Video More From Don Marti About Why Targeted Ads are Bad (Video 2 of 2) 53
Robin: I was reading and now I’ve forgotten all about it, but I do remember your ruminations on targeted advertising and overtargeted advertising, and if targeted advertising was that good, we’d all love spam, wouldn’t we?
Don: Well, everything they are saying about hypertargeted internet advertising now is exactly what Sanford Wallace the spam king was saying about spam in the late ‘90s, and if he’d been right then, we could have had everything that the ad tech companies are promising on the email spam platform.
Robin: That’s right. And I noticed that let’s say I go through and I looked at like for this phone, I looked at a cheap phone, I saw that, and now I go to read oh I don’t know Slashdot, and my god, off to the side, there is an ad for that phone, right?
Don: Yeah. It is one of those things where in a typical advertising connection with the company, the company is asking you for attention, but they are really giving you a lot of information by the fact that they are choosing to advertise that product, the fact that they are choosing specific places to advertise it, and the amount that they are throwing at it. Let’s say you are a company CIO and you are looking to invest for years in the exampleware platform, or even if you are an individual buying a cell phone and you are looking for years and years of apps and content on a phone platform you really want the companies to send you an accurate signal about how much they are putting into that platform for the future. If a company is able to target specific individuals, people who might already be invested in a platform, and blow up their signal artificially then there is no real reason for you to look at advertising any more.
Robin: Ah, okay, so does that mean more people I’ll never use an ad blocker, because I make my living writing for ad supported sites, and if I did use an ad blocker I wouldn’t admit it.
Don: Well, when I was working for ad supported sites I always ran an ad blocker because I didn’t want to be fair or unfair to a particular company depending on who’s advertising on the site, so if somebody said, “I can’t believe I saw the ad that example.com placed on your website,” I’d say, “Well, look I am on the editorial side, in order to be fair, I don’t look at any of the ads.”
Robin: Yeah, but now I am finding that if I had an ad blocker, I am not saying I do, but let’s say I went to the Washington Post website, it doesn’t work – I see the ads – what’s up?
Don: Well, there are two kinds of ads. It is interesting that you bring this up, because the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are starting to fall back on what you might call first party advertising. I run a tool called disconnect.me which is a nice privacy tool that helps protect your information from third party trackers, and that tool as a side effect, blocks a lot of the third party advertising. But when I go to nytimes.com, there are a lot of ads that show up on the home page, and those are the ads that aren’t coming from those big third party ad networks, but they are coming from the nytimes.com domain. The Wall Street Journal is doing something similar.
Robin: So what you are saying is going back to, as we did in the old days, serving the ads from their own servers.
Don: Exactly. I don’t know if you have seen the TV show Mad Men where they are going out and drinking; well, it is the old 1960s advertising business, they are going out drinking and billing it to their client, they’ve got big expense accounts, they’ve got super deluxe offices, and you look at that advertising world and you compare it to everybody on a laptop type of ad world of today, and you think, “Wow! We must be so much more efficient today with the internet. The internet makes everything more efficient, doesn’t it?”
Robin: But not as much fun. Come on, Don, l mean let’s face it. I would love to take you out for a big boozy expense account lunch or something.
Don: Well, look at the actual numbers then. Something really interesting that Tim Armstrong the CEO of AOL came up with is today publishers are getting about 25 to 45 percent of what advertisers spend. Back in the
Robin: Wait a minute, you are talking about paper publishers?
Don: I am talking about online publishers.
Robin: Oh online? Okay.
Don: Online publishers, they are pulling down 25 to 45 percent of the advertiser’s budget. Go back to Mad Men days with the deluxe offices, and the free martinis and all that good stuff – those guys were letting the publisher have 85 percent while the agency pulled in 15 percent. So in this case, and it is something that makes you think of it as a bubble because it is way too much money chasing way too little value. In this case, we’ve got the internet making something dramatically less efficient because a lot of the people who are involved in ad tech and targeted advertising don’t really understand what advertising is for.
