I dislike these articles that try to manufacture outrage by using emotionally-charged terms from the physical world - like “stalking” - in the context of targeted advertising, to make things seem more threatening than they really are.
Someone stalking you in real life is pretty damn scary, and not at all comparable to an automated Facebook algorithm showing you ads for mountain bikes because you joined a mountain biking club.
EDIT: I realize now that it was actually a HN commenter who used the word stalking, not the article, which is slightly more circumspect, though still uses manipulative language in my view.
I agree - I also remember a comment a while back from someone on the google ads team and a lot of the targeted ads help small businesses the most.
Large brands already have a lot of market presence and a lot of money for advertising campaigns. Small businesses that can find targeted customers that might want their thing on a nation or country wide scale get huge benefits from that and would be hurt the most from losing it.
People have such strong and over-confident ideological positions without really knowing the issue in depth or thinking through consequences.
Thinking about my past experiences —- I can definitely see how that may be the case.
That being said — we have got a problem here and we ought to try and solve it. The ability to target people with potent advertisements tuned using machine learning on large scale populations is fearsome in its potential. At the very least it should not be allowed to continue without basic restrictions and oversight. Like it should be obvious that targeted political advertisements in liberal, free-market democracies will lead us to bad places! Yet we do nothing.
The large businesses have priced the smaller businesses out of 99% of the market. They leave only the crumbs from the table and pretend that's how "advertising" works now.
It's not advertising, it's commodification of the machinery of advertising. It's worse than selling pickaxes at the gold rush: it's like franchising the pickaxe stores.
> to make things seem more threatening than they really are
I see that real stalking is a terrible thing, but undermining elections/democracy and negatively impacting things like happiness and mental health worldwide also seems pretty threatening to me, less personal but affecting many more people.
And stalking is not even a good analogy. They act more like possessive pimps, gauging their abusive clients who can choose and then take turns doing whatever to their naive and innocent "offerings".
I'm not saying they're completely equivalent but as a result of this whole tracking there are rather complete profiles about millions of people in some companies' DB, including hyper sensitive data such as sexual and political orientation which is just one The Purge scenario away from being abused on a massive scale. But even at a smaller scale, this data can be extremely (incl physically) harmful to individuals when leaked or when it falls into the wrong hands (Eg gay person in Uganda. EDIT: or a completely normal person in a future McCarthy-style witch hunt).
You're right. I'm sure finding a search history looking for domestic abuse shelters couldn't possibly cause physical harm. I'm sure that location data showing regular meetings with known AA members couldn't possibly cause harm to a career. I'm sure that somebody's adult website preference couldn't possibly reveal somebody's sexuality, and that nobody would have relationships hurt by having them revealed.
And of course, these databases couldn't possibly leak. Otherwise, we might conclude that these are databases that can hurt people, and should not exist.
Do you (or have you) worked for Google, Facebook, or any company that derives a significant portion of revenue from ads? Perhaps we should question the value of services if people aren't willing to pay for them.
Tracking people as they use the internet should be a crime. It's not something most people are even conscious about, and I think they'd be outraged if they knew someone was always looking over their shoulder.
The longer we let this go unchecked, the further our privacy erodes and the claws of the surveillance state sink in.
i really don't see any harm in tracking. What are people afraid of? the article was not in any way able to show how it harms people.
When you go to the starbucks, and the waiter recognizes you and remembers your name, is that creepy? What if they remember that your usual drink is a latte and remembers that the next time you come is that creepy? What if, heaven forbid, they tell a coffee company that you like dark roast, and now you receive an advertisement brochure in the mail for a dark roast coffee you wanted to buy anyways.
I really don't see the harm. Is it the fact that they have the info? or is it what they might do with it?
are people worried about embarrassing websites they've visted? I get that. But, for that you just use incognito mode.
I don't want to have a personal relationship with merchants, but I especially don't want their marketing panopticon piecing together the lives of Americans.
> But, for that you just use incognito mode.
That doesn't work. Fingerprinting can still track you.
I always thought that if the government wants to get you, then they'll definitely get you. The powers of government are already so vast, Not having your browsing history won't stop them one bit.
There's quite a difference of scale between the staff of a particular shop knowing what I'm up to when at that shop, but nothing else, and what amounts to automated surveillance tracking me around vast swathes of my (online) life and trying to aggregate everything together in one single profile.
It's definitely stalking. There is absolutely no question whatsoever about that. Please disclose how you benefit financially from the stalking so we can all be level here.
