Longtime Linux Advocate Don Marti Tells Why Targeted Ads are Bad (Video 1 of 2)

"Don Marti, says Wikipedia, "is a writer and advocate for free and open source software, writing for LinuxWorld and Linux Today." This is an obsolete description. Don has moved on and broadened his scope. He still thinks, he still writes, and what he writes is still worth reading even if it's not necessarily about Linux or Free Software. For instance, he wrote a piece titled Targeted Advertising Considered Harmful, and has written lots more at zgp.org that might interest you. But even just sticking to the ad biz, Don has had enough to say recently that we ended up breaking this video conversation into two parts, with one running today and the other one running tomorrow.

Comments

More to the point

[Hatta]

Advertising Considered Harmful.

Re:More to the point

[gnasher719]

That was missing the point.

The very important point that the article made: Targetted advertising considered harmful to advertisers.

Re:More to the point

[i kan reed]

Yeah, he had a section of his writing that had a kinda sloppy counter-argument to this, but advertising and a true free market, according to neoliberals, are fundamentally contradictory.

Re:More to the point

[Anonymous Coward]

No, if you read the article, he's saying the opposite, targeted advertising is harmful to consumers.

His central thesis is that advertising is valuable to consumers to help correct an information imbalance between the buyer and seller. The buyer needs to be able to separate the low-quality option from the high-quality option. Seeing that one company is willing to spend $50,000 on an ad in a national publication is a good indication that they're confident in their product to believe they can recoup that. If a company is willing to spend $3 on targeted ads, there's a better chance that they can recoup that before the word of mouth got around and people stopped buying.

Basically, the more expensive advertising is, the more it's only available to the contenders and not the pretenders. Targeted ads even the playing field and lose their value to buyers.

Re:More to the point

[girlintraining]

Advertising Considered Harmful.

No. Advertising is just fine. Ever submitted a resume for a job? Advertising. Ever held up a sign to protest something? Advertising. Ever posted something political to your Facebook? Advertising. Advertising is nothing more than heading out into the big blue room and yelling "Here I am! Over here! Look at me!" ... or if you're from the South, "y'all ain't gonna believe this shit. Hold my beer." Advertising is neither good nor evil, neither harmful nor beneficial. It's just an umbrella term for anything that tries to get another person's attention.

Advertising becomes harmful when it encourages people to do things they shouldn't be doing. For example; Casinoes. Ever notice they almost exclusively target the elderly? These are vulnerable adults who, due to age-related cognitive deterioration, don't have the best critical thinking skills and tend to be overly-trusting. They're easy to take advantage of. And most of the lever-pulling zombies they have on the floor really, really, should not be there. They're on fixed income and they're pissing money away to pull a lever like some lab rat. A cocaine habit would be cheaper for some of these poor bastards.

Advertising becomes harmful when it crosses lines of privacy and cultural norms to get that extra sale. Obama, please stop sending me e-mails. I also don't want v1agr@ for 'cheep', penis or breast enlargement pills, and the list goes on. This isn't just ineffectual advertising, but it results in loss of impact globally, creating a Red Queen race amongst advertisers.

Advertising also becomes harmful when there's too much of it. Something like 1/3rd of television is overt advertisement, more if you consider the pop-unders and animated shit they put across the screen while you're watching the show. And then there's paid product placement. All tallied, probably over half of TV content is advertising.

  And not just harmful to you or me, but also harmful to the advertiser! Having to jack the volume up to level 99 to try and capture the attention of your viewers because it's a veritable crap-flood for 5 minutes at a go, fed to you in 10-30 second screams out of your idiot box... is not improving your sales figures.

And that's just TV and print media. On the internet, advertising isn't just annoying or ineffectual -- the platforms for serving these ads all over the internet can be compromised to spread malware, viruses, and government-endorsed spyware to millions in mere moments.

My point here is that advertising itself isn't harmful; Particular advertising methods are. You can't get rid of advertising, and in fact, it has a valid use. Companies need ways of attracting new business. Targeted advertising, especially opt-in, is much better at doing that than previous methods. But as a society, we need to figure out a way to balance the legitimate business needs here with the equally legitimate privacy and quality of life concerns of the general population. A good balance between these things benefits all parties -- businesses and citizens alike.

But right now, it isn't balanced, and in fact is so out of balance it's toxic. But that does not mean advertising, as a concept, is harmful. So please be careful tossing off one-liners like this -- they rarely paint a complete picture, and encourage black and white thinking.

Re:More to the point

[karuna]

The premise is wrong. Ads have very little informative value. They are mostly acting on human psychology. The more expensive ads are, the less informative they are. Pretenders are another issue. Lemons versus peaches. The solution to the problem can vary for different products.

Re:More to the point

[Hatta]

Advertising is more than just informing someone. It's informing someone with the intent of getting them to give you money they would not have given you otherwise. What we, as good citizens and neighbors, should want is for everyone to make the best decisions based on the best information. The way people do that is to use non-biased information sources. There's no way that using biased information can lead to better decisions than non-biased information, so advertising is always harmful.

Re:More to the point

[girlintraining]

Advertising is more than just informing someone. It's informing someone with the intent of getting them to give you money they would not have given you otherwise. What we, as good citizens and neighbors, should want is for everyone to make the best decisions based on the best information. The way people do that is to use non-biased information sources. There's no way that using biased information can lead to better decisions than non-biased information, so advertising is always harmful.

When you lose your job, please remember these words of wisdom, and submit no job applications, resumes, or talk to anyone about your skills and abilities.

Dude, black and white thinking -- you got a severe case of it. Please see a doctor.

Re:More to the point

[interval1066]

When you lose your job, please remember these words of wisdom, and submit no job applications, resumes, or talk to anyone about your skills and abilities.

I completely understand your point, but I really think putting resume submission in the advertising column is a bit of a stretch. Ads are mostly unsolicited. I rarely go around shoving my resume into the hands of random pedestrians.

Re:More to the point

[AJH16]

The thing about advertising is it should never be your only resource. Targeted advertising is great if you use it purely to discover products. When I'm in the market for a new widgamajig and they notice that I'm looking for a widgamajig and start displaying ads for other types of widjamjigs, that is helpful to me because it shows more options that I might not have thought of.

It's kind of like letting the advertiser choose the keywords that match with their product and then having my keywords meet in the middle. It exposes me to more options and this is a good thing. If I'm dumb and decide not to research the things I see advertised, that isn't a problem that targeted or untargeted advertising is going to fix, it's a problem "not being a freaking retard" is going to fix.

Re:More to the point

[girlintraining]

I completely understand your point, but I really think putting resume submission in the advertising column is a bit of a stretch. Ads are mostly unsolicited. I rarely go around shoving my resume into the hands of random pedestrians.

Stay unemployed long enough, and you'll be holding up a sign that says "IT/Network Administrator. Will Compute For Food." Actually, I did that for a few days. While wearing a cardboard cutout of a computer monitor around my head, and the text was on another piece of cardboard made to look like a keyboard. Got several interviews out of that -- I guess some employers still like seeing initiative.

People need to square with the idea that advertising isn't evil; anymore than a screwdriver is. It's the person that's evil (or not). Now my creative advertising worked for me; Why should corporations not be afforded the same priviledge? It all comes down to moderation and limitation; There's some things we just shouldn't do. But that's where the discussion needs to be; Not making blanket statements and proclaiming ultimate good or evil. Leave that to the professional news casting of Fox News if you need a dose of "the sky is falling". I want reasonable debate from reasonable people.

Re:More to the point

[Hatta]

My resumes are honest, solicited, and submitted for positions where I believe I am the best candidate. You can't say that about advertisements. A data sheet is not an advertisement.

Re:More to the point

[Hatta]

Targeted advertising is great if you use it purely to discover products.

You know what else is great for discovering products? Asking knowledgable people with no financial interest in my decision.

If I'm dumb

Advertising doesn't only affect the dumb. If you've seen an ad for something, even if you don't remember the ad consciously, you're still going to favor the familiar, even if you don't know you're doing it. It's insidious.

Re:More to the point

[Oligonicella]

Perhaps yours are, but I've certainly seen some fantasy work submitted. Equate those to annoying and false ads and yours to an ad for a cause you believe in.

Re:More to the point

[Hatta]

I disapprove of those too. People should make up their own minds on products and causes, based on the best available evidence from unbiased sources. Anything more biased or misleading than a datasheet is unethical.

Re:More to the point

[gbjbaanb]

no, targetted advertising is bad fort advertisers. (as well as the rest of us).

My case: I need a new pair of windscreen wipers, so I googled for them, found the kind I wanted and the shops that sold them. Placed my order and when they arrived, stuck them on my car.

