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Fighting Marketing Drones Over 3rd Party Web Tracking?
Web Sawy asks: "I work for a large-ish company (4000+). We have a number of disparate divisions and, believe it or not, varying knowledge on How Technology Works. It was brought to my attention that one part of the corporate website has been using 'a third party tool' to 'compare the performance of individual ads'. In other words, some external party is tracking user surfing habits. How does one go about educating co-workers on the evils of these third party services, which are currently 'helping' the Marketing department? What technologies are people using to do this type of reporting to help the Marketing department generate their numbers? In the world that I live, I can't even see those third-party ads (or hidden images!). I certainly can build my own user tracking system using existing technologies but before I fight that major uphill battle, I wonder if Slashdot readers would share their insights."
The secret to the marketing drones is they have very limited IMU's 'cause they are cheap - therefore you use a GPS jammer first so that it doesn't have a very goodf fix on where it is - then lob a SAM at it.
Training programs are way too costly.
They won't listen to reason if you're not their boss.
Besides, if you fire them, you're liable for severance AND unemployment tax rate increases.
By killing them, you put the onus on the insurance companies and, face it, they've got all the money anyway.
Yup. Definitely 'kill them'. Quick and bloody. There's still hope for the others.
(Can't wait to celebrate Hitler's Birthday, Oklahoma City and Columbine this weekend. W00t!)
add a layer of code between the advert click/render* to include a call to an image on a seperate server, sending the image a querystring of the session info you store in the cookie... all requests on that server will be in the log files for you to parse and thus deduce user patterns.
* your choice as to which is important
" How does one go about educating co-workers on the evils of these third party services, which are currently 'helping' the Marketing department? "
The Clue-by-Four works pretty well and is easily purchased at most hardware stores.
"WHACK WHACK WHACK - Bad Marketing Drone. Naughty Marketing Drone. WHACK"
There is no internet. It is a fabrication of the online news media. Those infidels should be hit with a shoe. I triple guarantee you, you are reading this message on paper, not on the internet. I speak only the facts.
Repeal the DMCA!
First I would check your site's legal disclaimers on privacy and the like. If it says anything about not sharing information with third party vendors, then contact your legal group and the market droids and tell them bad things have happened. That will be your biggest stick.
After that, find out what statistics the marketing people want and see if you can write somethign that will give them the same info, or provide some anonomized statistics that they can give to a thrid party for analysis. Marketing sorts are usually just ignorant of what they do, so if you tell them you can do for free what they just paid $200,000 or more for, they will listen.
Therefore, you have to bite back if you want this to be done. My suggestion is to build the applet, install it, let it run for a few weeks, and demonstrate the results at the next meeting. If you can prove you can do it for less money, you can look favorable to the higher ups. Marketing will still look at you, the puny code geek, through their noses, but you will also have the satisfaction of beating them.
This sig no verb.
There are things that must be done on site even if it's a third party product.
They don't listen, tell em you'll report them.
Don't torture yourself trying to educate them.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
1. Third party tracking
2. ?????
3. EVIL unleashed on the world!
Did someone with a third party tool steal your girlfriend or something? Are they reselling user information? Is it too closely cuppled with your user database? Purchase history?
No? Then there is no big deal. Go with whatever technology works for you.
.sig Karma out the wazoo, better to spend points elsewhere if this is above 2 or below 0
Some 3rd party tools can be very helpful and are cheaper then building your own. The problem though is some of these are really adware and spyware. You should ask around and see if your boos and coworkers know what spyware is. Explain that your company is using spyware (if it is) and you should also explain the benefits by using a different solution.
You haven't detailed the evils these tools pose to the users. As others have said already on the comments, check to see if they are violating any privacy agreements your site has in place.
If the software works, why reinvent the wheel? In some way, they just said you valuable time but not having you build something inhouse that's already available. If they are comfortable with it, then good.
I'm curious what you describe as being evil. If it helps to keep a site up and running, more efficiently if your companies main source of revenue is from the ads, then what's wrong with that? I prefer getting ads that are targetted to my interest. We all know a majority of us will not fill out a form of turn-ons/offs as for what we're interested in. Instead, user tracking is fine, as long as the site doesn't violate my privacy.
Also, I hope your complaint isn't about why they didn't decide to build it inhouse instead, then that just sounds more like a programmer's power struggle.
...and send a copy here.
That will get management's attention right quick!