Advertising, in general, is under-taxed. Should it even be tax-deductible as a business expense? Overall, in the US, most people are maxed out on spending. The savings rate is low. Advertising does not stimulate demand, it just moves it around, while adding cost.
Think of a tax on advertising as mutual disarmament for manufacturers. Less spent on fighting with competitors, more price cutting.
It can draw people to buy on credit, thus stimulating demand. And fundamentally businesses are taxed on profit, and advertising is an expense, so if you start saying advertising isn't tax deductible, you start fundamentally changing the way corporate taxation works and opening up a whole can of worms. Adding a tax on advertising spend like a sales tax would be far less messy - but it would benefit brands with large existing recognition at the expense of smaller/emerging companies. Without advertising, warby parker would never have been able to grow, leaving luxottica unchallenged as the largest frame maker. You'd just cement current market leaders.
To play devil's advocate, advertising is a social good, and better advertising is even more of a social good.
How many times have you heard someone complain, "I just bought a desk lamp, and now I'm getting loads of ads for desk lamps. Don't they know I don't want another desk lamp?" And surveys back it up -- people would largely rather the ads they see reflect the things they're interested in. Because a well-targeted ad is good for the viewer. Sometimes they want the thing, and they buy it, and their life is improved.
If I'm statistically more likely to buy a particular item because of some demographic I belong to, and you have my demographic information, by all means use it to decide which ads to show me.
Maybe you having that information is a breach of my privacy, but if you do have it you should at least use it for something that'll benefit me.
This shouldn't even be a devil's advocate point of view. Targeted advertisements have been just about the greatest value-add in the world of business in maybe the last twenty years.
Imagine if you couldnt target advertisements. Imagine the waste. European baby formula manufacturers advertising to middle aged single men in Wyoming shouldn't happen, and it's because targeted advertising that we prevent that waste. We are all better off for it.
If they didn’t know they wanted it before an advertisement played on their psychology to make them feel they needed it, then they didn’t really want it.
And if they did know they wanted before the advertisement, then they’d go look for it at a store, online or otherwise, or in a catalogue, or so on.
> Imagine if you couldnt target advertisements. Imagine the waste.
Following your argument, the world 30 years ago (when we didn't have targeted ads) would have been a terrible place. Perhaps you should explain why it wasn't.
To me it only means that advertising in itself is not really advantageous, except if everybody else is doing it. It's like a prisoners' dilemma for companies and we are all paying the price in the form of more expensive products, but also in the form of more consumerism.
Advertising was targeted then. TV ads were bought by geography, channel and timeslot. Newspaper ads targeted people who read newspapers, radio ads targeted people by channel and time of day, billboards by geography etc etc.
All of those things made the world a better place, as did the targetability of common-sense regulations around advertising to children during their regularly scheduled TV-watching timeslots.
I'm aware of that, but we're talking about personalized ads based on internet tracking. I think most would agree that there is a huge difference with the type of advertising you are talking about. In fact, I think many people here including me would think that the advertising model of 30 years ago was okay/acceptable compared to what it is now.
Regarding children needing protection against any kind of ads, that's a good point, but dropping targeted ads does not mean we would need to drop targetability of regulations as you put it.
That didn’t happen a ton before the Internet anyway, because even if you can’t profile individuals you can profile a readership accurately enough not to make a mistake that bad very frequently. That just requires having a decent guess of who’s reading something and where it’s distributed, not tracking every individual reader. Ditto billboards and such. Don’t advertise your European product on a highway sign in Wyoming and you solve the geography problem. Post your for-sale ad for a tractor in the ag paper you see at your local feed shop. Doesn’t take tracking anyone to do that.
Targeted advertisements on highway billboards didn't exist in 1990 and they don't exist today.
However, on the internet, there is no controlling who sees or clicks on your advert without targeting controls, hence why said targeting controls are a godsend and should be protected.
Right, individual targeting before the Internet was basically limited to mail. But a billboard is still targeted to a population! There are different ads on billboard in Times Square versus a rural stretch of Nevada interstate for a reason.
You can control which sites you’re paying to run your ad on the Internet, just like anywhere else. The idea that internet advertising must be wholly indiscriminate without spying on and targeting individuals is absurd.
Unfortunately, targeted ads have been around far longer than the internet. The direct mail industry was booming for decades. That said, it's ENTIRELY possible to target ads based on intent or interest without tracking individual users.