So now, when I browse the web (without adblock, for some sites) guess what adverts I get... and guess how many additional pairs of windscreen wipers I'm likely to purchase. So those advertisers are paying good money to show me adverts that I will definitely not be interested in. Which is ironic as targeted adverts are supposed to do exactly the opposite.

There is another argument in that the targetting is too easily gamed. I look at the hungersite.com, and click whatever advert is on there. So now I get ads for womens clothing and telecoms products. None of which I bother to look at anyway, but still shows that the targetting is pointless.

Ad systems that work, work based on the demographic of the website visited. You gather info about the kind of user you have, and then sell ad space directly to advertisers that are likely to want to advertise to your users. So a technology site is not going to do well with adverts for baby products, but will do much better with adverts for computer hardware. Its the same model used for television - people who watch soaps will want adverts for household products, those who watch space documentaries .. something else. Advertisers who want to maximise their advertising budgets would do well to understand this.

Re:More to the point

[sqrt(2)]

Your definition for advertising is so broad as to be meaningless. Advertising can be more narrowly defined as corporate speech intended to persuade potential consumers into taking some sort of economic action, usually the purchasing of a product or service. The keyword there is persuade. They have no intention or incentive to be truthful, or to take the consumer's needs into account. Advertisers can and do use every trick and psychological hack available to sell products. It doesn't matter if the consumer really needs it. It doesn't matter if it's harmful. It doesn't matter if better alternatives exist. If some communication is giving you that information, it's not an ad, it's an informative communication usually by a third party (think Consumer Reports or Amazon product reviews).

Advertising is harmful because it is by its very nature deceptive, dishonest, and serves the needs of the advertiser, not the consumer.

Re:More to the point

[Hatta]

Regardless of the veracity of what the claim, I can, at least, know that they're unlikely to be a fly-by-night company looking to turn a quick buck and then get out before the house of cards collapses.

pets.com

Targeted advertising, at best, obscures the meta data that we might use to make purchasing decisions. I can no longer tell the difference between someone with a $1m ad buy and someone with a $100 ad buy.

As if there were some correlation between ad spending and good products? If there is a correlation, it's inverse. Anything they're spending on advertising has to be recouped from the customer. Either they're overcharging you to pay for the advertising, or they're cutting corners in quality to pay for the advertising.

Re: More to the point

[AJH16]

Not if you make informed decisions and sometimes new products are the best and as an early adopter other knowledgeable people aren't always there. Some of us are capable of making decisions on objective criteria.

Re:More to the point

[Alomex]

They have no intention or incentive to be truthful,

Actually in many European countries by law advertising has to be truthful. Only in America are companies given so much leeway in twisting the facts in ad copy.

This has to do in part with strong first amendment rights but also in part to straight out lobbying from industry.

Re:More to the point

[sqrt(2)]

We also allow pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to patients on television. That's fucking insanity, but everyone just thinks nothing of it. I feel like I'm living in the movie They Live sometimes.

Re:More to the point

[Lennie]

Forget targetted, advertising considered harmful.

If the NSA uses man-in-the-middle-attackes browsers trying to talk to doubleclick then we know we have a big problem.

Advertising networks that gather lots of data, do tracking is just a bad idea. It attract other bad actors like the NSA.

Re:More to the point

[Bite The Pillow]

I heard you say "poorly implemented targeting helps no one, but done right everyone benefits."

Is that what you meant? Because that's your last paragraph.

Re:More to the point

[Bite The Pillow]

Pedant. We are obviously not talking about your overly broad definition. Context is important, and you ignored it.

  If moderation worked without JavaScript you would have a -1 off topic. But I am willing to type rather than enable it

Re:More to the point

[Shompol]

Ever submitted a resume for a job? Advertising.

No no no, for me to submit a resume for a job they must have a relevant opening and actually post that opening on their website or 3rd party list of openings. That is how things are SUPPOSED to be done.
Advertising is when my resume is plastered on office buildings around the town.

Re:More to the point

[Mandrel]

My resumes are honest, solicited, and submitted for positions where I believe I am the best candidate.

But, like all advertising, your resume doesn't tell the whole truth. Not many will comprehensively list their faults.

It's possible to conceive of a world without job ads: all potential employees are interrogated by an independent employment assessment organization who then provides employers with the most suitable single candidate or group of candidates.

Of course this is mostly a fantasy, just like a world without ads for products is a fantasy, where we would rely entirely on product assessment organizations. In practice, product makers, like job seekers, will never be able to resist tilting the playing field in their favour with spin.

So given that ads will always be with us, let's just get rid of the most intrusive types: door-to-door, on-street, telemarketing, and ads that distract us from our media consumption. And find other ways to pay media professionals.

Re:More to the point

[phantomfive]

Obama, please stop sending me e-mails. I also don't want v1agr@ for 'cheep', penis or breast enlargement pills, and the list goes on.

The depressing thing about this is, if people didn't buy them, then the emails would stop coming. But people are actually buying unknown pills from sketchy vendors on the internet and eating them.

Re:More to the point

[Mandrel]

You know what else is great for discovering products? Asking knowledgable people with no financial interest in my decision.

The most knowledgeable people will usually be professionals. But the ranks of these will thin If enough people don't want to pay them, either directly, by looking at their annoying and distracting ads, or by turning them into salespeople by using their affiliate links.

Amateurs can be a good substitute, particularly now we have online forums. But often the information from amateurs is either wrong, anecdotal (only useful in aggregate), or is second-hand information from the above threatened professionals.

Re:More to the point

[Mandrel]

Actually in many European countries by law advertising has to be truthful.

The truth, but not the whole truth. This is the sine qua non of advertising. Spin.

Re:More to the point

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like they're targeted...

Re:More to the point

[EdIII]

You did not listen to his argument and your definition of advertising is far to0 broad.

There's no way that using biased information can lead to better decisions than non-biased information, so advertising is always harmful

That statement is 100% true in all cases.

I have never seen advertising that contained a shred of truth. As another put it, advertising has always been about psychological manipulation of a person. This is also 100% true.

Is it advertising for me to post a resume online? No. Not if it was all factual.

Take a manufacturer's website for example. When you look at a product it of course covers the major talking points of the device itself. Already, it's many orders more informative (with non-biased information being included) than any regular advertising period.

Another important thing to note is specifications.

On what advertising, anywhere, is there an interactive tab that gives you black and white specifications? Nowhere.

So your definition is just far too broad and serves as a Straw man.

Once you have a tighter definition of just what advertising is , it's clear that he is absolutely correct. All advertising is indeed harmful, because all advertising contains only manipulative content devoid of any real truth. In fact, dissemination of truth is the last purpose of advertising.

Your warning about "black and white" thinking is really just an admonishment based on a Straw man platform you constructed and is therefore baseless itself.

Advertising is extremely harmful as a concept and you are certainly correct about one thing, a Red Queen Race.

People have fought against advertising for as long as I can remember. Advertisers fought back, and then became ever more greedy. What do we have now?

Louder commercials - This actually required laws to stop
More commercials - I've seen this over 40 years now. It's more than half and TV is so toxic with overlays that it's unwatchable to anyone in my generation now.
No Sanctuary tolerated, No Quarter Given - Fucking blaring advertisements at fucking gas stations! - NO PEACE ANYWHERE
Regulated devices. - PUOs (Prohibited User Operations) that are protected by DRM law that mandate you MUST put up with our shit period.
Draconian copyright laws - The law itself is being perverted to serve those who control content (not make it), and advertising is only a beach head unto our very way of life.

No, advertising is so harmful and toxic to the human experience that it has become an evil with its own life at this point with marketers and executives worshiping at its unholy altar to receive the blessings or more money, and the control that goes with it.

Ask yourself this: Has my life really become better due to more advertising?

Re:More to the point

[kwbauer]

So, you only submit resumes to companies that have asked you for one? And that would also be your plan if laid from your current employer without already having been approached by other companies?

Re:More to the point

[kwbauer]

"I have never seen advertising that contained a shred of truth." Seriously. The Ford ad claims that Ford dealers have new cars manufactured by Ford. What company manufacturers the Ford cars that the Ford dealer sells. I also saw an add the other day that insinuated that I could get a red Toyota something or other. Did Toyota run out of red paint?

Re:More to the point

[kwbauer]

And your definition is so narrow that the advice given to job-seekers about "advertising yourself" does not even exist.

"by its very nature deceptive, dishonest, and serves the needs of the advertiser, not the consumer." So the ad in the local paper for the hardware store that said they had something on sale that happened to be one of the models I had been looking at was all completely deceptive and when I got to the store and bought the thing it was actually $150 more than advertised (to match the manufacturers direct selling price) and that extra money was paid by whom? I never saw it listed on my CC statement?

Re:More to the point

[YttriumOxide]

I think it depends on what is being advertised and the method of targeting.