Robin: And it is for
Don: Advertising is for signaling. When a company is selling a product to people, potential buyers, the seller always has way more information than the potential buyer does. So if you are a buyer of a used car, you don’t know the maintenance history of the car, you don’t know if the seller tried to change his own oil and the oil all fell out, and you put the oil back in, but the car is trashed; in almost every situation, the buyer doesn’t have the good information that the seller does. So sellers have to come up with signaling mechanisms to say, “Here’s a credible way, here’s a credible piece of information we can give you that shows we back up this product.” And spending money on advertising, making an investment that will become worthless if that brand name item turned out to be low quality, is one of the ways that they do it. And they spend a lot.
Robin: Now wait a minute, wait a minute, so you are saying that Ford should not have advertised the Pinto as there was a dog that killed people.
Don: Ford should have built a better car. We all know that.
Robin: Well, yeah.
Don: And advertising in the short run can help with selling a deceptive product. If you look at the best example is the ads in comic books, right? Everything you see advertised in a comic book is probably crap. There are sea monkeys, which are really brine shrimp; there are x-ray specs which are these cardboard goggle things that totally don’t work. The ads in comic books are reaching a continually turning over audience of kids who are having their initial experiences with advertising. And they are getting ripped off.
Robin: Well, I am 60 years old, right? Which mean I have been seeing those ads for 55 years, more or less. I started reading well at age 5, as you probably did too, and we are on Slashdot where that’s common, it doesn’t mean we are special in this group, but I remember the sea monkey ads, a friend of mine bought those, and what they were doing I think was teaching us that ads are lies. Isn’t that It is not what I am catching on here?
Don: Well, the informational content of the ad has very low value. People don’t write the ads for the information on the page. So Vogue magazine just had their second biggest advertising issue ever which is something to think about, (I am going to come back to talking about print ads later on)Vogue magazine just had their second best issue ever.And yes, the advertising photography is beautiful in that magazine. And yes, the outfits are great, the people are good looking.But really if you are in that business, you are looking at the ads, you are counting pages, you are seeing how strong is this company’s confidence in their collection for this year - how much are they putting behind it. And it is an important economic signal that a targeted ad just doesn’t care. That’s why print advertising still brings in such a high percentage of the total advertising market compared to the number of minutes that users spend with print.
VIDEO 2
Don: If you look at Mary Meeker, from Kleiner Perkins... she collects this kind of numbers on different ad media every year. In the last one, print media accounts for 6 percent of the time that users spend with media. But it is 23 percent of ad budgets. So why does print carry so much more weight than online ads that can be so well targeted to the individual? The answer is print is more valuable because it is not targeted. And because it is not targeted you can see what the advertiser’s overall intention is, not what’s the message that they are trying to send to a specific person.
Robin: Okay, so what you are saying is the message that we should be getting from advertising is that this vendor believes in their product enough to spend a big part of money on it advertising it.
Don: That’s right. Rory Sutherland compared it to a racehorse owner betting on his own horse.
Robin: Yeah, and if they bet against it, you see them at the window, you are going to worry, right?
Don: Right. If you see an owner that has multiple horses, and they are betting on one, but not the other, then they are likely to know something about that horse that you don’t. It is the classic problem that buyers and sellers have of information asymmetry.
Robin: Okay, now here’s a weird thing, people: Don Marti here, now we know him primarily as a Linux guy, he is writing about Linux he is an advocate in Linux Today and Linux Journal and so on and so forth, and that’s where at least I know him from, and am highly respectful. How the heck you go from writing about and learning and spreading the Linux gospel to advertising philosophy?
Don: Well, I came at it from the internet security point of view. When I was setting up infrastructure for companies, I was realizing that as ads become better and better targeted you may not want to be leaking information about your employees’ interests outside the firewall. If I’ve got 50 employees who are working on a new product, and a third party advertiser can see which content sites they are going to, there could be a lot of information leak that’s going on that I am uncomfortable with.
Robin: So all those Microsoft employees going to Apple and to their ordering pages, right?
Don: Well, Microsoft is one of the biggest Apple’s ISVs. Microsoft saved Apple back in 1997 when they invested and agreed to continue supporting Microsoft office on the Mac platform. Those two companies are joined at the hip - it is a desktop duopoly.
Robin: Okay, that’s why we just said there are proprietary operating systems, that I never differentiated between them, but now today, so you got into it from the security, and the security in what we now call big data census, is that what you are telling me?
Don: Yeah, and big data is the trendy name for it now but there have been a lot of other names applied to this kind of taking marketing and trying to make it more mathematical. It goes all the way back to direct mail and junk faxes, email spam of course. The idea of trying to get a bigger marketing budget by skewing math is an old one.
