This reminds me of my experience with Google Adwords. My target was to increase signups for travellers to selected cities looking for 'events nearby'. So, I selected my cities and customer segments and had a limit set of 30 Dollars / day. Regularly, I paid for 2-5 Dollar more per day than my max price. I reduced the price to actually match my max price, but this would as a result out-price me of the relevant keywords. In addition, it never brought the clicks they charged me for. Yes, I was tracking the other side of it as well.
I believe there is a whole world of click-fraud with Google and Facebook in this which noone is tracking. I am looking forward to a world where Silicon Valley is tackling the 'hard' problems of this world again (Space/ Marine Exploration, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data Analytics, etc) rather then the optimization of click bait.
> I believe there is a whole world of click-fraud with Google and Facebook in this which noone is tracking
I believe it's actually a little more subtle than that. Google and Facebook don't have to commit fraud, and arguably their business model is to be a kind of middleman for fraudsters. They can be doing everything ostensibly above-board (and I would argue are) but profiting from the combination of advertisers and click farms.
Our brief experience with Google's ad network was similarly disappointing. A tiny fraction of the visitors we received were genuine, unless you think people coming from pages at bizarre domain names where the content is mostly a bunch of keyword spam in tiny, almost-white text are likely to be legitimate...
I'm delighted to see a big, influential advertiser pulling serious money out of the market and openly saying why. Both Google and Facebook have some very dubious practices and very little transparency around their ad programmes. The little guy can't do much about that, but it won't take many nine-figure advertisers pulling the plug to force a change in how the whole online ad market works.
inside google adwords you have a invalid click rate,
right now i have cca 13% per search campaign and 70% display from the start of this month till now, im sure thats not everything because for some time i tracked those invalid clicks from my side and those where bigger then what google reported. its frustrating but i can hardly do anything.
In some cases you'll see that they leave your page immediately- too fast for a human to process that it's not what they want if they've actually clicked on an ad. Like, one or two seconds.
One or two seconds sounds pretty long to me. I think I close accidental ad clicks well under a second a lot of the time as I realize what I did without waiting for the site to load.
Yeah I do that too but I don't want to pay for those clicks either. I want genuine interested clicks. Google is set up to get me to pay for clicks, not to give me the right clicks.
Or at least it was when I used them. It's been a while because of that.
It is totally too quick if they are looking for content. If they are looking for a car and click on a lumber store then I agree. But anything other than a clear mis-click and you can't absorb the page that fast.
Another tactic I'll use is actually parse thru apache log for adwords clicks looking for duplicate IP's. File a complaint with google to get a refund if I see patterns of abuse.
Perhaps rather anecdotal, but this is why I joined Uber, and did not take my Facebook or Google offers. It feels nice to work on tech that directly impacts lives and how a persons day flows. As opposed to, as you correctly put it, optimizing click bait.
Both Google and Facebook work on "tech that directly impacts lives and how a person's day flows". So far producing more value than Uber has, but Uber provides a valuable service too. And while Google & Facebook's revenue is primarily from their ad business, they're not ad companies, like, say, Rubicon Project.
A thought experiment: suppose my company makes and sells shoes. We're a shoe company, right? Then one day some soda company calls us and says they'll give us money (a generous $10 a pair, our pairs sell for $100, cost $90, hello double profit) if we put their logo on the tongues. Sure, we try it out, shoe sales don't seem negatively affected (they're great shoes) so we keep it and keep taking money for the ad. Basically one guy at our factory coordinates with the soda company to make sure we're paid, and makes sure we have logo supplies and that each tongue has a logo on it, but the rest of us are just focusing on making and selling shoes. Are we still a shoe company? I think yes. What if for every logo'd $100 pair of shoes we sell the soda company pays us $50? $100? What about $200, much more than the cost of the shoe for their ad, such that we start giving away the shoes for free? Still a shoe company then? I still think yes.
Your shoe company is in the business of selling ads at the point where ad revenue exceeds revenue from the manufacture of shoes. The shoes become the medium of delivery of the ad, but the company would as likely give away slips of paper with the logos on if the ad revenue justified it.
A better analogy, in my opinion, is to that of a company that makes billboards: they sell ads, delivered by billboard. They'd stop making the billboards if the ad revenue stopped coming in. Likewise Google would stop working on anything ad-related (and probably switch focus to GCE) if ad revenue dropped appreciably.
Maybe it's a difference of opinion on the purpose of companies. For some people the only purpose of a company is to make money, regardless of how. But for my shoe company, the purpose is to make great shoes for people to wear. Even when the ad revenue is huge, the company wouldn't just as likely give away slips of paper with the logos on it if the ad revenue justified it, because we have no interest in making slips of paper, we just want to make shoes. Similarly, why is the soda company continuing to pay us such high ad revenue unless they think it's justified on their end? Couldn't they make their own shoes, and sell or give those away instead of having to pay us? Except they're in the business of making soda, they have no expertise or desire to make shoes. If the ad revenue dries up, well, we can go back to trying to sell the shoes instead of just giving them away.
The analogy with the company that makes billboards is good if you're trying to point out the fundamental difference between an ad company (there aren't that many of them, despite many companies being funded by ads) and a non-ad company. The only purpose of a billboard company is to make billboards that people see ads on. There's no other reason to make billboards. The day to day of most employees will be about how to most effectively design and position their billboards for better ad delivery and finding advertisers to pay, while a relatively small amount of employees enjoy focusing only on the construction process. The CEO probably doesn't even care about billboards, they just found a nice way to make money.
If Google's ad revenue dropped a lot, there would definitely be a change in focus, but they wouldn't kill off search. They'd probably put some more people on trying to sell Enterprise Search. Google, being a tech company and not an ad company, has tech it can try to sell when the ad revenues go away. An ad company has nothing else. That's the big difference.
What if ad income were so large that the shoe company just gave away your shoes and relied solely on the ad income?
This is where Google and Facebook are, and that makes them ad companies: Their business and design decisions are driven primarily by the objective of increasing ad income.
It just happens that Google and Facebook draw most of their revenue from being middlemen in the advertising industry, the same way Uber is a middleman in the transportation industry -- Uber doesn't have the fixed costs that you'd expect a large cab company to have.
Their business is ad delivery. Apple is a consumer electronics company as they make and sell hardware directed primarily at consumers (as well as niche professional markets – kind of like Panasonic.) Google is an advertising company; the tech they produce is nearly universally focused in some way on the delivery of ads. They make and sell ad delivery.
Search: ad delivery. Any innovations around search are all built for the purpose of making essentially a better billboard.
Gmail: data generation tool that feeds information into Google in order to better traffic ads.
Google analytics: a Trojan horse that trades data to web property owners in exchange for being able to use that data themselves – to better target ads.
Google Fiber: more bandwidth, the more people will be able to use their ad products.
AdWords: ad delivery
AdSense: ad delivery
Chrome: owning the browser means you protect the ability to serve ads.
Google Apps for Business/Gsuite – an exeception to the above that represents a minuscule amount of revenue.
Play Store: if you make Android more attractive, you protect an ability to use Android user data in order to target people to... (drumroll please) serve ads.
All of these X/Skunkworks projects are just hobbies. Google is an ad company, plain and simple. Their entire business is based around “track and serve.” Even self-driving cars: “we noticed you visit REI a lot, how about we drive you to this <new competing store> for a 30% discount off of whatever you were buying at REI?”