You (and Mr Marti) make a point, but I think it's only a point against one of the very common forms of targeted advertising that exists today.

In your first example, they don't know you bought the windscreen wipers, so they keep advertising them to you and it's useless to both you and them. In your second example, they're targeting to you for the wrong products based on incomplete information about you. These are problems with the implementation, not the concept.

As per my sig, I recently launched my first book. My sig is an example of nontargeted advertising. Anyone who notices it and is interested may click on one of the links and may end up buying my book (and I thank anyone reading this who has done so or will do so!). However I don't expect it to be a particularly large generator of sales. The intersection of 'slashdot readers' and 'people interested enough in knowing more about psychedelic assisted self-discovery' is probably not very high (although hopefully greater than an empty set).

Facebook's advertising however is different. On facebook, people list their own interests. This therefore allows me to pay some money and specifically target my ads at (for example) people who 'speak English'; 'are interested in psychedelics'; and 'enjoy reading'. This way, I can be sure that my ad only appears in front of people that at least have a reasonable chance of being interested. This not only means that people who might be interested get made aware of my book, but also I don't have to worry that I'm paying for showing it to people who will absolutely never be interested in reading it.

This kind of targeted advertising makes a lot more sense to me and I have yet to see a downside.

Re:More to the point

[YttriumOxide]

You know what else is great for discovering products? Asking knowledgable people with no financial interest in my decision.

My sig is an ad. It's advertising a book I wrote. Let's look at a couple of hypothetical where I decided not to ever advertise it.

1) Let's say you're interested in the subject of Self-Discovery through psychedelics, but you're unsure what good books there are on the topic. You Google around and find.... a couple of Amazon links to books written a long time ago that other people have finally written reviews for. Do you find my book? Not likely. No one has ever heard of it so no one ever wrote anything about it. It's there on Amazon, but so far down in the list that unless you were searching for it specifically it won't come up.

Why is this a bad thing? Why should my book get advertised and get some priority? Well, because it's new and it might be better than other existing works on the topic. You'll never know if you don't get a chance to ever even know it exists.

2) You're a psychologist but have somehow never come across the idea of psychedelic assisted psychotherapy during your studies. "Recreational drugs" have never really interested you, so you never specifically go searching online for anything to do with them. The chances of you ever hearing about my book are very slim. As it turns out though, psychologists who have never heard of psychedelic assisted psychotherapy are exactly the kind of people who may be very interested in my book, as it gives them a wealth of information that they can then use as a starting point for further investigation in to the subject.

So yes, I have a financial interest in your decision of whether to buy my book or not, and I'm advertising it with the specific hope that people buy it and give me money. However the alternative would be that my book sales remain at near zero forever and I wasted a lot of time writing it. I never wrote it to get rich - I wrote it because I'm passionate and knowledgable about the subject and want to spread that knowledge to others. The money from it is nice to have and I feel it's only fair to compensate me for my work, so I won't give it away for free to everyone (also 'free books' are usually not viewed as well by large subsets of my target audience) but it still is a secondary motivation to the desire for my book to be read.

Re:More to the point

[YttriumOxide]

I have never seen advertising that contained a shred of truth.

I challenge you to find a single lie in the advertisement that constitutes my slashdot sig or even the Amazon web page it links to.

Once you have a tighter definition of just what advertising is , it's clear that he is absolutely correct. All advertising is indeed harmful, because all advertising contains only manipulative content devoid of any real truth. In fact, dissemination of truth is the last purpose of advertising.

With this argument you're either building up a strawman or using a no-true-scotsman fallacy (too early to tell, but could be both). A lot of advertising is manipulative content devoid of any real truth, but that's not the definition of advertising. It's fair enough to say that advertising that falls in to this category is harmful, however - even if that were 99.999% of advertising which exists (which I doubt) - that still does not say that advertising itself is always harmful.

Re:More to the point

[sqrt(2)]

I'm sure that ad listed all their competitors prices too, right? And all the other brands that might be even better or cheaper, or both? You probably could have done better going on Amazon. Even if you're completely right in this instance, I'm still right in the generality. You'll always be able to find cases where the advertiser's needs happen to mesh with yours. That's incidental. It wasn't their intention. Don't take it to mean they had your best interest in mind.

Like comparing a gambler to a non-gambler; the non-gambler may be worse off on any one day compared to a gamblers who happened to get lucky, but over his life the gambler will be down and the non-gambler, simply by opting out, will end up ahead. In the long run, you'd be better off ignoring ads, and doing your own research when you need something. If you've made a habit of acting the way you describe, you're definitely down more than the $150 you saved on that one item.

Here's just one example. I know someone who works in the produce department of a grocery store. When they need to move a specific product quickly they put up a sign saying "temporary price reduction" and sales go up every time. They don't actually change the price. Some stores even mark up "sale" items, and people still fall for it.

Re:More to the point

[EdIII]

Your slashdot sig is not an advertisement. Your using the same misconception as girlintraining.

Advertising is a form of communication for marketing and used to encourage, persuade, or manipulate an audience (viewers, readers or listeners; sometimes a specific group) to continue or take some new action

Email addresses, resumes, etc., are not marketing. They're only stated methods of communication. I don't feel that when I go to a website that it's advertising their address and phone number. It's informing me of it, and that is fundamentally different.

All advertising is communication for the purposes of marketing .

You have not stated a challenge in a correct fashion at all.

The true argument is here, is not whether my statements about advertising and marketing in the contemporary world are correct, but whether or not we are in agreement about what constitutes an advertisement.

With that being said, I stick to my arguments. All advertising (as I have defined it) is harmful to society and not intended to disseminate truth, objective facts, and/or non-biased data. In fact, 100% of all advertising is intended to illicit an action. This action, of course, being a profit center. Once money got involved, it grew to become the monster we have now.

You're only trying to point out that I'm speaking in absolutes. I am. Advertising will always be harmful, and evolve to be harmful, due to human nature.

1) It's human nature to grow like a parasite apparently and seek domination and extinction of all competition. In this sense, marketers have always been seeking ways to coerce, control, and mitigate obstacles....
2) It's human nature to attempt to control your environment to your own tastes. I've yet to meet (IRL) a person that truly wants advertising in a willful way being aware of how to eradicate it from their own lives. Attempts to control the flow of information to yourself is fundamentally harmful to other humans that are attempting to do the exact same thing to you for their own purposes.

Just as the other poster said, a Red Queen Race has been in effect for quite some time now. It's effect has pervaded everything including the law.

You only need to look to legal incidents such as Sonic Blue vs. Big Entertainment to see the unconscionably offensive statements such as "not watching commercials amounted to theft of content".

This is why advertising as a concept, and how it's been implemented, has had a wholly deleterious affect on our civilization.

The only excuse trotted out time and time again is that without it capitalism would somehow fail. That's ridiculous, and information could be imparted differently. Especially with the communication resources we have at our disposal .

However, advertising has hijacked and perverted the very idea of social networking hasn't it?

Why the heck does anything need a share button? Is any statement from another "human being" now reliable at all?

Once again, any attempt by human beings to fight back was met with astroturfing. The poisoning of information flows with crap yet again.

I make this challenge to you:

Identify an example of marketing that is not negatively contributing to society in the majority of its content.

This is true not only for advertising.

Re:More to the point

[Znork]

The failure in the implementation is failing in temporal targeting. It doesn't matter if you know what someone's interests are if you don't know _when_ they are. Someone may be interested in psychedelics but they're not interested in them when at work or while chatting to a friend. They're interested in them while reading information on psychedelics.

That's why the tracking is pointless. You're getting worse targeting than if you simply target the content because it doesn't matter who they are, it only matters what they're doing at the moment. The content gives you both the information that they're interested in the target subject and that they're interested in it at that point in time.

You don't want a random sales guy sitting down at your table in a bar when you're talking with a friend and saying 'I've been following you around and would like to suggest you buy this oven I can tell you about'. But you might actually be receptive to a sales guy coming up next to you when you're looking at ovens and saying 'I can tell you something about the oven you're looking at if you want'.

Re:More to the point

[YttriumOxide]

Your slashdot sig is not an advertisement. Your using the same misconception as girlintraining.

All advertising is communication for the purposes of marketing.

Honestly, my slashdot sig is an advertisement. It is exactly for the purposes you describe. Specifically to "encourage an audience (slashdot readers) to take a specific action (buy my book)". I am marketing my book through my sig (amongst other methods of course).

This is what I meant when I said you were either building up a strawman or using a no-true-scotsman fallacy. If you define advertising as being something very specific that no one else uses as the definition, then you can make any claims you like about it. However as that's not the commonly understood definition, it's only going to misdirect people hearing/reading your statements to think you mean something else.