Robin: But it doesn’t work.
Don: It doesn’t work as well as a credible signal. Because users expect a fair exchange. If you are in a conversation, if you are in a truly informational selling situation then both the buyer and seller are asking for attention, and both the buyer and seller are providing information.
Robin: Hold on. We are going to cut that out. We are going to cut that out because there was some noise.
Don: Oh yeah, there is somebody here, let me check my schedule.
Robin: Okay.
Don: Yeah. I don’t see anyone else having the room, but hold on, let me check who has it.
Robin: Not a problem. I am going to cut this.
Don: Okay, yeah, there are going to find another conference room. It wasn’t on the board when I came in.
Robin: Okay. We only need another couple of minutes here. People who are dumb, ba, ba, ba, okay with targeting, some targeting is obviously useful and healthy. Like for instance, you don’t want to advertise dog collars in Cat Fancy magazines.
Don: That’s why print is so great. Because print is divided up into many, many niche magazines. You can buy an ad in fine woodworking, you can buy an ad in a hamster magazine, you can buy an ad in successful farming. And print has the sweet spot of awesome, because you can target your ad to the content. But because you can’t target the ad to an individual user it carries a bigger signal.
Robin: But couldn’t you do the same thing online? I mean Violinist is a website, you can tell who the target is, and she is a nice lady who runs it, and there is a Theme Park Insider which is run by the husband of the woman who runs Violinist – I know them both. And obviously, I know Theme Park Insider he gets ads from guess what, not targeted you know, by little bits but people who go to Theme Park Insider.
Don: Absolutely. And sites like that remember, publishers are only getting 25 to 45 percent of ad budgets these days, because of all the intermediaries, all the ad tech, in between the original advertiser and the content site. If we are able to clean up some of the privacy problems with browsers, especially how browsers handle third party cookies, third party java script if we can fix some of those privacy problems with browsers, then the web can start to work more like print and be more valuable as a medium overall.
Robin: Okay, but couldn’t an online publisher do that right now, by just saying to advertiser, “Look” and we have a website, there is one, there is big bulletin board for Jeep Cherokee owners, I am a Jeep Cherokee owner, I go to it, I exchange maintenance tips with the other Cherokee owners. And there are ads on that site, for parts and things. And I believe that the owners of the bulletin boards sell those direct. So isn’t that there already now?
Don: It is, but the publicity around internet advertising for which the Wall Street Journal’s What They Know series was kind of the big coming out party for awareness of targeting. The fact that targeting is possible in the medium makes users just trust ads in the whole medium even when the individual site and the individual advertiser are trying to send a high quality signal. So the problem of lousy privacy policies in browsers cause the most trouble for those legit sites that are carrying strong signal advertising. As the browsers improve their privacy policies, then those ads that are targeted by content are going to regain their signaling value.
Slashdot - STOP! (Score:5, Insightful)
Stop putting together these multipart stories and then having a new thread to discuss it in. We hashed most of these points in the last thread. Now you're barfing it up onto the main page again... so we can have the same arguments a second time? Either wait until all the parts are there and post it as a whole, or join the threads together so we don't wind up rehashing things. It's wasteful and obnoxious.
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You misspelled "sammich". :-)
Why are we talking about Lake Sammammish?
I'm thirsty, can you get some iced tea while you're there?
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That's "sudo" make me a sandwich.
Hand in your fake id AND your geek card.
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Re:Slashdot - STOP! (Score:4, Insightful)
And start using HTML5 for your videos. We're in 2013, Flash is long dead and buried.
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Well, that's actually google+'s fault. So, go bother google about it.
Re:Slashdot - STOP! (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, STOP with video interviews entirely. I don't have flash installed, and even if I did, I can read faster than your talking heads can yammer.
Re:Slashdot - STOP! (Score:5, Interesting)
I do have flash installed, but I'm protected by flashblock. But if they think I'm gonna click on a video link, they should probably only interview Woz, because I can't think of anybody else I'd rather hear than read. Not that their blurb gives nerds any reason to even click on a transcript.