Apple is a hardware company – they make software and services so you want to buy their hardware. They are to a lessor extent, a content distribution company but really even that is to support selling Apple hardware. They haven’t changed much since 1984 – make software exclusive to the Mac, so Mac is differentiated from other computers.
Facebook – not even a debate. Track and Serve.
Microsoft might be considered a “true” tech company in the sense that they are essentially a software version of what IBM used to be.
It's disingenuous from the perspective of what it's like to work at a company.
I worked at a comparison shopping site that turned into an SEO house towards the end, after we failed to get direct traffic. The entire company slowly shifted focus improve our SEO, because that's what dragged us away from bankruptcy. Our engineers were tasked with finding ways to get indexed in Google higher, tweaking our site layout constantly. Search became about latency, since Google crawls faster sites faster. Crawling became about getting more content to mix up and show to Google. It became a rather depressing slog, all things together, after we stopped worrying about users and started worrying about SEO. It was explicit and pervasive.
If you work at Google, you only worry about ads if you work on the Ads team. If you work on search, if you work on GMail, if you work on cloud services you work on and worry exclusively about making those products the best they can be, for the users of those products. If I weren't also a user of Google products, I would almost have no idea that Google had ads; they just aren't a salient part of a workaday engineer's job.
You can still argue that from a business perspective every product is tainted, but from an engineering perspective, ads aren't a consideration at all, let alone the first consideration.
That’s absurd. Your argument appears to be “I wish people outside Google didn’t pay so much attention to what business Google is in, because it’s super fun being an engineer working at a place that has a geyser of money coming in from the ads division so engineering can ignore business pretty much completely.”
Yes, that is fun (so say all my friends who work there)! But it’s pretty irrelevant to the conversation about what business Google is in. It’s an advertising company.
Yes, but they do a whole lot of other things, which as you noted, tie back into their main source of revenue.
I don't disagree with what you've written but I think calling them an "ad delivery" business is as accurate as using the tusks as a synecdoche for describing an elephant. Using a well-known part to describe a thing is fine in most cases, except that over time, it blinds people into ignoring the other parts that gives a thing its uniqueness.
> Microsoft might be considered a “true” tech company in the sense that they are essentially a software version of what IBM used to be.
Funny that you use Microsoft.
Among the big 5: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft, Microsoft is the most diversified, revenue wise [0].
All companies are tech companies in this day and age, it's a meaningless classifier. But not all companies recieve most of thier money from advertising and selling personal information, which makes ad company relevant classifier.
I'm sure Warren Buffet will disagree with that generalization of all companies being tech companies, especially since he, the quintessential value investor, doesn't consider Berkshire Hathaway as one.
Neither would Carlos Slim. Not that it means anything but at different times, each was once adjudged the wealthiest in the world.
Calling a company a "tech company" speaks primarily to its competitive advantage in printing money, not the industry it is in.
Look at it this way: Big law firms are called that because they hire a lot of lawyers (and lawyer-types); big 4 accounting firms hire a lot of accountants and big 5 tech firms hire a lot of software engineers (or CS majors if you will).
They are called that not because they don't hire HR, IT, finance or other professionals, they are called "big X" because specific professions (lawyers, accountants, software engineers) dominate their hiring.
The quality and quantity of their hires from those professions in turn determine the amount of profit they are able to extract from whichever industry they choose to focus on/dominate.
> They are called that not because they don't hire HR, IT, finance or other professionals, they are called "big X" because specific professions (lawyers, accountants, software engineers) dominate their hiring.
My point would be that if Uber vanished Uber drivers wouldn't, and very rapidly they would be providing their services via alternatives. My feeling is that no one would lose if this happened, apart from Uber's investors.
In my own personal experience, I can honestly say I've never "intentionally" clicked on an ad in the past 20+ years I've been on the internet. I will say I've certainly looked at ads in magazines, billboards, tv commercials (before tivo) and even those small planes pulling banners at the beach.
I am not surprised that digital marketing is not that effective. What does surprise me is why its taken this long to figure that out.
I almost feel like there are two factions. I'm pretty similar to you. I have clicked on ads a handful of times, but it's very rare. However, I have worked in jobs where I had visibility into the metrics, and I have seen internet ads be EXTREMELY effective. Not in terms of clicks (which could easily be accidental or fraudulent), but in terms of people clicking and then purchasing. People aren't going to "accidentally" click and then give us money. And I've seen many campaigns where we were getting huge ROI in terms of actual dollars. So there are clearly lots of people out there who do click on ads and take action. I think the problem comes when you're using an intermediate metric like clicks or impressions to measure success. You have to measure the actual outcome you are trying to drive, like purchases or subscriptions. Of course, with CPG, that's a lot harder to do. And I'm not convinced that pure brand advertising is any easier to measure online than it is offline.
Not only are there definitely people who click ads, but there are people _like us_ who click ads.
All the dev tool companies run ads! CircleCI runs them, but the dozen or so other dev tool companies where I know the founders or early hires also run ads. You would think given comments like this on HN that they would be useless, but we all run the numbers. The numbers say that not only are they effective, but that usually we should run more of them.
It's like when people here say "oh I hate talking to salespeople". Yet, salespeople make the world go around.
Even then, I think you are being too generous. The stricter criterion is something like: "People who run more ads believe they will personally benefit from running more ads."
Ideally (and occasionally) this means that ad buyer believes the company as a whole will benefit from the advertising. But even if this belief is real, if the influence or income of the decision maker correlates positively with increasing spending on ads (and decreases with cutbacks) it can be difficult to distinguish belief from reality.
All this talk about "belief" like it's religion or something. It's reasonably feasible to get hard, scientific numbers that prove the effectiveness of advertising spend. Ie tracing click throughs vs conversion rate.
>I've seen many campaigns where we were getting huge ROI in terms of actual dollars. So there are clearly lots of people out there who do click on ads and take action.
That's the problem, though. You can tell me that the user clicked on the ad and then bought my product; but was the user going to scroll down to my organic search result, click on that and buy anyhow? The advertising sellers claim that they should be credited with the sale, when all they are providing is moving the last link up; at least in the industry I was in, a user, generally speaking, isn't going to sign up with a VPS provider they haven't heard of. Sure, sure, putting a special in front of them can move you from second or third place to first place, and there's value in that, but really some brand advertising needs to be done before you can sell at all, and as you pointed out, measuring the effectiveness of brand advertising is super hard.
I suppose there are some products where the user really is going to buy the product first linked; but I think there are a lot of products where the user doesn't make a buying decision for some time, and the last click... may not have a lot to do with what order the links are in.
I think this is the real problem with online advertising; tracking that last click into a purchase is fairly easy (though, as you point out, some people don't even do that) but figuring out how much of that purchase was because the link was first, and how much of that purchase was because the user had previous knowledge of you? that's hard - I understand that a lot of research is being expended in this direction, and that this is the value proposition that Facebook claims, but... it's a hard problem, and depending on the product, you could reasonably argue that the state of the art isn't as good as the people selling advertising say it is.
But it is an open question of incrementality -- did you just cannibalize a sale from a different, possibly cheaper, channel? How much lift did you actually get?