Re:More to the point

[gbjbaanb]

this is also probably the reason people are annoyed at targeted ads - the intrusion of totally wrong adverts tells people that you're not only watching what they so and making it so obvious, but also giving them no (or less) benefit from this intrusion.

Re:More to the point

[TheRaven64]

I really don't understand why Google invests so much in trying to build profiles of people. It's almost enough to make you believe that the NSA funded or pressured them to do it, because it makes no business sense at all.

When Google started, they had simple text-based ads that were placed because they were relevant to the text on the page. They were unobtrusive and they were - at least somewhat - informative (because you can't do much else with plain text and still make people want to click on it). I clicked on a lot of Google Ads back in those days, because they were almost always about things that I was directly interested in at the time I saw the ad.

Now, Google Ads are based on things that Google thinks I'm interested in based on my past behaviour and this means that they are pretty much completely irrelevant to me. I don't block ads, but it's been a long time since I saw one that I even vaguely considered clicking on.

Re:More to the point

[aaaaaaargh!]

You don't understand how advertising works. It's purpose is not to inform but to trick people into buying things. The only rule is that they are not allowed to lie directly into their faces (as opposed to politics, apparently). Read Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow, it is more general and doesn't talk much about advertising in particular but will give you a good impression of the mechanisms modern advertisements are based on.

Re:More to the point

[Half-pint HAL]

Advertising is more than just informing someone. It's informing someone with the intent of getting them to give you money they would not have given you otherwise. What we, as good citizens and neighbors, should want is for everyone to make the best decisions based on the best information. The way people do that is to use non-biased information sources. There's no way that using biased information can lead to better decisions than non-biased information, so advertising is always harmful.

When you lose your job, please remember these words of wisdom, and submit no job applications, resumes, or talk to anyone about your skills and abilities.

If I walk into a shop, I can pick up a fact sheet telling me the specs of the computer I'm looking at. If I switch on the TV, I see a flashy ad telling me that this computer has 32 Gigabytes of high capacity memory and Intel Quad-core processor inside (ba-da-da-ding) for superfast gameplay and faster browsing!

Which of those is my CV more like?

OK, so large magazine adverts typically often you the full spec, but either that's after the attention grab at the top which constitutes the main advert, or you're reading one of those thick computer mags from the turn of the century that was essentially a multi-supplier catalogue, or a paper-based market square if you prefer. But that's not typical of advertising.

Dude, black and white thinking -- you got a severe case of it. Please see a doctor.

And how are you any better?

Re:More to the point

[girlintraining]

Your definition for advertising is so broad as to be meaningless.

Er, no. It's the dictionary definition. Used by english-speaking people all over the world. See, we have these things called 'adjectives' when you need to be more specific. Take these examples:

Corporate advertising.
evil advertising.
non-profit advertising.
targeted advertising.

Adjectives: They Do Shit(tm).

Re:More to the point

[captainlavender]

You are quite clearly confusing two things -- persuasion, and deception. Obviously it's a spectrum, but informing someone of your strengths via a resume is a generally honest, if not objective, action. You draw attention to what would be relevant to them, and maybe you exaggerate a little, but the process is closely based on the truth. None of this is true in advertising. Advertising is designed to distract you, play on your impulses (ideally without your conscious awareness) and manipulate you into considering their product good by making it familiar (a well-known psychological illusion). Does it seem like honest persuasion when McDonalds chooses the color scheme most proven to evoke hunger in the viewer? Does it seem like legitimate argument when companies create commercials that are designed to work BETTER, not worse, if you aren't really paying attention to them? Humans absorb a lot of information and a lot of biases from those around us. That data stream can be manipulated, because the part of you that remembers the lady on TV recommending a product is the exact same part of your brain that remembers Sheryll from next door recommending a product. Source amnesia leads us to remember dreams as real, remember facts without being able to recall where we heard them, and store observed attitudes and comments of others to inform our own attitudes and behavior. Advertising takes this area of great vulnerability, the instinct for social imitation, and uses it for profit. Yes. I have a problem with advertising. And I think you should too.

Re:More to the point

[painandgreed]

Targeted advertising is great if you use it purely to discover products.

You know what else is great for discovering products? Asking knowledgable people with no financial interest in my decision.

Knowledgable people find out about such products how exactly? They scour the ads for such products and do research. At best, they are specifically sent information about new products for review, which is what? Targeted advertising. Not only do you have some idea that knowledgable people have magic they use to discover new products but you also seem lazy in the desire to let other people do everything and never become knowledgable yourself.

Re:More to the point

[david_thornley]

There exists some advertising that is deceptive and harmful. That doesn't mean all advertising is.

Assuming we adopt your definition of "advertising", substituting "commercial" for "corporate", YttriumOxide's .sig is advertising. It is intended to make /. users buy a book. Is that harmful?

Some advertisements are to get the sale, anything else be damned. Others are intended for existing customers (I get a lot of advertising from assorted companies I do business with) or intended to start a long-term customer relation, and those have to mesh to some extent with the customers' needs.

For an example, I've bought stuff from Amazon. Amazon regularly sends me emails with advertising in them. I usually glance at them and delete them, but I've glanced at them and bought stuff often enough for it to make sense for Amazon. I've gotten very good deals on some things, and found out about others I didn't know existed. Overall, my life is very slightly enhanced by these advertisements. Amazon could send me deceptive advertising, trying to get me to buy something I really don't want, and it might be short-term profitable. The result would be I'd automatically junk email from Amazon, and they'd lose out on a small but continuing revenue scheme. Amazon has incentive to make sure I find the advertising useful, and to make it point to things I want as often as they can. They have incentive to make sure I don't buy something from them based on their advertising that I am disappointed with because it really wasn't as described.

If you show my how YttriumOxide's .sig or Amazon's emails are harming me, I'll at least consider your thesis that all advertising is bad. Not until.

Any kind of Internet ads are bad

[ruir]

I use ad blocking, refuse to see any video at all that starts with ads, and even use filters for facebook and linked.in. Actually facebook and youtube are extremely annoying without filters in the browser.

Re:Any kind of Internet ads are bad

[Anonymous Coward]

Sense of entitlement? Is someone holding a gun to someone else's head and demanding that they stop using advertisements? Is someone saying that they absolutely deserve anything? No? Then there is no "sense of entitlement"; it's just a bunch of people deciding they don't like advertisements and not using websites where they can't get rid of them.

Re:Any kind of Internet ads are bad

[i kan reed]

Meh, I don't care. I'd rather put actual money towards the ad-blocker teams if there was an adblock/ad arms race than face ads I don't want to see. I'd also stop using sites that had ads that intrude on my life.

What other people want me to see will never be a determining factor in what I choose to see in life. I don't care if high expense sites die in the process. I don't care if paywalls crop up for content with actual value. I don't care if its tragedy of the commons or not. I didn't sign a deal that said I had to be exposed to ads, so I won't(and I wouldn't sign such a deal).

Re:Any kind of Internet ads are bad

[ruir]

I can't be bothered and I refuse to do it. Lets point it out I am not demanding they take them offline, I just vote my clicks, or rather the absence of them. If you want customers like me, devise a less intrusive way. And I don't really care what you think about it.

Re:Any kind of Internet ads are bad

[girlintraining]

Well sure. You deserve the internet.

Myth: Busted
Several countries have added internet access to their constitutions as a basic human right. Sorry if you don't live in one of those countries.

I'm sure someone will respond telling me that advertising is an outdated business model,

No. I don't think we will. We'll respond by telling you that you jumped the snark. Advertising isn't an outdated business model, it is essential to it. Nobody's arguing that. Well, nobody with more than a tenuous grip on the subject matter. Our concern is the toxic byproducts of excessive advertising, which include violations of privacy, computer security, and watering down of mass communication technologies like TV to the point they are so super-saturated in advertising as to be nearly unusable for the purpose of getting anything else, which in turn is caused largely by a massive power imbalance between private citizens and corporations -- our legislators are inaccessible, hidden behind a wall of money built by advertisers who are engaged in a Red Queen race with each other... with increases in advertising driving the response level and interest of their audience straight into the dirt.

Re:Any kind of Internet ads are bad

[mythosaz]

Well sure. You deserve the internet.

Myth: Busted
Several countries have added internet access to their constitutions as a basic human right. Sorry if you don't live in one of those countries.

Is part of that right to internet access the right to use YouTube without seeing an ad for Colgate Toothpaste or listen to Pandora without hearing a blurb for a Ford Fusion?

Re:Any kind of Internet ads are bad

[i kan reed]

On the other hand, what specific duty is set out that I have to see an ad to visit the site?

Re:Any kind of Internet ads are bad

[girlintraining]

Is part of that right to internet access the right to use YouTube without seeing an ad for Colgate Toothpaste or listen to Pandora without hearing a blurb for a Ford Fusion?

