013 have seen their advertising budgets being siphoned to Google and Facebook.
All because they cannot compete with their level of data granularity - and trust me they tried! Hell some tried to build their own data systems to have more refined targeting.
I can even tell you one of the solutions on the table was to force Google and Facebook to share their data with media groups.
So this "white knight in shinning armor" article, despite showing valid arguments, is most definitely biased, because it's in their best interest that contextual advertising prevails and interest/behavioral falls. For years their agenda is to get back media investment from the big boys.
So bare this in mind when you read these articles.
I also don’t believe that behavioural advertising is better by definition. Even the article mentions some research to prove the contrary. I’ve seen it from first-hand experience as well. Which, of course, is anecdotal. But what is not is the fact that the world’s largest and most profitable advertising product, Google Search, is completely reliant on contextual rather than behavioural targeting.
The fact that publishers so far have not been able to do something about FB’s and Google’s duopoly doesn’t necessarily mean they will never be able to. Or at least I certainly hope that it doesn’t.
Like said, the bad thing would be more wastage and potentially less relevant advertising.
The problem with advertising is that a campaign success is a multi variable equation that fiddles with human attention/retention of attention/memory and many other factors that makes us humans and regulate our perception.
For example, I don't consider Google Search contextual base. I put it in a category of it's own, because you're tapping into people declaring their intent and interest, and reducing it to context is dangerous - because it's more than that.
I used to say to clients: Facebook knows what you like, Google knows what you're looking for, and Amazon knows what you're buying.
Google does have Contextual Segmentation but it's used mainly for display advertising (GDN - Google Display Network). There was a time you could even select/exclude domains, but I don't know if that's still available.
Also, Facebook tried to leverage their data for display advertising outside of Facebook and they ended up closing Audience Network... so even interest based targeting seems to work within a context itself.
>The fact that publishers so far have not been able to do something about FB’s and Google’s duopoly doesn’t necessarily mean they will never be able to.
This would be a long conversation, but in a brief way, I think they tried to compete by placing themselves next to Facebook and Google, while they should have set themselves apart and leverage their strengths - name content quality wise.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but is the consumer also consenting?
Unless you're trying to say that the consumer didn't consent to have messages being displayed around him, and this is just once again too broad... the solution would be any media (or for the sake of simplicity, any surface) would need to be plain white with no text. Walls, shelves, windows, clothing of staff, even products on display.
Seems like quite a leap to me to suggest that consent to see the later type of message is implied by mere presence in the store; maybe this is exactly the point you are making, but I think by extension any advertisement seen anywhere is "consented" to by nature of being in the place (physical or virtual) where the advertisement is?
On a side note, this seems more like "contextual advertising" rather than "targeted advertising"?
Usually POS Advertising is indeed for products within the store, you just give an incentive to have your product being supported with visual display. Sometimes on those displays you have product lines ups, or products soon to be released - so those don't necessarily have to be available in store. I'm sure you've seen "Coming Soon"/"Pre-Order" signs.
Advertising being displayed only needs the consentment of the owners of the media, and to follow all the legal terms of the country where it's being displayed. Because it's a message, and you only read/acknowledge a message if you want to, that's why consent on the on the part of the consumer for display doesn't seem right.
>his seems more like "contextual advertising" rather than "targeted advertising"
This is a matter of semantics, because for me contextual placement is a form of targeting. You target by context, and that was the premise of my first reply - they're quite broad terms to be generalized.
“Meanwhile, the ability to track users wherever they go tends to shift ad revenue from higher quality sites to less reputable ones. “The way the adtech system works is, it follows the reader from Wired.com all the way down to the cheapest possible place, the basement bottom-feeders on the internet, and will serve you the ads there.””
Many people don’t like seeing ads. But they do like receiving the free content that those ads pay for. And would find it far more annoying if all the content was locked behind paywalls. Whether we like it or not, digital advertising is a powerful equaliser that gave free access to vast amounts of information to anyone from any country and from any income bracket.
But the shift towards audience targeting has stripped high-quality content creators of their share of the value they create and has instead spread it out to countless click-baity websites and apps designed entirely to profit of off targeted advertising.
So diminishing our reliance on targeted advertising is not only great for the user, it would be truly game-changing for high-quality content providers as well. For some reason, this mutually beneficial outcome is often forgotten and I’m glad that Wired pointed it out.
High production value can and is absolute shit. Gell-Mann amnesia effect says hi. The problem isn't the competition but that the old guard sucked at their job.
I am no fan of targetted advertising but I despise attempts to control the internet for the sake of dinosaur propagandists. They need to just die already and stop crapping out bullshit.
* Cascade - Useful
* Some IBM Power and Storage Webinar - not so useful
* Used Cars - not so useful (I anticipate doing less driving than normal the next few weeks)
* Constant Contact - not so useful
* Nike - not so useful
* Auto insurance - not so useful
There is something funny about an article arguing against targeted advertising surrounded by ads that do a pretty bad job of targeting.
Because then only untargeted advertising will be left, and that's definitely not what you want.
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.
You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity.
Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.
You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.