That's the problem I've seen in the digital ad space -- lift is either hard to measure, or ignored completely. Causality to the sale is assumed on the ad.
I think that's a great point, and definitely hard for a huge company like P&G. But for a small company, it can be easier, because when your volumes are low enough, it's often very easy to directly see sales uplift in your top line numbers when you run the ad. If I normally get 20 orders a day, I run an ad and get 40, then the ad budget runs out and I'm back to a steady 20, I'm not too worried about cannibalization.
For a huge company it's even harder. I think the internet ads serve partly the same as news paper ads. There is no click through for them either. Actual paper ones.
We have a couple different phone numbers exclusively for advertising campaigns. We can note the line it came on when receiving the call. We're a small-mid business, so I assume larger businesses have budgets for a lot more ways to track printed media advertising that isn't too obtrusive.
New customers or orders brought in by the ad which you wouldn't have gotten otherwise. Lift is a basically unmeasurable quantity which directly relates to the ROI of the ad.
Mostly I've noticed that people click ads when they don't realize they're clicking an ad. For example, when my dad googles something, often he doesn't realize the results at the top are all advertisements (he's colorblind and has bad vision). When I point out to him that they're ads (whether relevant or not), he then avoids them and scrolls down to the organic results.
I agree. I think there's a big hump in the middle of people who are like "hmm, this is relevant to me, i'll click it", then 2 long tails of people who click a LOT and people who click rarely or not at all.
On the other hand, there is a not-insignificant number of bot networks and shady clickfarm sites out there. Though, you can usually avoid being taken in by them by not being a cheapskate - quality traffic is more expensive. If you're bidding <$1 CPM for most things, enjoy funding a click farm.
> I am not surprised that digital marketing is not that effective.
To be clear, that isn't what the article is about.
P&G still spends massive amounts on digital advertising. The point they are making is they were able to identify & eliminate $100M of advertising that was ineffectual.
The other part is that P&G is largely into consumer products & I highly doubt they are measuring online advertising by clicks.
Clicks are a decent measure for performance advertising but pretty poor for brand advertising. And when it comes to consumer products & digital products, it's mostly brand. (Consider, when a typical person needs tooth paste, do they hop online, type it into Google, look at results & then buy it? Or, you know, do they just grab whatever brand they've always gotten on a trip to the grocery store.)
Digital advertising is largely held to the same standard where most of that brand spend is: television. And there are no clicks in television.
With television, they first data point they're looking for is how many people did they reach & what was the demographic composition. They may later follow on with surveys to see if they achieved the change in awareness/purchase intent/whatever, as well as try to analyze for lift in sales.
So does P&G care if you click ads? Probably not. What P&G cares about is shaping how you think about laundry detergent, making you aware of their brand, creating a positive association with the right attributes, and ultimately in you buying their brand at the store.
Given the amount of stupid ads I see I sometimes click one when I see something that is remotely interesting (dev tools etc), hoping to train googles AS (Artificial Stupidity) to serve me more relevant ads. (No, I'm still happily married and I cannot figure out why a company that sits on my personal email and most of my internet searches for the last 15 years cannot figure that out. Especially as I have even configured my ad preferences in the settings.)
I can't figure out why Zillow thinks I'd be interested in houses in Palo Alto. They regular send me emails about houses they think I might be interested in, and they are in the Palo Alto area.
The only reason they have my email address was because I made an account so I could claim my house on Zillow, so they know exactly where I live, and that is 850 miles from Palo Alto.
I've had several ads I would have clicked on them, but I didn't get to them in time. Typical scenario: I'm reading a story at fanfiction.net. I get to the bottom of the page, and click the button to go to the next page...and then I see that the ad on the bottom of the page is for something I'm interested in and I want to click, but it is too late.
If I go back, either by the browser back button or by the button on the next page to go to the previous chapter, it usually does not show the same ad.
(It also appears that the ad it does show then is not random. There is one particular ad that I've seen a lot when I get to a page via the back button. I wonder if it is possible to specifically target pages reached by back buttons?)
This is probably the experience of a lot of people. Never clicked on an ad, no idea who does. Same here.
I happen to know a guy who drives some very expensive cars. He made his money advertising stuff online and selling it. He knows all the tricks, the inside out of how Facebook and Google work, how to source cheap stuff, how to ship things, and so on.
So clearly someone is clicking the ads.
My guess is he has some tricks up his sleeve that are either unknown to most marketers or slightly dodgy. Actually that last one he told me himself. But he does know a thing or two about how the ads work, what makes people buy, and all that.
> I am not surprised that digital marketing is not that effective. What does surprise me is why its taken this long to figure that out.
It is effective, and cheap at that. I run a small-ish left wing FB site and Twitter account, and regularly do small scale advertising - either to rally people up for a demonstration, or to annoy right-wingers. Proper targetting makes this incredibly easy, and judging by the numbers it works out just fine.
Relevance is huge. If you're shown an ad for something that you don't care about (which is most of the time, for most people), it will not be effective. However the right ad at the right time is very effective. But that's impossible to get correct all of the time, so there's no choice but for merchants to play the odds.
Long time ago I used some free $ on adwords to advertise Dropbox. I maxed out the free storage upgrades within a day or two. I am sure I am not the one who did that. People click on ads. Plus ads are not always meant to lead to sales. For companies like P&G who sell products with many substitutes it's also about maintaining brand awareness.
As a counter example, I click on ads fairly often, probably once a month on average. However it is only for rather niche products or rather niche companies. I've discovered a handful of companies that have gotten my money this way over the years, many of which I probably would never have heard of otherwise.
I haven't intentionally clicked on an ad nor have I intentionally look at an ad in magazines, tv commericals, etc.
I've gotten rid of my magazine subs years ago and haven't owned a TV in years.
> I am not surprised that digital marketing is not that effective.
Depends on the type. Certain google/facebook ads get far better traction than any traditional ad.
The truth of the matter is all ads are ineffective. It's just that digital ads are easier to track ( the impression, clicks, views, etc ) whereas "traditional" ads are not.
The problem for companies/ad agencies/etc are that kids/younger demographics are spending so much time on social media. We know that some digital marketing works because these youtube stars make a killing selling their own merchandise that they advertise on their own channels.
The best thing for ad industry is if traditional media dies and goes away and then they could focus their attention on "digital" rather than traditional/print.
> ... digital ads are easier to track ... whereas "traditional" ads are not.
digital ads are not always easy to track. a lot of malware is dedicated to filling your cookies with visits so that if you happen to buy something, they can claim you saw the ad prior and take credit. in many cases, a digital add campaign creates such a tiny blip in sales its hard to differentiate from randomness, were as a TV ad shows floods of sales.
> The best thing for ad industry is if traditional media dies and goes away and then they could focus their attention on "digital" rather than traditional/print.
traditional advertising, namely TV, is still the most successful way to increase sales for many companies. since digital ads leads to so few sales, even the platforms have often moved away from 'advertise to produce sales' to advertise for brand management.
I formerly worked as a digital influencer across the usual list of content platforms.
One of my last influencer marketing gigs was for a major multinational company. You've heard of them and they are not amateurs when it comes to marketing.
I asked one of their top marketing people how they measure the impact of digital influencer campaigns like ours. The short answer is that they don't. They have no idea how to.