Umm... they can try. Good luck getting past all the adblock in my browser though. And fun fact; Have you ever noticed that if you're willing to wait until a couple hours after a show has initially aired, the torrent sites light up like a big christmas tree with new torrents of that show... invariably with the advertising cut out? I salute these people; Truly, you are doing God's work there. I will gladly wait a day to watch my favorite shows; Cut away all the fat and leave just a lean, mean, content machine. Delicious.

All those people who can't wait or don't know how to download a torrent client and join the revolution... they deserve the advertising. Burn in advertising hell, you lazy peons. :3

Re:Any kind of Internet ads are bad

[ruir]

You don't get it. Besides wasting my time, what specific duty is set out that I have to pay the bandwidth and the equipment to watch that advert?

Re:Any kind of Internet ads are bad

[mythosaz]

Unless you've agreed to some sort of TOS, you don't have a specific obligation.

I'm apparently in the /. minority, but I still believe there's a tacit agreement to keep websites operational by at least giving their revenue model a chance. Right now, that model is mostly advertising.

I have the option of disabling ads here, but they're fairly unobtrusive (and generally well targeted since I'm "all-in" with Google), so I do the "right" thing and leave them on. I do similar by leaving the ads on at places like 2+2.

Does giving them a chance equate to clicking every banner, watching every video and donating to every request? For me. No. ...but that doesn't change the fact that I believe that we have a tacit agreement to not simply "steal" the bandwidth from sites we frequent because ad-blocking makes our lives easier.

As a result of this thinking, I try to pick good sites to suck bandwidth from.

YMMV.

Re:Any kind of Internet ads are bad

[mythosaz]

Me me me me me me me me me me!

And as soon as everyone follows you, the shows you torrent will disappear.

Re:Any kind of Internet ads are bad

[Prof.Phreak]

I think you missed the (early) Google business model. Ads shouldn't be annoying. They should be something that actually helps folks find what they're looking for. If ads show folks stuff that they're not looking for, then folks are perfectly morally right in shutting out those ads---screw the advertisers with their large bandwidth bills and starving families. I have no sympathy for corps that are intentionally trying to waste my time.

I've yet to see anyone complain about non-intrusive sometimes helpful ads (e.g. google adwords that show up when you search for something in google.com). Most ads aren't like that.

Re:Any kind of Internet ads are bad

[i kan reed]

Ads are the start of the tragedy of the commons. No one benefits from the net presence of ads, but individuals benefit from their own ads.

Re:Any kind of Internet ads are bad

[i kan reed]

I also get that. I just find my own personal exposure to the ad to be a greater expense than the capital costs.

Re:Any kind of Internet ads are bad

[TheCarp]

Except, from DAY ONE the model on the web was that the server serves up the content, and the browser decides how to interpret/display that content.

Who is the more entitled one; The person who configures his local browser to display and interpret content in the manner which he chooses, or the content producer who specifically disregards this model and implements his own business in such a way as it relies on specific vagaries of specific browsers in specific configurations, and then whines when people choose local configurations which break his model?

Yes you linked an image on a third party server, is there an RFC somewhere which specifies that a web browser MUST parse all HTML content and MUST load any content referred to, regardless of source?

If so, I missed it. The ad blockers are using the WWW as designed. Anyone claiming that this situation should be different because reality is breaking their business model is the entitled one.

Re:Any kind of Internet ads are bad

[khellendros1984]

I pay for Netflix, partially because it means that I get to be served "endless on demand video streaming" without seeing ads. There are other sites that, if given the chance, I'd pay to have ad-free. Seeing as that's not an option, I usually just avoid sites that get annoying enough to bother me. I'd have more sympathy for your viewpoint if it were possible to get the product that I want (an ad-free Youtube, for example) without becoming a product myself.

Re:Any kind of Internet ads are bad

[DrStrangluv]

I used to believe this, and then came Stack Overflow. One day I was reading an answer on SO, and it hit me: compare Stack Overflow, which is fully ad supported, with it's arch rival Experts Exchange, which though it has ads, is mainly subscription supported. Which would you rather use?

Re:Any kind of Internet ads are bad

[mythosaz]

I'd at least consider paying for an ad-free YouTube, at least if I used it more. [I seek out the occasional song to play for someone, or watch the occasional device tear-down or home-improvement/repair video..] Pandora and its ilk pretty much all offer this. Many websites do as well.

Re:Any kind of Internet ads are bad

[vux984]

Actually both sites spend 80% of their time rules lawyering.

"This question isn't formatted right" "I should get the points" This question hasn't had its points awarded" "This is not a good question for stackoverflow because there is no one answer and people might disagree.." "Hey all you did was repeat my answer with an example..." ...

I'd pick which ever site was curated to remove that crap once the question was answered.

Re:Any kind of Internet ads are bad

[AlphaWoIf_HK]

Holding a gun to somebody's head and demanding they stop using advertisements is not the minimum bar for being entitled. Are you serious?

Straw man. That's not what he said. Fact of the matter ism that guy implied that being disgusted by advertisements or not bothering to watch an advertisement makes you entitled, which is absolutely false.

When somebody gives you something on the condition that advertisements play, and you decide you'll just take it but not run the advertisements, that's entitlement.

Incorrect. That's using something because it's there, and then modifying/blocking certain data. That is not the same as feeling that you're entitled to anything, and to say it is is to demonstrate that you're just using the word "entitlement" as a meaningless buzzword.

You don't deserve to get their content anyway -- thinking you do is a sense of entitlement.

You're arguing with people that largely don't exist. No one truly believes that they're entitled to the ability to control what other people do with their own websites, and you probably know it, but you instead choose to argue with straw men.

Try reading the reply the AC replied to: "but that doesn't change the sense of entitlement of people who can't be bothered to watch a 15-second ad before being served endless on demand video streaming by YouTube or mostly-free music by Pandora." I guess you're entitled if you can't be bothered to watch ads. That is exactly what he said; read the comment yourself.

Re:Any kind of Internet ads are bad

[AlphaWoIf_HK]

The funny thing with tacit agreements is... you can say they mean whatever you want them to mean, so no one with a brain cares if you believe they exist.

Re:Any kind of Internet ads are bad

[TheCarp]

I see your problem. You are using a bad model to understand these interactions. One does not, usually, put ads on a website, one puts references in a website to other sites which serve ads. In the default configuration of most web browsers a browser does, connect to such sites and download their content...right along with the original site, and runs any and all scripts handed to it from all sites.

This is a default behaviour, and one Guy A has now based his attempt to turn a profit on.

Guy A is entitled when he starts bitching that people want to browse the web with nonstandard configurations that don't do what he expects and assumed all web browsers would do. It isn't Guy Bs fault that Guy A based his business model on unwarranted assumptions about Guy B's browser.

So yes, when Guy A complains about it, he is acting pretty entitled.

Re:Any kind of Internet ads are bad

[mythosaz]

Try reading the reply the AC replied to: "but that doesn't change the sense of entitlement of people who can't be bothered to watch a 15-second ad before being served endless on demand video streaming by YouTube or mostly-free music by Pandora." I guess you're entitled if you can't be bothered to watch ads. That is exactly what he said; read the comment yourself.

It's not "exactly what I said."

I'll be clearer.

If you expect services like YouTube or Pandora for free, you've likely got an entitlement problem.

Re:Any kind of Internet ads are bad

[mythosaz]

You summarized my position as "I guess you're entitled if you can't be bothered to watch ads" and followed that immediately with, "That's exactly what I said."

Someone reading your post could easily conclude that I said, "I guess you're entitled if you can't be bothered to watch ads" -- which wasn't what I said.

There's a sense of entitlement in this country - and getting shit for free on the internet is part of that sense of entitlement.

Re:Any kind of Internet ads are bad

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot several steps:

Guy A builds website.
Guy A puts advertising on his website to support it and/or turn a profit from it.
Guy B request ham (content)
Guy A send ham and spam (ads)
Guy B refuses the spam as it never was requested
Guy A cries that people are not eating his unrequested spam
Guy A is entitled.

This is just the way the internet was designed. You request content and if the server has the resources it sends that content to you. A designer can not expect people to view content they never requested in the first place.

Advertisers are the entitled ones. They want us to use our time, our bandwidth, our electricity to view crap we never requested. If they are not happy with that, then their site can die. I was on the Internet before the advertisers took control of it and it was a fine place. We don't need the advertising leeches. The internet works just fine without them.

Also, don't forget that the advertisers are responsible for a large amount of malware spreading. Advertisers lie, they are manipulative and they spread malware. As far as I am concerned they are the worst than lawyers. I have absolutely no sympathy for them.

Re:Any kind of Internet ads are bad

[mythosaz]

We non-sociopaths engage socially in tacit agreements all the time.

Re:Any kind of Internet ads are bad

[mythosaz]

I'm pretty sure the video above is guy-B complaining, not guy-A.