Hint to editors: "Nerds" aren't "average people with computer literacy." We're a subculture. The vapid crud you've been pushing will NOT keep us here. The only reason we're still here is that we're giving you a chance to listen to our complaints and change, because we've been here so long. But your chances to change are running out and if you wait for the traffic to bottom out before changing it will be too late.
Geordi Jettison RIP (Score:2)
FTFY. But it's actually not entirely true. When I've made an effort to jump ship, I find that many of the alternative sites have not yet invented the paragraph.
Seriously, the background music in this video is the all-time low since the day I gleefully blacklisted Jon Katz. But sadly, this still beats conversing in sentence fragments. I've seen articles written by Katz since then, elsewhere, that were quite good. It's just that his
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Jon Katz was so wrong he was funny. Katz posts were to be celebrated.
This is vapid commercial crap. That is a whole different thing. Even if Katz gets old, you can skip over it. But there is almost no content left. I mean that literally. They seem to think they can feed out 98.7% astroturf and keep us around. They can, for a few months. But I don't have this type of content in the rest of my life, by choice. I won't have it here, beyond the denial period. I'm still thinking these bean-counters will do their
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I'll add my vote to not show videos of talking heads. For something that needs shown, like the story with the amateur rocketeer that shot a rocket to the edge of space with a camera on the rocket, yeah,l show a video. But if it's just words, I don't want to hear it. I want to read it.
The trouble is all the obvious aliterates here (not to be confused with illiterates), obvious by such nonsense as "TL;DR" and "He thru there three ball's thru the hoops over their." Note that to someone who reads, that sentence
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We need that pyro kid to chase them off with hair spray and a lighter
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I keep getting this thing saying You Need A Plugin to View This Content.
The quick answer - No.
I don't.
It's after 2010, time to move on, plug-ins are for old people.
NF;DW (Score:2)
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No, sorry, slashdot has gone web 3.0 bandwagon. We have a few months until it's all top-ten-lists in a mostly whitespace theme. The only hint of what slashdot was will be in the slightly green borders of some of the ads.
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I didn't get first post, but I want to get first hurl.
huuuuuuuuuUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU uh hck hck hck huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu hck hck hck :,(,,,
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Since opening day people have complained about they way Slashdot does some things, while predicting its demise based on those things. It's always been campy, but lately I actually worry.
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Cut and paste a few +5's from teh previous discussion into here. Instant Karma.
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So I ignored yesterday's story, and listen to it now.
The two parts are poorly cut - second part is hard to follow without the first part. Music background is annoying. Interviewer doesn't ask good questions. Interviewee doesn't argue convincingly, making the whole thing boring to listen to. The video part of it is useless; the only important part is the audio, a podcast format would've been more appropriate.
And indeed it simply should've been posted in one go. Optionally with transcript (can't take that lon
Who cares (Score:2)
You remind me of the people who always whine about dupes.
It was always amusing that people cared about that. Half the time I missed the original post. The other half I missed the dupe. Maybe you're just checking slashdot too much. :)
You know what? Other people come and have the same discussion. Redundancy of discussion is assumed and unavoidable, since this is a news site, with comments on each of the endless stream stories.
Only one argument in essence (Score:5, Insightful)
I was HOPING in this second part, he'd say something new; but in essence it seems his entire argument comes down to various themes of "targeted advertising (online) is cheap and therefore anyone can and will advertise anything and you can't trust it".
Is that really it, or did I miss some insight as his voice made me doze off?
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Well, slashdot can deliver twice as many ads this way. Ironic, no?
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He's full of shit, this was a waste of time. The only silver lining is I know he won't target me to buy something related to this blather.
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Yeah, that's pretty much the idea. And it's an idea I find very intriguing.
Web ads that are clearly tracking me I find creepy and annoying. I tend to feel violated. Yet, I commonly set aside a mailing or magazine ad for later review/action.
Clearly I value one, and have extreme distrust of the other. I've never been able to articulate why that might be. While a bit rambling, the idea is a sound one.
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Agree. The argument has merit, but the delivery is lacking.
Targeted ads turn marketing into a cheap hustle: "Hey Buddy, we know you have money, we know what you want to buy, let's just cut to the chase, hmmmm?"
Its the marketing pitch of the following: "Hey sweet-cheeks, I'm a man, you're a woman, lets forget the games and do what comes naturally".
Not generally going to close the deal.