If a European baby formula company wants to sell more product they could buy ads that show up when someone searches for baby formula {intent} or run ads on childbirth YouTube channels {interest}.
If a middle aged man from Wyoming sees those ads, he would have been mis-targeted regardless.
Is it really though? How many times is it more like, see the thing they don't really want or need, are swayed by an advertisement targetted based on a profile created through data harvested through their phone, their credit card, their social media, their email, etc., they buy the thing, experience a temporary endorphin rush from having the new thing that makes them feel good for a while, get bored of the thing and move on to the next thing provided by targetted advertisements?
Even with targeted ads how often is it that someone actually (1) wants the thing and (2) buying the thing is net good for them and for society?
I'm sympathetic to the argument that ads could reduce information asymmetry, make the market more efficient, and thus count as a social good. The problem is that advertisers' incentives aren't the same as society or the consumer's.
Look at it this way: Google exists. If you know you want something, it's not hard to find online. Ergo, if you often find yourself buying something because you saw it in an ad, what does that say about your rationality as a consumer?
In practice, corporations buy ads to manufacture demand because their products are neither things consumers or society actually wants, nor things consumers rationally choose to seek out.
And we can have it both ways. If consumers really wanted targeted ads, we could build a website for that: users enter their personal information and the website responds with personalized ads. Like Google-search but with only sponsored results.
Agreed. Call it a corporate profit good and that's fair. Social good? Fuck those *s promoting such propaganda. Mark their aliases in your blackbook and forever look at them as absolute demons. Doing their thang.
The quality of products on the market will improve beyond a margin if people buy after research and thorough reviews rather than being told something is good. Then companies might have to compete beyond having the flashiest ads.
Interesting article. Then I dug in more about the author and no wonder he runs a competing user tracking service that competes directly with google analytics. Sure it does less targeting - but then also provides less data points.
Here's an idea: let people have a public advertising profile they have personal access to. I'd do a lot less adblocking if I knew advertisers were picking off a defined list of my interests. New iphone? No. Android flagship with a headphone jack and a telephoto camera? Oh yeah I'm interested. Allow people to make it known they're interested in classic computers or new rifle accessories or LEGO videogames or books from John Scalzi. It would be nice if advertisers knew enough about me I could cancel all my Google Alerts.
What this ignores is that non targeted advertising means less money for publishers. As advertisers are willing to spend more when they have more info about a user. According to a Google study [1] the impact can be as high as 50%.
I prefer targeted advertising that's relevant to me. Especially because the advertiser doesn't actually know anything about me as an individual, I'm just an id, one of billions.
"Wrong" in your opinion, not in the opinion of others.
Choice is a beautiful thing- that's why with things like GDPR you can opt out from tracking, personalized advertising and be worth less as a user to the publisher.
Ad tech needs to do a better job in making these choices easier to make and persist.
edit- as the commenter below correctly states, GDPR is "Opt-in" not "Opt-out"
Think of TV and other traditional media. The content is created to attract people which are turn sold to advertisers as a commodity. If you're looking at specific content, you are being targeted, by the content and any appropriated ads depending on who is buying at the time. All without individual tracking and targeting.
Seeing an ad for something like a keyboard on a site about cooking is wasteful in so many ways. Mostly due to the inherit waste/loss in the ad stack and market. Too many middlemen taking too many %s of the pie to add what is in essence, a small lift in performance for the advertiser. Who really has no choice but to spend more if they want to increase their goals.
The problem is that the internet became about gaming a false metric to make money. Success was measured by metrics like Impressions...
The entire market is very wasteful and exists without a proper market forces to balance the costs. Facebook, Google make up their pricing. There is no transparency in the demand, they just choose a price, take a large % of the value, (or all) and have no incentive to change course.
Most people better receive random, contextual driven ads than specific targeted ones. They interact with something similar to the content rather than to their specific browsing history. The thing that FB figured out, was they could combine content into ads and also sell ads against that content. Taking hold of the whole enchilada.
1) "Success was measured by metrics like Impressions" - advertisers need to get smarter and link advertising to bottom line results. If you can't tie ad spend to improvement in sales, then why are you spending money?
2) "The entire market is wasteful and exists without proper market forces" - the entire point of programmatic advertising is each impression is sold in an auction, so it can be a very efficient way to buy advertising. The problem is when there are too many middle men between the advertiser and the audience taking a cut, this is why "supply path optimization" is becoming a big thing in the industry by helping you answer "how can I get to my audience with the fewest people in the middle?"