When trying to measure the impact of marketing upon sales, teasing the signal out of the noise is almost impossible to do with confidence, especially for huge companies running many campaigns at any given time. I suspect this is true for all advertising, not just influencer marketing.
With few truly reliable metrics, marketers fall back on conventional wisdom. For a long time, conventional wisdom has been that you have to pour a ton of your marketing budget into digital or you're being left behind.
A change in that conventional wisdom seems to be afoot. I saw it as a digital content creator - ad revenues per view have been declining for a while now. Aside from the short-term panic over ads appearing next to extremist content, there might be something more long-term that's changing in corporate marketing strategy.
It's hard to see how this, and not a challenge from a new startup, is not the greatest threat to the success of Google and Facebook. Their business is digital advertising. If spending in that field declines, it's probably rough times ahead for those giants.
Do you mean digital influencer in the sense of social influencer? The latter can be measured quite well, depending on the method.
Using affiliate-like CPC click-through links on their social media accounts allows the ad network to observe exactly what is working. The problem is that social influencer status probably only really works for stars with a huge following of real life fans. One example (@work) was a celebrity posting about a nice pair of shoes. Those sold out within minutes, and the shoe company's store page crashed due to the unexpected demand. So it can work, but like most things in marketing, if everyone does it, it won't work for most.
Yes, that is what I mean. It can be measured in that way if the product being advertised is something that's meant to be bought right now, online. But many products don't really work like that.
For example, we did multiple campaigns for major sports teams. How are they supposed to measure the impact on sales of tickets and memorabilia? The idea isn't to generate sales of product X right now, it's to energize and grow your team's fan base, which will hopefully lead to more people buying more things over time.
Another example: we did many campaigns for food and beverage brands. People don't tend to order those things right now, online. You're just trying to grow your brand in hopes that more people will buy that snack or drink the next time they're at the store.
So I amend my previous statement to agree with you that semi-precise metrics are possible if you're trying to get someone to buy a specific product online right now. That description covers a lot of companies, and they probably have good metrics.
But a big consumer-goods company like P&G probably isn't doing that kind of marketing. They're trying to get you to think of brand X the next time you're getting groceries. That makes impact of ads devilishly hard to measure, regardless of whether the ads are online or on TV.
I think you're overestimating how well social influencers can be measured. It's true, you can measure clicks to a landing page, one per influencer - but that's relatively annoying administratively, and only measures clicks, not sales. Plus, that counts on your influencer actually following instructions and using the custom landing page URL, which is harder than you might think.
If you're a consumer lifestyle or luxury brand, most of your sales are in-store and hence attribution due to influencers becomes incredibly difficult.
What many companies I've seen do is attempt to measure organic reach through a variety of internal or external scoring mechanisms, and using engagement as a proxy for reach. So a beauty influencer posting a screenshot of her travel bag with your brand tagged would have comments, likes, reshares/regrams measured, and then have that scored as some sort of an effectiveness index.
Its can be pretty straightforward if you run your campaigns through a software platform. The way we (mavrck.co) do it is we do outreach for a campaign, screen the influencers based on their engagement rates/relevancy, have influencers connect their instagram/facebook accounts to our platform, generate individual tracking links for each influencer, ingest their posts via API, and measure the comments/likes/clicks/conversions with our analytics.
Wouldn't that qualify as operating an ad network on instagram, something that is explicitly forbidden via the instagram terms of service?
"Don't transfer any data that you receive from us (including anonymous, aggregate, or derived data) to any ad network, data broker, influencer network, or other advertising or monetization-related service."
We (mavrck.co) actually work with a lot of brands (including P&G) to help them measure the effectiveness of their influencer marketing campaigns, as well as with their loyalty, ambassador, and refer a friend programs.
Happy to chat if you're interested - matt@mavrck.co
Digital advertising is rife with (what should be considered) fraud. Advertisers feel as though they are getting fleeced, and the advertising middlemen reap massive margins. The accountability isn't where it needs to be; there are websites that hide ads under other ads, still reporting displays for all ads per page load. I suspect moves like this one will help the ecosystem change for the better.
Yeah, but it's not like traditional advertising is free of fraud either. You can't even really pretend to measure the effectiveness of campaigns there. And there's much more money in it.
> You can't even really pretend to measure the effectiveness of campaigns there.
I disagree - for something at the scale of P&G, you can bet that they're doing a LOT of measuring for every campaign they run.
The article reads to me as if they're applying the same metrics to their online ads that they use already for traditional campaigns, and finding little impact.
Agree that they are measuring, but determining the cause and effect of each campaign is very hard. Sometimes ads have a clear impact, but those are cases that no one argues with. Mostly advertisers simply say (in effect) we got your message out, and there was an impact. If the low/high uptake was due to the ad or to the quality of the product or to the weakness of competitors - well no one can say.
Just assuming that they have a magical way to solve attribution for traditional ads because they're a bit corporation. If they did have that, they could just use the same tools on digital and report fake clicks and bots to Facebook and Google to get reimbursed. (Google at least refunds all impressions and clicks that were later detected as being fraudulent)
Correct. We're likely talking econometric/MMM modeling which likely tells them at the channel level what is or is not working, but they may not have enough data for that at the campaign level or lower.
a while back I saw a traditional display ad for KFC it was on a site heading out of town where the next KFC would have been 20 miles away - not sure they where getting much value out of that advert,
I worked in online ads for bigger part of my career, I certify that fraud is that industry's second nature. But the type of fraud they engage in is the one for which they can't be prosecuted (disclaiming, audits, etc)
Is there no government agency(ies) who track this to protect businesses from fraud? Otherwise with these practices in place, clearly the businesses selling ads are simply seeing what level of bullshit businesses will tolerate - how far into businesses' profits they can dig before the businesses say fuck this.
Advertisers are the most complicit in all this. They always have the option of using whitelists and buying properly but they (meaning the dozens of layers in the agency/vendor supply chain) always go for the cheap impressions and clicks to make their reports look good.
Why does it matter if the ad is visible? When those same companies post in People magazine, they pay for the placement they want and get no data about how many people saw the ad.
The agencies that buy the ad verify it was placed in the right spot at the right size and that's about all they can do.
Why should the web be any different? As long as they insist on bundling javascript with their ad, I'm going to run an ad-blocker.
What? Because it can - it's the biggest reason so much money is transferring to digital and away from print, because of data and accountability. An ad that was at least scrolled into view is better than one that isnt and many campaigns are now bought on that basis.
It's not perfect but it's far better than before and we're not going back.
CPG can't be tracked is the problem, there's a major last mile / offline attribution issue and it's only getting tougher as security/privacy gets more regulated.
That being said, we work with P&G, they definitely know more now than decades before with older mediums.
Because this is running on the customer's browser, CPU efficiency doesn't matter at all. They can do all sorts of stupid things, like grab the DOM from the browser, lay it out in a JS rendering engine and see if their div ends up being visible.
I haven't had the time to look through the ad javascripts on your typical fat webpage, but when there's tens of megabytes of code and it pegs my CPU at 100%, I know it's doing more than just displaying a .png in an iframe.
Could you just pick a couple of pixels from the actual page display and check they're the right color?
Not sure either of these work without access at the top page level, ie you can't get the data from scripts in an iframe? Been a while since i did any JS dev.