Re:Any kind of Internet ads are bad

[AlphaWoIf_HK]

You summarized my position as "I guess you're entitled if you can't be bothered to watch ads" and followed that immediately with, "That's exactly what I said."

That is what you said, even if that's not what your position is.

There's a sense of entitlement in this country - and getting shit for free on the internet is part of that sense of entitlement.

Well, is that ruir fellow you replied to in the unidentified group of people you're talking about?

Re:Any kind of Internet ads are bad

[TheCarp]

While true, I am not sure how that is relevant to the discussion of whether Guy B and his stance is acting "entitled". I have certainly seen many "Guy A"s and their apologists make this argument and, as stated, I find this argument has it exactly backwards.

Or to change the phrasing around and say it another way, and really get to the point: It isn't about Guy B being entitled to Guy As content, Guy A is offering it up for him. Guy B is however entirely entitled to display that content for himself in whatever manner he chooses...which really is, him using his web client in exactly the manner which was always intended.

If that wasn't the case, then why wasn't their any outrage about lynx. Lynx doesn't show ads either.

Re:Any kind of Internet ads are bad

[mythosaz]

Agreed. It is difficult for sociopaths to engage in basic human interactions because they don't understand them.

If you say that you honestly don't get how tacit agreements work, and see that we successfully engage in them constantly, you're either being intentionally obtuse, or perhaps you lack whatever genes allow for humans to interact with each other without handing each other contracts every time we pass in the street.

Re:Any kind of Internet ads are bad

[cas2000]

SO and the other Stack Exchange sites have ads? wow, i never realised...i've never seen them.

thank the FSM for AdBlock Plus.

ps: experts exchange was in my block list long before I discovered SO etc. too many search requests ended up on their useless pages demanding joining or subscription before showing any answers, so i filter them out. funnily enough, though, with NoScript, you used to be able to scroll down to the bottom of the page and see the answers anyway...and realise that they were generally shit answers, certainly now worth subscribing for.

Re:Any kind of Internet ads are bad

[Shompol]

As somebody pointed out, 90% (?) of websites out there are not worthy of existence. Maybe if we could get rid of ads those websites would also go away. The internet existed before ads and will probably do just fine after.

1. increased DRM making it progressively more difficult to view content at all.

DRM is a completely different battle coming up, way above and beyond any problems ads ever posed, and it it coming wether or not we choose to use adblockers.

2. quality of content decreasing as it becomes decreasingly profitable to crate content for the web.

To the contrary, when I search for something majority of hits go to ad-infested no-useful-information "profit farms". It is the sites with few or no ads at all that are the most useful.

Re:Any kind of Internet ads are bad

[kwbauer]

No, your last statement is either Guy A puts up paywall or Guy A shutters website.

If Guy A choose the first option, then Guy B will cry about nothing being free anymore thus exposing his sense of entitlement to enjoy the fruits of someone else's labor for nothing.

If Guy A chooses the second option, Guy B will complain about all the free stuff disappearing and wonder why because Guy B has a distorted sense of reality and has yet to realize that the refrigerator remains full because mommy buys the groceries.

Re:Any kind of Internet ads are bad

[ruir]

Yup. I second that, when expert exchange links come up in my google search, I don't even bother to click them.

Re:Any kind of Internet ads are bad

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't care if high expense sites die in the process. I don't care if paywalls crop up for content with actual value. I don't care if its tragedy of the commons or not. I didn't sign a deal that said I had to be exposed to ads, so I won't(and I wouldn't sign such a deal).

Its so obvious that you are such a liar. If you don't care, why are you visiting sites with adblock in the first place? If you didn't care you'd browse the web without adblock and just hit the back button the moment a website showed you an ad. The fact is you *do care*. In fact you are desperate. You badly *want* to see the content on the website.

In fact, why don't you, as an act of protest, blacklist websites on your own machine that show ads? That would be principled.

Re:Any kind of Internet ads are bad

[girlintraining]

And as soon as everyone follows you, the shows you torrent will disappear.

Yeah, in the same way people stopped reading newspapers when the internet came out, and stopped riding horses once the car was developed. Oh wait... that never happened.

Re:Any kind of Internet ads are bad

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Stack Overflow simply has better answers.

I know why

[DCFusor]

First, they suck. I buy a camera, like it, don't return it, yet am then bombarded by ads from the vendor - for the same camera/accessories. WTF?
Two, I'm an inventor by trade. I get a lot of traction by seeing things I didn't expect/want and figuring out how to synthsize these found things into new inventions.
Targeted ads fail on both, horribly.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Ad revenue for phones tripled this year

[ArcadeMan]

You mean those same iPhone users who pay to get apps without banners as opposed to the Android users who are too cheap to pay for apps so almost all their apps have ads in them?

Re:Let's Fight Back?

[ArcadeMan]

Death by a thousand first post?

an odd conclusion

[craftycoder]

"Trying to increase relevance by turning up the creepy level is likely to increase ad blocking, not reduce it."

The entire gloss magazine business is predicated on the observation that people like to look at well targeted advertising. I think the new media companies (Google, Facebook, etc) are just copying old media and are on the right track. I don't think people really care about privacy. They vote for Congressmen who support the PATRIOT Act. They send naked photos of themselves to casual lovers over SMS. They talk about midnight cravings on Facebook. People today are more than willing to give up their privacy for a little bit of attention. Nothing to see here, move along.

Re:an odd conclusion

[istartedi]

Ahhh yes, but it was *you* who picked up a copy of the Beverly Hills Chamber of Commerce publication. They didn't sniff your zip code from your IP address and put the ad next to your g-mail. The ad sends a message of "We are helping to fund this glossy thing that they stack up in boutiques. We drink white wine and eat little sandwiches with the editors. If you work with us, maybe we can do lunch some time". The g-mail placement sends a message of "we contracted out with yet another online advertising firm like everybody else is doing".

I think his conclusion is correct.

Re:an odd conclusion

[craftycoder]

His thesis is compelling, no doubt. What about the signaling of the market capitalization of Facebook and Google though. Doesn't that signal at least as strongly as an ad in Vogue Magazine that they are on to a good idea with their targeted advertising?

Re:an odd conclusion

[istartedi]

The market caps of GOOG and FB signal a lot of things. Only time will tell if they are signalling an irrational market, Federal Reserve policy, or a long term validation of targeted advertising.

Re:an odd conclusion

[dmarti]

Excellent point. Print magazines are in many ways the ideal ad medium. They allow advertisers to choose the type of content that the ad is attached to, but it's impractical to target individual users.

http://zgp.org/targeted-advertising-considered-harmful/#what-does-print-have-that-online-doesnt

Which is why Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends presentations keep showing an out-of-proportion percentage of ad spending going to print, and lower percentages going to more trackable media.

Re:an odd conclusion

[craftycoder]

I really enjoyed the article and sent it to several friends including some economists I know. I think you have a very compelling thesis and while I had an intuition about advertising and that which I liked and that which I did not I could not elucidate why. Your arguments resonate with me and the more I think about them the more they resonate. Thank you for sharing, reading it was the best part of my day.

Nothing New...

[mythosaz]

Targeted ads have been around forever, but with less granularity. You don't advertise malt liquor in The New Yorker, and you don't advertise Tiffany in High Times. [Unless Tiffany started making bongs... ...did they... ...I digress.]

About a year ago, I took the plunge. I let Google see everything my Android sees and logged into Chrome.

Net result to me for giving up my privacy to big do-no-evil? Better service overall across the Google platform, with a minimal amount of what appears to be well tailored advertising for me. I'll let Google read my maps searches in exchange for being "politely notified" about a restaurant near my destination that has a 2-for-1 special that night.

I love 'em.

Also... Obligatory Futurama:

Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 21st century?"
Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.

Re:Ad revenue for phones tripled this year

[chromas]

Take a page from the gaming industry who violently protests against in-game advertising

Just to be clear, did you type that with a straight face?

Target Ads Based On Browsing..."lagging indicator"

[Webcommando]

First, they suck. I buy a camera, like it, don't return it, yet am then bombarded by ads from the vendor - .

I typically use blocking software on most sites, but not all. What I find is the ads are always too late to be useful.

As an example, I was looking at AutoTrader for a used car. Found one I liked, went to dealer, and purchased it. Now, weeks later I still get ads for vehicles. No problem; maybe they assume people search longer for a car. I'll buy that. Purchased flowers for my fiance and the next day I'm getting ads for flowers. Yes, I love her but I'm not buying flowers everyday.

Basically what I'm trying to say is that the ads lag behind what I'm in the market for. They aren't predictive (maybe Google does better when scanning your email) and thus don't add much value if you're already done with the purchase. Facebook seems a bit better because they link them to topics people are discussing in posts. I like to post about cool guitar gear I find so an ad for a discount at Guitar Center might be useful. However, that is rare too.