3)TV and traditional media wasn't necessarily the most efficient way to advertise, the "spray and pray" approach. Advertisers and TV networks are beginning to realize this, that's why a more and more of the ads you're watching on TV are actually placed there via programmatic advertising and the percentage is only rising.
Take a look at your microwave oven and ask yourself why it has so many buttons. 99% of the time you are using it for one thing only. To heat an item for 15, 30, 60 or N seconds. On high.
Yet every single microwave is full of dozens of other buttons. Multiple other functions. Lots of features, bells and dings.
Why?
Because somewhere along the way, people thought they needed these extra features to sell their product. They thought they added value. But in the end, they do not add value to 99% of their users or their actual use. They are superfluous and yet, they remain on every microwave oven sold.
This is what digital ads have become. A kluge of processes and jargon chasing a rainbow of perfect, efficient ad delivery. Something that is impossible to achieve.
With the FB and Google and Amazon, owning the sell side market, you do not have a balanced marketplace. They are not adjusting the cost of the imp, conversion, or click or engagement or the N based on efficiency, or competition, or depreciation over time. They are in fact doing the opposite. They are adjusting the price based on none of those things. Only their ability to sell all those buttons, those features and those extras...
And in the end, the advertiser just wants to sell more of X or achieve more of Y for as little as possible.
Microwaves offer additional features because it's really cheap, some of us like them (defrost is great!), and the features don't get in the way for users who don't need them. I don't think this is a useful analogy.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but defrost is just a microwave for a very long time, right?
Why _not_ just microwave by typing 5 minutes? Or instead, why shouldn't the microwave have less abstruse buttons like "1 min", "2 min", "5 min" which grant you the opportunity to seamlessly jump to trying to use your intuition to figure out the timing you want instead of this vague "defrost" button which... I'm still not sure what it does.
Defrost is a long time, but at a lower power. For example, if I want to defrost a small bowl of berries I could put it in for 30s on high, but they'd get a bit cooked and squishy. If I put it in as defrosting 2oz it runs for ~1:40 at a much lower power and they're nearly as nice as if I'd let them slowly come up to temp in the fridge.
I could be wrong but I believe that most microwaves operate with a single power. The various settings are just cycling the power on and off at different variables... 5 is half the number of cycles, Defrost is a timer setting, pre-programmed based on weight of food... water content.
Yes, I think you're right, turning down the power level is usually implemented as cycling the magnetron. But you need to be smart in how you do it if you're not going to wear out the microwave unnecessarily by using cycles that are too short. If you are cooking something big you can do 50% with 30s on / 30s off, while if it's small you might need 2s on / 2s off. Hence the relatively complex controls.
That's why these features are on every single one. They are cheap. Their costs went down over time... And just like digital, there are only a few manufactures.
Have digital ad costs decreased over time as supply as increased?
You're assuming that Google, FB and Amazon are the entire supply side of the market. They're a huge part of it yes, but there's about 30% of the internet supply that they don't control and once you get into the TV space it becomes even more open.
TV open? Um. No. I guess if you count the myriad of brokers as supply, otherwise, the linear market is even tighter. Not too mention most of the ads are never seen...and not audited. Leave the scatter out, that's for and local ads and DR. Those are measured in pennys, not dollars.
Traditional TV isn't. But more and more TV is consumed via various types of CTV platforms- these are transacted programmatically, mostly through private deals but a growing share via open programmatic.
Isn't the choice of publisher itself a form of ad targeting?
E.g. many advertisers probably believe readers of "The Atlantic" and "Guns and Ammo" segment into two distinct populations. And publishers themselves certainly target media to specific segments, e.g. fashion magazines for young middle-class women versus middle-aged gay rich men have different content
Context (which is basically what you're referring to) is just one strategy.
Often, targeting is used to narrow in on an audience. Let's say I have a product to sell but I don't know my exact audience- I'd start a very broadly targeted campaign then see which types of people are responding to the ad. I would then narrow my targeting based on response. The broad targeting can lead to insights that I wouldn't have received if I had targeted a specific publisher.
Does targeted vs non targeted really have an impact on sales? And if targeted was gone everywhere would it really cause a drop in revenue?
It seems (from the little I’ve seen over the years) that targeting doesn’t have much impact. And that advertising budgets are pretty fixed as a percentage so revenues wouldn’t go down if everyone had to stop targeting.