I've worked in and around marketing/advertising for the last 6 years in different capacities and have found that the emphasis on audience hyper-segmentation and retargeting to the exclusion of other methods is the single biggest piece of bullshit out there. Targeting people based on what they are apparently interested in vs. places they go that reflect those interests doesn't give better results and can turn off your customers. It sounds cool to marketing teams and it works to get you contest entries, but it doesn't usually translate to more conversions than a well managed campaign would give.
If I buy a mattress, advertising more mattresses to me doesn't make me more likely to buy them; I bought the thing already. Advertising mattresses to a person on a mattress review website, though - that works. Of course, that's harder to do.
Still getting TONS of car advertising, after I bought one 8 months ago (when I see it).
seriously car ads are what pushed me to JavaScript off by default since their ads are almost as rude as porn ads. Even the normal advertising reset trick of "open all in new tab" on a folder with a dozen cloud/server hosts didn't swap out advertising to their normally sane ads.
i bought my friends kid a backpack that looked like an owl. i got advertisements for the it for a few weeks after, which was strange to me. I bought the backpack on amazon, and the advertisements were amazon. didn't they know I bought it already? didn't they know I probably didn't need 2 of them?
"If I buy a mattress, advertising more mattresses to me doesn't make me more likely to buy them; I bought the thing already."
Actually, it is possible that you might want to buy a mattress again. Consider that you found the new mattress to be more/less firm and are looking to return it and get a different one. I think it is reasonable to show ads for the same thing at least till the end of return window.
You may get extreme edge cases, but you're going to pay more to get them because the conversion rate will be low. You'd get more out of targeting placements directly because you would hit all people looking for a new mattress there, not just people that have already purchased one.
Well, I just found out which half I wasted on Google AdWords. I had a campaign targeting the US. It was much less effective than I had expected, and just yesterday I found out why: There is a little option in advanced settings that lets you decide if you want to display your ads to users "in your targeted countries", or "interested in your targeted countries". The second is the default option, and if you do not change it, it will display your ads in Belarus, India, Turkey and wherever, altough you have an US-only audience. I got lots of calls from the Adwords sales team, always trying to tell me how to spend more money on Adwords. Nobody every pointed at the wrong setting, although they had all my settings and campaigns clear in front of them. I have the feeling that Google owes me a few thousand dollars.
Plenty of reporting available that would have identified keywords and geo performance stats. Adwords seems easy enough but it's pretty complex to get things done right.
This isn't really a qualitative judgement against advertising so much as what happens in large mature industries as waste and inefficiency and perverse incentives pile up. Look at any government/military over-spending for similar effects.
P&G is one of the largest advertisers on the planet using hundreds of agencies with thousands of vendors with millions of placements across digital media, managed by thousands of people trying to make themselves look good and get that bonus. This is a typical cycle of cleaning house.
The industry itself is slowly getting better and will eventually fix many problems through technology and regulation but there's still a very long way to go for that.
A couple of things going on at once - it's hard for old guard companies to compete in digital marketing because consumers are being trained to buy based on reviews, price, and delivery times more than brand. And when you're spending $100M/quarter over a dozen brands all digital marketing is going to be brand marketing.
It also raises a question about conversion being a lagging indicator here. It's possible after a few more months of lower spend they will start to see consumers pulling back.
Perhaps it's possible that digital marketing is not all that effective for commodity items?
I admit to having brand preferences for laundry detergent and garbage bags, though I like to believe (perhaps wishfully) they are a result of first-hand and family experiences.
Often it's a false economy. Dish detergent for example... the more expensive stuff is often far thicker concentrate and lasts many times longer than the cheap stuff.
Oh they care about the packaging, they care very much. They're doing price discrimination in stages:
The fancy toothpaste with the beautiful box comes from the same conglomerate as the cheaper one does. If you consider yourself hot stuff, you pick the fancy brand with the shiniest box. The middle class, humble folk pick the same product sans color whirl and foil insets on the box, but it's still Colgate brand shaving cream. None of that Value-By-Walmart crap for our house, no sir.
The in-store, value-add generic products look even cheaper and less attractive. My rational mind knows that Safeway doesn't own any shampoo factories, and Safeway Compliments brand shampoo comes from the same vats as the more expensive stuff on the higher shelves.
It's not like fancier graphics take more money to print. Rather, P&G, Tesco et al pay the designer to make the boxes look "cheap" or "expensive", so us suckers would opt for the more expensive option - and bring more revenue.
We are all suckers. I learned this like 10 years ago prepping for my economics admittance exam. Our house is still filled with brand-name items, because monkey be dumb.
As a control system engineer, I can confirm you're correct that store brand items are often made in the same factory, using the same equipment as brand items.
However in every factory I've worked in, there have always been differences in quality.
Active or expensive ingredients are reduced or replaced. Soaps concentration is lowered, butter and cocoa is reduced/replaced, less pulses(beans) or fruit in the tin, drained weights are lowered, quality control is not as strict, etc.
Regarding quality control - often factories would clean the line prior to running the high end product. Switching over to the cheaper product usually consists of switching the packaging out and topping up the supply with the cheaper product - no clean or flushing of the line. The first couple of items produced would be different quality to the rest of the batch.
You have to cut some corners to compete with big companies like p&g and Unilever. They're buying and producing much larger quantities of products than any generic brand.
Regarding cheap packaging - you pay per colour when printing. Printing materials can also be swapped out. Thinner plastic or card. Matt instead of high gloss.
A lot of people love brands and pick the one they last remember - which is why advertising is so powerful. It maybe sound cheesy/irrational/unbelievable but it's true and there are 100s of billions in market value built on it.
There is even a hidden logic to picking a brand product: when I recognize a brand, chances are high that if I had read something scandalous about that brand in the past I would not fail to make the connection. Whereas when I am looking at a noname with a "brand" as recognizable as an IPv6 address, there is no way I could make the link between product and something bad I might have read about it in the past.
"It's famous, I would have heard about it if they were all duds"
I actually do this, more or less, and consider it rational. For a large number of household goods, I really don't care about them past some baseline quality threshold. So if something worked last time and the price doesn't seem out of line, I'll use that. I generally don't remember brand names for most of these things, but generally can pick out what packaging looks like. And I'm sure advertising influences my first-choice and whatnot on the margin.
I'm sure paying attention would save some money, or, who knows, I might even be "delighted" by a "new" "product experience", but I'd rather just not think about it.
Better yet: seller that delivers to your local supermarket so you don't have to stay home and wait for them. In NL it's pretty much the preferred option for carryable items
at this scale their digital marketing is not your traditional performance marketing. traditional performance marketing would absolutely be worthless to a brand this big, but large ad buys ensure they stay top of mind for consumers in a (commodities) space where competition is more numerous than it is deep.
> It also raises a question about conversion being a lagging indicator here. It's possible after a few more months of lower spend they will start to see consumers pulling back.
Why would online lag be different from other media? It's unlikely consumers drop everything and stock up on Downy Fabric Softener after viewing the ad on TV or hearing a cheerful radio/podcast commercial.
The point is that old mass media ads are pretty much accepted as a bottomless pit with unclear outcome and that there is a whole industry specialising in independent result assessment.
Online ads promise perfect monitoring, but that is not only provided mostly by the advertisement channel provider itself (quite the opposite of independent) but also only useful for ads that aim for immediate reaction ("buy now!"), it does not tell anything about brand awareness effects.
