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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.
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.
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.
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.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
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.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
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).
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.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
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.
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.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
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.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
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.