Back right around the time the whole DoubleClick/Abacus thing was going down, a marketer brought up in a meeting how great it would be if we bought their service so we could learn who was looking at our sites and send them stuff. After carefully explaining that the whole scheme was dicey, and we would have no way of knowing if the data was even any good at all (though it was sure to be expensive), I further explained that this was a major privacy conflict brewing, and that it was likely to get our company in particular, which was/is a large household name, a lot of negative publicity, hostile letters, hate mail, and if we were unlucky, front-page attention on how Evil our company was. The response from Marketing? "Wow, so when can we sign up for it." Sam, you fucking idiot. I was right, of course: lucky for you our department didn't get on that train before it crashed (and lucky it crashed before it got out of the station).
So that's what you can expect from Marketing.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
For a class I took two years ago, a team of 3 people
(I was on that team) wrote a program to do this same thing. It only
took two weeks to write. Whatever the marketing
drones paid for this program is way too much.
I can understand you don't like the evils of someone else serving your ads for you, but are you sure you want to open this can of worms?
I used to work for a company that did 3rd party ad serving, and another division worked on a client-side ad-serving system. We tracked ads and clicks anonymously - there was no matching against real databases.
Anyway, the technology for judging ad performance and optimizing things can be pretty complex. Do you really want to (can you?) write software to glean *meaningful* information from all these web logs and present it to your marketing department in the form required? Do you really want to generate spreadsheets from web logs? Could your system optimize certain ads as soon as the data started to get statistically significant?
I'm not exactly sure what your company has contracted to do, but if your ads are being displayed offsite as well, there could be all kinds of experiments performed to find how well certain audiences respond to ads and you could optimize where you buy banner space.
Some of these third-party tools have merit and can be used without requring ANY internal resources. And they can be turned off when the data is known. You can gather data for a week, then let things sit for a year.
IMHO i would find the files the tracking uses and set up a black list for the users to spam/bomb/DoS
Some websites will not let you in unless you allow them to do this surely this is blackmail?
The key word is "corporation." That says it all. If you're in a corporation large enough so the top person doesn't personally know all the employees, then it's a company that doesn't care about anything but making money. All marketing will care about is getting data and putting propaganda out there so the company makes money. Making money also means getting a job done quickly, so fewer man hours are involved. They don't want to hear a better way. They don't want a simpler way. They've got a method in place so, by definition (and because of their egos), their method is "right." If you don't like what they're doing, go out and start your own business, build it up, and lead by example. And see if, in 10-20 years, you don't find yourself more concerned about the budget and profits than right and wrong. It's the way all big corporations think.
Volunteer (you were never in the military, right?) to get on the security policy committee. Spend the next few months adding updates to the security policy which has been pre-approved by senior management. Include in that policy rules for punishing (i.e. instant termination with extreme prejudice) any employee who allows customer data to be leaked to a third party. Make some specific examples, which will highlight those idiots current behaviour.
Once the security policy has been approved and put into place(nobody, but nobody, ever reads those things, trust me on this), loudly announce a new network monitoring program for violations of the security policy. Give it a few days, then show some data on how a third party has been stealing all your customer data through corporate espionage with the help of a internal spy. Approach the CEO with the report, tell him the FBI is waiting for his green light because of the 100's of Millions of $$$ being lost in customer good will (is Mitnicked a verb yet?), but you would prefer to avoid the disasterous bad PR and have him handle it by making the offending party redundant. It helps if you have two burly armed guards standing by in the hallway to escort the marketdroid to the parking lot.
Oh, wait, I've been reading too much BOFH
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
I am a system engineer (oh how freely that term is used) for one of these 'evil' 3rd party tracking companies. Whenever I mention it to someone the response invariably reminds me of South Park, just after Kenny dies. And I don't have anything to do with all your email spam...so don't ask.
At the same time, none of these same folks would pay for Yahoo, Google, or any other internet sites because 'they should be free!' Ask your company to pay per user for ad free service from every site your users visit...I'm sure they would laugh at the thought of spending money on for web sites.
To answer the original question in the thread... Feel free to go it alone to manage ad campaigns for your company. Good on ya! Here are a couple things to of which you should be aware.
You must manage the relationship with EVERY website that you advertise on. And your marketing ddepartment will have a ton
These websites will require you to prove that you have a system to support the serving of the ads. Some will want to test it. And don't forget the legal bs that goes along with everything.
The traffic is very unpredictable. It is common for purchases to be 10s or sometimes hundreds of millions impressions, which the website decides how to serve. That may mean 10 million in an hour, a month, or just as fast as they can....you won't know until it's too late. Take that times 1-30k per impression and your pipes need to support it.
The marketing department will want to get stats on how well their campaigns are doing. And they will want it in real time.
Since your images will be served from your domain you will be the third party. Your domain will get blocked and you'll need to explain to your management why their email from nasdaq didn't get through. :)