I don't think that you are disagreeing with GP at all.
Bingo. No one rushes to the store to get Downy because of a Facebook ad, but they might start buying something else a few months later if another brand has been consistently hitting them with ads.
In my (anecdotal) experience a lot of people just go for the familiar brands when buying commodity products. Surely creating brand awareness must have some kind of effect.
Honestly, I'm waiting for the internet advertising apocalypse wherein retailers cut digital ad spending because ROI is too low - and only advertise on Facebook or other sites with super targeting.
That would effectively kill a good chunk of internet services.
Search ads for retailers have solid ROI, it would be counterproductive to reduce them.
Ads on random websites are more challenging, as the intent is further removed, but still could have good ROI, just need to be cheaper.
I have to admit that at a deeper lever I'd love if advertisers get the fuck off of the web. I don't have a problem with advertising per se but the way it's used today hurts the medium in so many ways. Sites are bloated with ads, journalism is riffled with native advertising articles, malware is mainly spread through infected ads and on top of that we have a legion of companies out there which are collecting every kind of personal information imaginable without permission or any kind of regulation. Enough is enough.
The good thing about Google's cost-combative platforms like Adwords and DoubleClick is it prices the lowest rung of spammers out of the market.
Multinationals leaving these platforms means the price drops down. This not only means more illegitimate entities can afford to compete, but that publishers need more of them, in more places, just to stay afloat on the same income.
You could argue that this is falling apart because Google takes a 50-68% cut of what the advertisers pay, away from publishers. I'm not sure how this competes with old world advertising, but that seems pretty severe. If they edged off on this —they'd lose a ton of money but— they'd probably make the internet better.
I'm afraid that the situation is backwards. Media aren't published for an ulterior reason and propped up with ads to cut costs. Most digital media exist to show ads, and it props them with "viral content" to lure in readers.
Paper media can sell a paper copy and (theoretically) run without ads. Digital media would have to sell subscription (when they can offer high-quality content), or run entirely on ads (then the content is secondary). Guess which type is prevalent.
It's really too bad that they got away from being an equalizer in the advertising space. Pricing the spammers out of the market isn't the best way. Keeping the advertising from becoming so in-your-face is the right way to fight this. And quit trying to get ahead of my thinking in what I want to purchase. I never recall them ever getting it right. I've never searched for something, seen an ad, then purchased. EVER.
And I'm ready to make a several-hundred-dollar purchase tomorrow and I see ZERO ads around these products. I see plenty of crap.
In my view, the founding hypothesis of the company- that people will be amenable to ads connected to what they are searching for- is incorrect. So we're seeing a pretty clumsy pivot.
I keep hoping Duck Duck Go takes it elsewhere. It could be very easy, maybe as simple as a little button I click that says "I am looking to purchase" and now let the advertisers make their pitches.
The point is, I would like to see if they got better results by letting me drive.
When i use Google news , there's so much waste in web journalism: a million journalists rewriting the same article, and often a useless and low quality article, at that.
I agree. It’s really old fashioned supply and demand. When the price drops below the price of providing something, you get a shortage. We need a shortage of some of the nonsense that passes for “news” these days!
In the heyday of the wires, Reuters, AP and to a lesser extent UPI and AFP were the syndicated news sources of choice – now every “digital marketing” intern from here to Jakarta suddenly is their own “wire” service. I am all for diverse reporting, but the same story written 800 different ways at a quality approaching trained monkeys on typewriters – I’m kind of over it.
We can ask ourselves what could exist without ads.
Most newspapers could make old-style ad deals, like they do for print. A few newspapers also still finance their sites almost entirely through subscriptions, and those would continue to exist (e.g. Süddeutsche, SPIEGEL). As would obviously publicly financed sites (BBC, ARD, ZDF, NPR).
Also products financed via paying customers, such as imgur used to be, or possibly reddit if they change the way reddit gold works.
Also, most people's blogs would continue to exist, as many self-host or use services where the free users are subsidized by the paying ones. Even WhatsApp used to be profitable with that model.
We'd be going back to a 2010 era web, and I'm not so sure that's actually bad. We'd lose the corporate dominance over the web, Google, Facebook, etc.
Now, there is one part where paying user subsidizing doesn't work, but where ads are currently the only model of financing, and that's search engines.
But considering those act as a public service, maybe after advertisers leave the web and Google goes down crashing, a government could just buy Google (as the German government bought DHL, or major shares in VW, they could probably just outright buy Google).
You are worth ~26€ to Google. On average, only ~5% of users are willing to pay, so each paying user would have to subsidize ~19 non-paying users for such a model to be profitable.
This would result in you paying around 600€ to use Google.
Alternatively, in a paid-only scenario (where you just pay the 26€), Google would become such a niche product that it'd become irrelevant.
The ad business requires Google to hire a hell of a lot of developers who are not working on the search engine. A pay service would be viable on less revenue. And nobody knows who many people are actually willing to pay for Google search because we've never had to.
Since ads on the web are mostly produced by bots for bots, and distributed through shady borderline-criminal ad-networks I think we've already reached rock bottom years ago and it can only get better.
Wasn't that always true though? The earliest internet I knew was through AOL cd's, but it still seems like the internet as we know it was born of cancerous (mostly pornographic) ads.
If people built more things instead of sold them to people maybe there'd be less need for advertising (or politicians). When the value is actually clear there is far less need to convince people.
Make things that work, sell your vision not the product. People will buy into your vision, and accept more product shortcomings and cheer you on as you improve.
Well, the Internet existed before web ads were a thing, and it was a better place in many ways. I wouldn't mind losing a lot of the current noise (twitter, facebook...) to end up with a network of public services, subscription-supported businesses, and fan/volunteer-powered resources.
I've always loved the idea of a back-to-basics www2 project. Not enough people care about this stuff for it to ever work though. 99% of people are perfectly happy with the FB/Google/etc world.
Hopefully a step in the direction towards cleaning the internet from the blotch of online ads. Make the internet a place to learn again and an open platform where people and businesses can exchange ideas(and data), not the silo'ed short-term profit-mongering mess it has become.
I agree that would be amazing. Sadly, for every big advertiser that cuts back, a million others are willing to fill the void with a slightly smaller bid in order to gain exposure and eyeballs on their product. And publishers will sell it to them to keep the lights on. And yet, prices go up year after year on increased competition. Google's profit was up 29% last quarter on stronger ad sales, and Facebook was up 71% over last year. A race to the top, or the bottom?
Not sure what we can get from this article as there are so many variables... What "digital" spend was cut: paid search? online video? paid social media? brand vs. product oriented?
What was the impact of non-marketing drivers like distribution, price, promo, competition, and the economy?
What was the impact of (new) ad creative?
Maybe take it as they are under pressure to cut expenses and cutting marketing, digital and likely non-digital, certainly helps.
I don't think it really matters. The reality is that the Ad space is ridden with fraud, poorly performing networks, platforms and methods and I believe we will see an increase of companies dropping spending in digital advertising or at least consolidate around what works and internalize their ad buying (which has been done by ad buyers who literally rip customers off in the fees they take compared to the value they deliver)
Talking about fraud, bad websites, etc. means that it's largely display advertising.