The problem is that most people don't understand how advertising succeeds. It does not succeed by eliciting the "Shut up an
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He misses an important point, too. If people are successfully able to opt-out of tracking, this does nothing other than concentrate the power to track into the hands of the few giants that people affirmatively log into, and who are also plugged into half the internet. Namely, Google, Facebook.
Easy Fix (Score:1)
I have instituted an easy fix for computers and networks under my control: I block ALL ads, web beacons, disallow DOM storage/LSO storage, tracking, 3rd-party cookies, adblock edge on all computers, disallow prefetch, CSS visited links, geo-enables, and more. Network is basically ad-free. This protects computers from malware, speeds up browsing, disallows tracking, and the Internet for these computers is enjoyable. I suggest the same as it really does help out with not using as much bandwidth. I dislike adv
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Youre saying targeted ads are more wasteful than non targeted ads?
Stop smoking crack
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more likely to work? and you'll have more money because the ads work better? maybe for a short credit crunch time.
however.. do you know who the targeted ad sellers REALLY target? companies who want to advertise. doesn't matter if the targets are really pregnant 38 year old asian women, as long as the advertising company manages to assure the company that is advertising that the ads are seen by that demographic. they're the real fodder for these companies! "ooh your campaign didn't do so well on fullfilme
Video-so it's harder to spot the flaws in my logic (Score:2)
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Dont play the video and use "Hide/Show Transcript" button. (Like I do)
Apples to Oranges (Score:2, Insightful)
Why should the percentage of time someone spends consuming print media be compared with the percentage of an advertiser's budget?
There are more factors at play than a person's viewing time. For example, who's to say that when a person reads print media, they are more focused on what they are looking at so the advertising found there is more effective.
Also, on the other side of the comparison, price as reflected in the budget will not evenly compare to number of consumable hours by the target audience.
How do you pay for stuff? (Score:1)
Let me explain why you tin foil hat idiots are wrong. Everything has a cost to it, time if not money. Nobody makes anything unless they get something out of it. Sometimes, it's a warm fuzzy feeling they're after, but it can also be money. So basically, you need to pay for stuff. Ads are one way to pay for stuff without actually giving up your money. A lot of us just have another window/tab open to do something else, or pop-up blocker. And sometimes the ad is even useful. There have been ads where I was like
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I remember the days when the Internet was free, and site owners paid for their own sites because they liked running them. Aside from a smaller number of fluffy kitty videos, it was generally a better place.
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Sure. You like ads, you go watch them. I, and many others - don't. We block both trackers and the ads themselves. We don't generate revenue this way. And we don't care if a website fails from not getting any ad revenue either. We really don't care about that.
background music in video (Score:2)
what's with the porn music in the background?
I can tell you why the don't work (Score:1)
I google for something I want, I find the best price over the span of about ten minutes, then I either buy it or decide I don't really need it.
Then google and facebook show me ads for the next six months for something I'm not going to buy.
Those ads are completely wasted on me. Those guys at google aren't as smart as they claim to be.
So what? (Score:2)
people only spend 6% of their media-intake time with print, but advertisers spend 23% of their budgets on print ads
You know, I read that and I'm completely baffled. Either I'm a blithering idiot that has somehow missed the obvious reason why one should expect those two percentages to have a smaller (or larger?) spread, or the statement is bullshit and I've spotted it, which isn't saying much, and it's merely intended to trick other blithering idiots.
Which is it?
Where is it written that it is wrong for the spend percent to diverge from the erm, "media-intake" percent? Maybe that audience and the apparently limited time
What am I missing here? (Score:2)
So if I get his premise...
Conventional advertising is good because good companies with good products can afford the ads.
Ok, I guess I can kind of buy that if you through in a bunch of caveats and exceptions.
But where he's losing me is on targeted ads being bad because they're too efficient and thus lower the bar to enable any advertiser.
I understand the point... I once took out some very cheap ads that were targeted towards my nephew for an imaginary fake product in an elaborate prank.
However, that only wor
Economics != reality, except... (Score:2)
I read TFA (but didn't watch the video because I hate watching interviews on the internet). The argument boiled down to:
The last part is classic wrong thinking in economics, but I think in this case the rest of the argument is still valid. I
Don Marti != Don Martin. (Score:3)
Unfortunately, and the really sad thing is that Don Martin is no longer with us.