BTW, don't like ads anymore than anyone else.

I don't know about other people

[jonbryce]

But I find a lot of adverts are extremely badly targeted.

For example, "Thank you for buying a BCI 526Y ink cartridge. Are you interested in our amazing special offer of a Canon MX885 printer to put the thing in?".
Or, "Thank you for buying an SD card from us. Here is a list of digital cameras that we sell should you want something to put it in."
Both those are real life examples from Amazon.

Come on, how many people buy a random inkjet cartridge and then wonder what they are supposed to do with it. Maybe they could wait for a bit, then advertise the same inkjet cartridge, in case I might think of buying it from Staples instead. Or maybe I might want the Cyan cartridge at some point, or the BCI 525Bk one. But that's not what they do.

Then there's the ads that follow you round the internet. For example I have a look at a pair of shoes a particular shoe shop. Then I see adverts everywhere I go for that exact same pair of shoes that that exact same shoe shop. Stop stalking me. I know you sell those shoes. I know I didn't buy them. Maybe there is a reason why I didn't buy them. Just leave me alone.

Re:I don't know about other people

[RedHackTea]

Also... buy something for your girlfriend or mom... then you see globs of female advertising. Binary God help me if I ever have to buy tampons through Amazon.

Everything listed here describe why I block ads.

[intermodal]

I block ads for basically every reason listed in the article, including the so-called positives. I not only don't want to be tracked, but I also don't want to be marketed to. Period. If you cold-call me, you have a 100% chance of not selling to me. If you use banner ads, you have about a 99% chance of being blocked, and a 1% chance of me not wishing to buy your product specifically because you are part of the advertising system I hate (and because you're wasting my bandwidth). If you show up at my office unbidden, I will not buy your product unless ordered to by my boss.

That leaves television, and I watch very little that has actual commercial breaks. I pay Netflix $8 a month for that privilege. When I do take the time to watch something on normal television, I DVR it and skip the ads. Hell, I refuse to use Spotify because blocking the ads makes the site unusable.

Perhaps this is the backlash Mr. Marti noted. I've been blocking ads since my dialup days, and I simply don't see why anyone else would trust them either.

Re:"This is an obsolete description."

[Russ1642]

SOFIXIT

You can try but I revert any change that doesn't come with an additional three references and was approved in the talk page prior to the edit.

Re:Ad revenue for phones tripled this year

[intermodal]

Take a page from the gaming industry who violently protests against in-game advertising...

I see what you did there.

Re:"This is an obsolete description."

[i kan reed]

Guess what we have here. A reference! A publication officially saying that description is wrong.

Argument Fail

[dcollins]

The central part of the argument, referring to papers by Davis et. al., seems like batshit lunacy to me.

Davis et. al. ask the question, “Is advertising rational?” and come up with: “It is not so much the claims made by advertisers that are helpful, but the fact that they are willing to spend extravagant amounts of money on a product that is informative.”... what is a “screening mechanism” that will separate the sellers who believe their products to be of high quality from the deceptive sellers? The idea is to come up with some activity that is costly enough for low quality sellers that they won’t do it, but still affordable for high quality sellers. Advertising shows that a seller has the money to advertise (which they presumably got from customers, or from investors who thought the product was worth investing in), and believes that the product will earn enough repeat sales to justify the ad spending.

That's crazy talk. If that were true, advertising could just be a bunch of people burning money onscreen and saying "yeah, our stuff is so awesome we can do this with our spare cash". But what advertising really is (usually) is a bunch of scummy emotional ploys to make people feel deprived and needy of some product. Personally, I use any advertising I see as a signal of what not to buy: Banks, insurance, investment services, phones that advertise widely on TV always have the shittiest customer service (they must be so big they couldn't possibly care about me as a customer). As my friend says, "advertising is always a communication of the problems that company is trying to fix".

Advertising in general is just scummy shit to make people do what they don't want. Unfortunately Marti's argument falls apart by it being hinged on this insane "rational economy" assertion.

Re:Argument Fail

[epine]

Advertising in general is just scummy shit to make people do what they don't want. Unfortunately Marti's argument falls apart by it being hinged on this insane "rational economy" assertion.

Sorry, bucko there's no free lunch on thinking straight.

Actually burning money is déclassé. (So is failing to render basic Unicode.) However, conspicuous consumption really works when done right. Thorstein Veblen, this is Mr Cecil Rhodes. You'll get along famously.

As far as Don Marti goes, it's an extremely well-written article about factors many people don't bother to consider. It's a heavy lunch as it now stands. But still, he leaves too much out. Sometimes you can't win.

The problem is that advertisers pursue mixed tactics. They burn money to burnish the brand silver, while also pushing your worst buttons, while moving mountains behind the scenes to obscure whatever direct quality signal the consumer might also observe.

In the rare case where a branding effort convinces me, I'll go to the corporate web site with a specific question about whether their product has a quality I regard as essential. It'll take me five minutes to even find the page that reveals this (or ten minutes of futility culminating in a boiling rage if the page doesn't even exist). Then I when I find the page, it might reveal what I wish to know or it might not. When it reveals what I wish to know, it might yet remain hard to determine exactly which models and which model years conform to my wishes.

When one steps back to do a NPV on the entire experience, the answer is "Why the fuck bother?"

My most recent horror-show experience involved procuring Nomacorc for some homemade wine which I wish to cellar for up to five years (my cellar is set up for upright bottle storage, so natural cork is a no-fly zone).

Check out this exercise in burning money: NomaSense OxiSense video. Labcoats, the musical, scored by John Williams. Notice the use of a thick French accent to extol product virtue, and the Swiss accent for the bean-counter spiff. This is a cool technology. I'm impressed, and not just in my shrivelled MTV reflex arc.

But mainly I just wanted to buy the best existing Nomcorc closure. Well, it took a long time on that horrid website to determine which of their product levels was best suited to my needs. Try it yourself.

Having figured this out, I started to call local wine supply retailers, and not a single one could tell me which expensively-branded Nomacorc they were actually purveying. Nomacorc (or their hapless distributor) ships out bags with no product markings, and neither do the individual corks have any such marking. If you bottle your fine Nebbiolo with a two-year cork by mistake, four years from now you can kiss your draino goodbye.

Eventually I found a hopeless geek such as myself who runs a brew-on-premise. I asked him which Nomacorc he sells. He launched into a tirade (without any prompting from me) "oh my god, I wasted of my life on their web site and putting through my order, but I did finally get a huge bail of corks suited to preserve wine for four plus years". I replied "thank you for saying that, I think we'll be friends for life".

As far as I'm concerned, the entire advertising industry can go stuff itself until the day comes when the supermarket informs me that I've selected a product that exceeds my personal guidelines for sodium or MSG or Monsanto extortion chemical, so I can reject it from my basket prior to paying. Until advertising is on-side with helping me enforce my better self (over my harried, impulsive fuckwit self) their business model will continue to circle the drain of preying on the weak, or the strong in weak moments.

Re:Argument Fail

[dkf]

If that were true, advertising could just be a bunch of people burning money onscreen and saying "yeah, our stuff is so awesome we can do this with our spare cash".

I'd buy that!

Gifts and work

[YalithKBK]

My favorite is always when I am shopping for gifts online. I look at many items (and possibly purchase a few) most of which, I have zero interest in for myself. However, because I happened to look at them, suddenly there are banner ads everywhere for items I want nothing to do with.

I also have this issue with work. I work for a biotech company and we order our products from a few usual lab supply sites. Sometimes I see banner ads for the same things. If I'm at work, ok, but I already have that information because I was just on that company's site earlier. If I'm at home and just happened to look at something (maybe from an e-mail) then biotech banner ads are plastered all over my personal computer for a week. Sorry folks, I'm not shopping for lab supplies at home.

A lot of targeted ads just don't work for the way I browse and it makes me laugh at them.

Re:Everything listed here describe why I block ads

[i kan reed]

This feels like a precise regurgitation of my own position, only I also feel that advertisement as a whole is a tragedy of the commons problem that sabotage GDP for the individual advertiser's benefit.

I guess that second statement calls for some explanation. There is a nominal way you'd prefer to spend your money. If ads work(and clearly they do) then they spend capital(and labor) to change a person's spending preference from what they'd nominally enjoy. Economically, that's a decrease in utility, and thus rent-seeking.

Targetted advertising is funny

[0123456]

Most of the ads I still see are ads for things I already bought, because someone happened to notice me browsing a relevant product page or doing a web search... so ad an for just about anything else would have been far more effective.

For example, I just bought a new NAS, and noticed this morning that I was getting NAS ads. Totally fscking useless, other than to make money for whatever site is shoveling the ads in my direction.