We have almost all the technology. What we don't have is verifiability in most cases. i.e. the real problem is that the publisher cannot determine that the User Agent is telling the truth. Everyone has a different value on the value of their data. For instance, I find great targeted advertising to be practically like a recommendation engine. Instagram's ads are great! And few of them relate to things I've done on Instagram or Facebook. They're clearly 3rd party.
If we can find a way to ensure that the User Agent isn't lying (this may not be easy), then I could trade my data for a discount on the WSJ instead of paying full price and you could pay for the WSJ at full price and share nothing about yourself.
I think the truth is that most people will pick the discount, but that's because I would. I think that's a fair exchange and very open and clear. You can opt-in.
Once upon a time, cable didn't have ads, because theoretically it got money from cable subscribers. Then they realized they could have subscribers and ads and make even more money.
The vast majority of sites don't treat "paying subscriber" and "sell information" as an either-or. They treat paying subscribers as people they get money and more information from.
Also, there's a third option: keep improving ad-blocker-blockers, so that they don't just block ads, they also block "we see you're using an ad blocker" messages.
Almost everything is fake-able outside of Google chrome exposing an IDFA (verified against google account data that is hard to fake) I don't see something currently possible that would be as fraud proof.
My guess though is that the same people who cry foul about 3rd party tracking I'm sure would be just as mad about this + now monopoly gripes.
This may be unpopular on HN. But I dont mind ads, I dont mind target ads either, in many cases I like them. What I do mind is creepy, personal ads.
"Your Friends Joe just bought a wallet, you might like this too."
I am OK with recommending me a wallet, since in real life I would have sales coming around me if I was in the Wallet counter and interested in one. I am absolutely NOT OK with being told my friend Joe bought a wallet. How did they know Joe was my friend, why are they telling me he bought a new wallet?
Amazon are allowed to collected data when I am in their store, but those Data should not be sold to any other company.
Right now there is a whole market for personal Data, and to me, that should be illegal.
Names follow a power law distribution, there are millions of guys named Joe and everyone has a friend with that name. Half of the men in the US have only 100 different names.
Do you think it was just a coincidence in Amazons serie "The man in the high castle" the main character is named John Smith?
I think it was more specific like Joe Smith, which was indeed my friend with his Facebook Profile pic, it was many years before there was any backslash against Facebook. It was that time I decided to drop Facebook.
The idea that it is ok for Amazon to show you targeted advertising on their properties but its not ok for third parties to do so seems like a pretty easy way to entrench Google and Amazon.
In fact, targeted advertising is _already_ extremely low margin outside of Facebook and Google. The big dollar ad campaigns follow context (Ford doesn’t want to follow you around the internet, they want to show you every ad on ESPN.com and their other properties).
This is a proposal that would a) make Google/Amazon/Facebook even more powerful on the internet and b) kill small publishers.
While I agree with the overall sentiment in regards to supporting end-user privacy, this article’s title is a bit sensational and the body fails to provide enough substance to support such a dramatic claim. It’s an overly idealistic solution to the problem and therefore is not of much use.
What would the text of the law say? All in-person sales activities are personalized. Would it simply forbid the use of automation for this in a list of specific ways? What would it say about YouTube video recommendations?
There's an easier solution: drop the word "targeted", and ban all unsolicited advertising. You have to define "advertising" either way, and this way you don't have to define what "targeted" means.
It will effectively put vast majority of the Internet behind a paywall. Just turn it into a sort of a cable TV of today. With almost all small publishers closing and the rest just charging for what you see, and turning it into a largely unidirectional, top-to-bottom source of information... Because there is no way in the world non-targeted advertisements are going to pay for things, remember those mid-1990s sites all flashing with banners - and yet never making enough.
Knee-jerk decision IMO. Advertising will always be at the core of businesses, and they all compete with each other on lowering the costs of advertising. Why would they agree on non-targeted ads if at least one of them has incentive to target their own ads? People began using ad blockers exactly because ads were not targeted.
I'm using an adblocker because most ads are deceptively trying to push garbage products. And I feel like I've never been offered some valuable information by an ad. Having them push stuffs we want (good and relevant products) it's different from having them push targeted trash. I believe that selling trash anonymously on the internet (think drop shipping, malware and bloatware) is so lucrative that genuine products and companies have a hard time competing.
Someone stalking you in real life is pretty damn scary, and not at all comparable to an automated Facebook algorithm showing you ads for mountain bikes because you joined a mountain biking club.
EDIT: I realize now that it was actually a HN commenter who used the word stalking, not the article, which is slightly more circumspect, though still uses manipulative language in my view.