As a user, good-riddance. As a marketer, good-riddance. It's an awful platform with WAY too much money in it right now. The rise of improved algorithms for targeting promised new paths to customer acquisition but has largely been a way to bring in lots of money without delivering true results.
Some of the responsibility for the failure of this should fall on the marketing managers and their lack of knowledge on what decent online advertising looks like.
I worked in AdLand for a while and remember the agencies impressing clients with bullshit results and pure vanity metrics.
Nothing about actual business results, just another thing marketing managers were seen to need to do.
When I worked for an ad agency I was specifically told not to add event level tracking to campaign sites because we knew engagement was awful. We could easily give the client some great vanity metrics on things like number of visits but the moment you dug into conversion rates it all went to shit.
For example, instead of spending millions on ads, write a story about "how you're not going to spend millions on ads" and get noticed by a lot of wealthy consumer in the prime pages of their Business Review newspapers.
Marketing is the price you pay to get attention. All marketing is a hack for attention. Being data-driven and figuring out the 1% of your digital ads that are working, then capitalizing on them, is a hack. Using a unique marketing distribution channel or method is a hack. Embedding the marketing into your product is a hack. These are all "growth" hacks.
Cutting in front of the line is a hack to get your lunch faster, but if everyone's doing it, the hack starts to lose effectiveness.
Not that digital ads today are ineffective, but I do think its methods have reached notable saturation points.
I think you're painting with too broad strokes by likening all marketing to hacks. Marketing is more like finding alpha in a changing, inefficient market. There are going to be short term and long term strategies that work. The only guarantee is that things will change with time and those with more information will beat those with less.
That sounds right. I look upon the word "hacking" favorably and use it broadly to mean something like "manipulating a system for a particular outcome" rather than just This One Simple Trick, sorry if I wasn't clearer.
I like the guarantee. That's why hacking in the conventional sense today-- which needs constant awareness, involvement, adaptation, experimentation to find out what works, non-codified intelligence, and dealing with the reality of a system -- can beat the process du jour. It might become the new canonical process if everyone else starts doing it.
Sometimes I feel like long-term or well-thought-out strategy is the hack in a sea of self-proclaimed hackers who focus on useless wins and optimizations.
>After cutting back on certain digital ads, “we didn’t see a reduction in the growth rate,”
>P&G, whose brands include Bounty, Crest, Tide and Pampers, spent $2.45 billion on U.S. advertising, not including spending on some digital platforms
So, even if digital advertising performed on par with everything else, it would only affect the growth rate by 5% of the effect other advertising had. Surely other factors contribute to variability at least enough that an overall effect cannot be determined using this data?
"after finding that ultra-niche targeting compromises reach and has limited effectiveness"
“The bigger your brand, the more you need broad reach and less targeted media,”
This is quite interesting. I see that other companies are cutting down on agency spending as well and some are focused on having an internal agency. The idea is to know the consumer and have a quick response to what is trending. So, apparently, the information that Facebook provides is not enough to put together a small niche group of people and say that they all would like that product. Or, at least, not worth the dollar invested. But knowing who the target consumer is, and building targeted advertising at it, but reaching a larger population has a more efficient return. Even when it reaches people who are not in the target audience of your product. Because it is a more general campaign about something that is happening, it helps in building the brand. And big companies care a lot about their brands and what people think about them.
It's not about efficiency, it's about quantity. Let's say I profit $20 for each customer my ad engages. If I reach 1000 people with amazing targeting and get a 10% response rate, I'm making on average $2/person. If I broaden the reach to 100,000 people and get only a 1% response rate, I'm making on average $1/person.
Clearly, bringing in $1/person is less efficient than bringing in $2/person, but at the end of the day you have $100,000 instead of $2,000 (ignoring the cost of the ad for simplicity).
With the broad campaign, you still get the people you would have targeted with the narrow campaign. So if you're going to do the broad campaign, you're already done.
Don't forget to factor in agency costs and in house costs. People are expensive and hurt margins. At that scale it adds up since I'm sure many of their agency partners view them as a big brand advertising cash pinata
I'm sorry to be that person, but if others start pulling their digital ads too, what effects with this have on the whole tech industry. Google and Facebook, who both are the face of the industry, would most likely get most of the blow. They both control over 77% of digital ad revenue [1]. Will that scenario only hurt those two and other ad providers in isolation or will investors reconsider tech company stocks as a whole?
Slightly relevant to the discussion, since P&G seems to have started make some changes to their digital marketing strategy earlier this year (It seems to have been a major change, since one of the companies actually had to shut down).
This is just one company. I worked for a big mobile games company, and their main complaint was how expensive where ads nowadays. They used to pump millions and get as many players as they wanted. Now you need to take a lot of care on how you spend your money, as the return of investment is not guaranteed if you pay too much.
If other companies follow suit, then we can talk about a more general issue. Maybe it is just that their campaigns were ineffective because were not good, or because their target users are not reached on digital ads.
It's not clear whether this is old banner programmatic ads that were cut, or more sophisticated social data mined tracking. Assuming it was the former?
You can ask: if this is not working for P&G why will this work for you. I have mixed experiences. If I am attacking a niche where the user will act immediately after finding you exist then it works, if you are targetting a big market with a lot of competitors it is not worth the money and time except you discover new specific keywords.
I work on an engineering growth team that focuses on large-scale digital advertising and can say it does work, for the right business, in the right context. You need a proper analytics team, engineering team, and experience to do it right. Most people who buy online ads have no idea what they are doing.
How many brands could just cut out the traditional or sales-based advertising and go for quality and word of mouth growth like ANKER?
Nothing sells me on a product like a happy customer. I scroll past the adds and related items on sites and dive right for the comments. Or just ask around work for what people use for X.
P&G ads don't work like that. Their products appeal to a broad range of people, same as their ads. Specialized targeting literally does nothing to improve conversion (and keeping their product in mind)
They sell a broad range of products, but not all of them appeal to a broad range of people. They can surely improve conversion by marketing men's razors to men and women's razors to women, for example.
I think other companies might come to the same conclusion and also reduce their ad spending.
We're in an advertising bubble just like the dot com bubble except this time it's not stock prices that are frothy, it's the advertising revenue itself.
I said before that printing money using basic income would only inflate it. Ads are designed to increase consumption, and we have a debt-based economy.
Anyone that's ever taken a serious look at online advertising knows that the elephant in the room is that most of it doesn't work. P&G is just the latest large firm to call that out.
It is very easy to waste big spends in online advertising. There are large swaths of revenue absorbing points that are completely useless or nearly useless.
There are also ways to do it effectively on limited spends. Just like anything else, it requires effort.
With as many channels as there are, and as many people who have found a way to avoid commercials, TV advertising is a shadow of what it used to be.
These days effective and valuable marketing, especially for large brands, is hard work. No one vendor is a complete solution, and you have to consistently experiment and determine what the best options are where your target customer eyeballs happen to be landing in an ever-changing landscape.
People spend more time on devices than TVs so advertising will follow in the long term. In the short term it will take companies like this to force the ecosystem to keep clean.
Does P&G have a substantial in house ad tech operation? They advertise so much that they could probably start their own DSP and license its services to others.
I've often dreamed of coding up some kind of worm-virus, but instead of stealing data or demanding ransom or corrupting storage, it would just install uBlock Origin on infected computers.