Re:Everything listed here describe why I block ads

[intermodal]

I would tend to agree with your statements here. Glad to find something we can agree on every once in a while! I have no desire to give people the opportunity to attempt to persuade me to part with my money. I'll part with my money when I want to part with my money, for what I actually want to spend it on, thanks.

Targeted advertising?

[wjcofkc]

I prefer seemingly random auto playing video ads with nice clear audio on Slashdot's front page to anything...

Re:There is more to life than buying things.

[prestonmichaelh]

This argument seems backwards though, somewhat. I guess the underlying factor is self-control. If you have the control to only buy what you need, then having targeted ads can aid in saving money.

In the original example, finding a 2 for 1 deal at a nearby restaurant would save you 50%. If you aren't going to eat out or are eating out alone, then ignoring the ad shouldn't be a problem.

There are something I by regularly and actively seek out sales for. If, through targeted advertising, the sellers could let me know that product XYZ that I've been buying each month for the past year is on sale at store ABC this month, it would save me money and time.

Ads make it free, why break the system?

[diodeus]

BYW: CIOs don't buys ads, marketing people do.

Advertising: there's only ever ONE sales pitch

[petes_PoV]

Forget the content of the advertisement, it doesn't matter.

The only buying decision that matters is the one where the advertising agency convinces their customer to buy the advertising they are proposing. What the ad tries to sell to the end user is completely irrelevant. By the time the ad gets onto the air, into print or on a website, the sale has already been made - the ad agency has got its money.

Whether advertising is direct, targetted, stuffed under your windscreen wiper, blocked by a program or on the front page of the NYT is just a technique used to sell the advertising - not the product. Once agencies find that one form of advertising no longer convinces the client to part with their cash, they'll find the next "new thing" and the whole world will move on.

Re:There is more to life than buying things.

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess the underlying factor is self-control.

If you don't realize that generations of research has been devoted to manipulating your sense of "want/need", you are unlikely to realize how thoroughly you have been compromised. Advertising is one of the games that you can only win if you refuse to play.

If you aren't going to eat out or are eating out alone, then ignoring the ad shouldn't be a problem.

It is still a problem insofar as I have to consume the ad to discern whether it is worth pursuing, which at minimum is a waste of my time. I don't see how this problem can be solved unless the advertising industry learns to perceive/respect the disinclination to buy things in principal.

Re:Why they're bad:

[TheCarp]

Actually, facebook advertising is my absolute favourite. Admittedly, I don't see much advertising because my own security config (noscript+requestpolicy) blocks ads voraciously as a side effect of safe browsing.

That said, FB is great. what I like about them especially is the "Comment" link. Where else can you actually COMMENT on ads and see comments other people made? OMG its great, I don't even mind ads for things I dislike....in fact....

When I see an ad for something I dislike, i comment on it. I pan them, I tell them why I dislike their ad or their product and say whatever else makes me feel better. Then, they take that as my interest in those ads, and I get more of them! Which means more opportunities to comment and more satisfaction for me.

whether this really works for the advertisers, beats me, but I enjoy the hell out of FB ads.

Re:There is more to life than buying things.

[mythosaz]

Well done targeted advertising brings me things that I might not have otherwise known about and might be interested in spending my money on. It's part of why I went "all in" with Google's services. Not only do I think I get back more from them in services than I give up in data*, but I believe most of the advertising I get from them is either (a) useful, or (b) easy to ignore.

I thank Google for telling me about a restaurant near the place it knows I'm likely driving to tonight. I thank Google for checking my inbox a few days before Valentines, noticing I don't have a confirmation email for flowers and showing me some 1-800-Flowers or ProFlowers or FTD ads.

[*They likely feel the same way -- that they're getting the good end of the deal, and maybe we're both right.]

self-correction: s/bail/bale

[epine]

I'm usually pretty good about that.

Here follows some anti-lameness fodder:

The origins of Unicode date to 1987, when Joe Becker from Xerox and Lee Collins and Mark Davis from Apple started investigating the practicalities of creating a universal character set. In August 1988, Joe Becker published a draft proposal for an "international/multilingual text character encoding system, tentatively called Unicode". Although the term "Unicode" had previously been used for other purposes, such as the name of a programming language developed for the UNIVAC in the late 1950s, and most notably a universal telegraphic phrase-book that was first published in 1889, Becker may not have been aware of these earlier usages, and he explained that "[t]he name 'Unicode' is intended to suggest a unique, unified, universal encoding".

I 3 Targeted Ads

[upto0013]

Oh a neckbeardy guy who doesn't buy anything and rants about advertising fat cats doesn't like advertising, I'm so surprised.

Trolling aside, what is the big fucking deal with targeted ads.

Sure, it's stumbling into the future, but let's look at this idyllically. If all the data that Google is already mining from my activities could actually show me products I actually want without shopping around, why would I be upset? What if Google's algorithms see that it's been three years since I bought a new tent -- for example -- and provides ads for renewed waterproofing or a fancy new tent. That sounds pretty awesome to me. Saves me time, energy and lets me outsource my anxiety about tent leaks and think about my next camping trip.

This guy is a fucking moron spewing a pile of non-sequiturs. This is as bad as Republicans wanting to go back to the days when Andy Griffith was the most dangerous man on TV. They can't turn back time, and neither can this guy.

If you want to live a private, ad free life, then go off the grid and raise some goats. I'll buy your delicious cheese via a well-targeted ad and we can all be happy.

Targeting consumers who already bought the product

[jtara]

While I use an ad-blocker on my desktop machines, I don't do anything to block ads on my iPad. I realize I can at least shut-off targeting, (and could use a proxy - would be easy given I almost never leave the house with it, and just use my WiFi) but I haven't as of yet. I suppose I will, though, because I am noticing a trend: most of the ads I see are for products I have already bought.

So, I recently got interested in Sous Vide cooking, did some research, and bought a Sous Vide Supreme. Guess what I see blasted across websites on my iPad? Sous Vide Supreme. Now, you'd think after a while these brilliant algorithms would notice that I've stopped search for equipment, and have seen searching for recipies. But, no, they just keep wasting their money pushing ads for the product I've already bought.

This is just one example. I've had this happen with other products recently, as well. In every case, I haven't noticed the ads until I've already bought the product.

Yeah, It Is

[Greyfox]

This post is brought to you by Herpacin! When you've got Herpes, Herpacin will hide them!

That's why targeted advertising is bad mmkay?

Re:Ads or Pay up. You decide

[cas2000]

no problem. i don't use them now when they're free.

well, i have accounts on facebook (some of my friends are/were on it) and gmail (convenient when i was travelling in 2000) but i log in to them about once every six months or so.

i never bothered with twitter at all...couldn't see the point when it started, and still can't see any value in it now.

Re:But didn't we ask for it?

[cas2000]

> When ads started appears on t'Net there were complaint from
> people saying they were seeing products they didn't want, and it > would make sense if the ads were tsargetted.

only the advertising wankers were saying that. everybody else just wanted the ads to go away.

co-incidentally, the wankers were about as semi-literate then as you are today.

Advertiser targets Slashdot

[PaddyM]

Says targeting is harmful. Have to agree with Bill Hicks here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo

Sexual Selection

[utkonos]

The ideas that are put forward in the section "Is advertising rational?" are very interesting. They seem related in some way to what happens in biology, specifically evolution and sexual selection. The process of exponential growth in female preference seems to me to be similar to the advertising process. The male grows some fairly useless appendage such as a plume of feathers or antlers that is basically a waste of energy, but a public and visible waste of energy. This demonstrates to the female that the male is healthy enough that he can expend this energy and still have offspring. Females then select males with larger of these appendages creating an evolutionary force that increases the size of the appendage to a point of equilibrium in the population. In advertising, the act of spending money on advertising demonstrates the health of the company rather than serving a more direct purpose.

Re:Sexual Selection

[VortexCortex]

So... Basically, the damn NBC peacock is trying to fuck us all?!

Re:Sexual Selection

[utkonos]

Yes. Exactly. Actually its the Comcast peacock now.

Re:Enough with the Beards

[dmarti]

Sorry about that, but I need the beard for work so that they'll take me seriously when I talk about Git and package management on Linux. If I came in with a Don Draper look, it wouldn't work.

Annoying soundtrack

[rasmusbr]

Next week: why overlaying elevator music / porno soundtrack (or even your favorite song) over voice content doesn't work...

For one thing it's annoying. Also, people with hearing disabilities might not be able to hear the speech.

Re:That's PART of WHY I wrote this... apk

[Gibgezr]

People saw "posts advocating use of someone's special hosts file" and had bad flashbacks to do with that jerk who spammed his hosts file spamvert messages all over Slashdot a while back.

The above post, in fact, looks suspiciously like said spamverts...was it this guy?