Millions of infected people, with zero idea what an "ad-blocker" is, just wondering where all the YouTube ads went. And then, hopefully after a month or so of infection, companies realizing that their bottom-lines were unaffected, pulling out of digital advertising altogether. Previously-thought-of-as-invincible giant behemoths like Facebook and Google, just crumbling to dust over a short span of time.
Personally I have grown so tired of analytics and advertising my personal idea would be to build a plugin that doesn't block anything. But instead it simply visits websites on random topics over time and clicks ads here and there. Slowly degrading the data shitty advertising companies have and ruining ROI. I am starting to do this manually and randomly clicking ads.
I honestly need to start doing that on facebook due to their new policy that every 2-3 posts need to be some "suggested" garbage
Honestly I am burned out by the constant barrage of terrible ads on most websites and social media in particular.
Noiszy is a browser plugin that creates meaningless web data - digital "noise."
It visits and navigates around websites, from within your browser, leaving misleading digital footprints around the internet. Noiszy only visits a list of sites that you approve, and only works when you turn it on. Run Noiszy in the background while you're working, or start Noiszy when you're not using your browser, and it sends meaningless data to these sites for as long as you let it run.
This meaningless data dilutes the significance of your "real" data, by creating a campaign of misinformation. You become more difficult for an algorithm to understand, market to, or manipulate. You can outsmart the "filter bubble".
I kind of suspect adblocking is doomed to die rather quickly if it ever seriously threatens the ad industry. As anti-adblock has shown even fairly trivial measures can be effective; and if you control the platform in more depth you can be a lot trickier about it, e.g. by doing minification-esque transforms to the complete dom tree.
How would markets prevent this? The only party interested in adblocking is the consumer, who isn't the supplier nor the customer of ads. Now, if there were some real alternative to ads; but nobody has found that yet. I suppose regulators could create that alternative, but that doesn't seem politically likely for the foreseeable future.
You're probably right, though I don't get why. FF mobile with uBlock origin works really really well.
Me, I'm using even IE 11 lately on-site at a customer of mine. They provide a choice of Chrome and IE, but I don't feel like klicking through Google's privacy disclaimer.
An ad never clicked usually doesn't get billed, but gets reported as expanding "the reach", so counterintuitively it might actually boost a campaign (CTR fell, but the reach is now pretty cheap).
Every single ad clicked every single time without an intent to act on it, however ... https://adnauseam.io
Digital advertising is absolutely effective. 2 of the biggest companies in the world are digital advertising companies, with several other giants. Don't be fooled by random examples.
> This dream would be the single most destructive thing to happen to the internet
Hyperbole much? That statement is just rubbish.
Personally I think it would be the most constructive thing to happen to the Internet. Hell, maybe even society in general. Advertisers are scum, they ruin everything they touch, and any 'content' producers whose businesses died if this was to occur would certainly not be missed by me.
Yeah, destructive in the sense of how antibiotics are destructive to germs. Please, give me more of them!
(Also, I hate the phrase "content producer". It seems to imply that content is fungible - companies thinking in such terms are precisely those who should go under.)
Content worth paying for is worth paying for the old-fashioned way. Movies are not an ad-supported industry, nor is music. We'd only lose the crap that has to trick people into paying indirectly, and good riddance.
Worth is not what is at stake here. It’s become obviously apparent that the public - even if they see value in something - prefers to get it for “free”.
They are linked in the footer appearing on nearly every page of HN (and have been for years). Comments about downvotes are explicitly addressed in them, so not much room for interpretation there either.
That quote is an argument for why "not mentioned in the guidelines doesn't mean it is acceptable behavior", it's not saying that no written-down rules exist.
Do what you gotta do, dang, according to you're taste. According to my taste, flagging on a polite and irrefutable comment is what's uncivil and/or unsusbstantive. There's no recourse other than to say something so that's what I gotta do. Thanks.
The controversial statement that started this was:
> Perhaps rather anecdotal, but this is why I joined Uber, and did not take my Facebook or Google offers. It feels nice to work on tech that directly impacts lives and how a persons day flows. As opposed to, as you correctly put it, optimizing click bait.
Back in the olden days where ads where more sparse, they would have so much more impact. Nowadays after the awash of ads we have everywhere, companies are collectively loosing their ability to make ads impact. (by logic, the more we are exposed to it, the less effective it it).
Therefore they did it to themselves. They abused it, so that now people reject them where they can, and it becomes less profitable. No sympathy from me.
Ads worked differently back in the days. A hiking site would accept sponsorships by outdoor brands, basically copying the magazine model, where the targeted audience gets served targeted ads with publishers inserting themselves in the middle and collecting a fee.
The big brands have figured out that in cost-per-click (or any cost-per-action model) retargeting delivers the best results, so if you go and search for flights to Barcelona or some shoes, those flights and those shoes will follow you around - there's a high probability that a click will lead to a purchase, and it costs advertisers essentially zero if they're wrong, since you likely won't click.
The Web ads industry thus turned into a raffle industry - ads for same flights to Barcelona will turn up on outdoor enthusiast sites, CNN, Wired magazine, ESPN, your local newspaper site, Facebook and whatever else you happen to visit the next few days. In a raffle scenario the entity with the most raffle tickets gets higher chances of winning, so publishers are locked in a war to accummulate as many raffle tickets as possible with the hopes that one of them will be a major winner, i.e. you finally buying those tickets to Barcelona and those shoes on Zappos.
I see this as positive in some ways. Previously most topics made a pittance compared to the "mesothelioma attorney" kind of topics. So if your site wasn't about one of these high-paying keywords, tough luck. Retargeting levels the landscape a little.
> The growth of “zero-sum” activities may, however, be even more important. Look around the economy, and it’s striking how much high-talent manpower is devoted to activities that cannot possibly increase human welfare, but entail competition for the available economic pie.
Advertising seems to be a zero-sum game. I can imagine some industries cartellizing to stop it altogether.
It's a pipe dream; but advertising/lobbying deserves regulatory hurdles much like other public health threats (e.g. tobacco). And before anyone shouts "freedom of speech" - we already do that extensively for stuff like fraud, libel, and incitement to violence/terrorism, so this isn't really anything particularly new.
It's simply detrimental to the overall ability for us to think.
> And before anyone shouts "freedom of speech" - we already do that extensively for stuff like fraud, libel, and incitement to violence/terrorism, so this isn't really anything particularly new.
So the slippery slope people were right after all.
Freedom of speech isn't a blanket "call it speech and you can now do it unrestricted" rule. It is the freedom to communicate with interested parties about the matters of your choosing. It is not supposed to be a freedom to perform mass campaigns of dishonesty in economic or political domains.
Sure they could, but it's not the definition of speech that needs to be fixed, it's the definition of "dishonesty campaign."
And there, the problem is not about speech, but identity-protection for the religious. One person's lies are "protected tradition" while another person's lies are "dangerous fake news."
Yeah. You clearly intend for this newfangled freedom of speech thing to protect critical commentary, avoid repression and promote the exchange of valuable ideas; and all of the sudden people apply it in all kinds of nonsensical counterproductive ways.
Slippery slope and all...
Unless of course you really think that protecting the rich & powerful's ability to mislead and trick others is really a societal benefit.
