sad to report the treasure analogy fails, if you price bulk data feeds from brokers.
My suspicion is that it's simply not likely to be anyone's choice, as a talented programmer, or data scientist, or even academic in related , to work for a advertising agency, even if salaries were comparable. The difficulty of comparing salaries that's not obvious to the casual observer might inform about cultural values: agencies indeed reward strongly correlated to results. But the tendency is to create expense account lifestyles that are lavish golden handcuffs. I have known fiends reach the age they feel a family is overdue, but be unable to almost even speak at the reality their lifestyle as a single young employee would require a zero before tax, appended to their base remuneration. I don't even think that shock is so rare, but rarer since 08 certainly, as whole societies are feeling financial pressure. Adland is a perilous bubble for those possessing the greatest talents to inflate the bubble. often would fantasize at I opening a meeting with a sharp announcement, "This is a code review. You don't write software. But every line you communicate, causes a trace effect in the reality of sales for our customers (clients, but i loathe the word) We shall now begin by taking one another's client proposals and creative briefs, anonymously, and, after explaining in summary the method and action of the instruction that was acted upon by this agency, analyze the accuracy and efficiency and reliability of each part of those tasks, against this cube containing enough data to clarify sales that each action can possibly affect. ___ Oh, yes, this does happen time to time, by some value of approximately, but would you habitually demand a team confine themselves to measurable actions whose methods can be verified, classified, and show to interact properly with other job roles, few agency company cultures would not be quickly suffering. I believe as I did not long after first hired, when whiskey under the desk was far from unacceptable, barely frowned upon, that mental and emotional well being is inversely disproportional to dominant environment structure and cohesion. i.e. random makes unhappy minds.
No disrespect intended towards some very goo data driven agencies i've known, but data is treated as almost anathema to advertising agencies and especially creatives. Prof Ritson laments the effect of this has been to fragment creative talent so far from the vital intrinsic of the profession, that data is maligned (and arguably more so due to systematic fraud become a openly accepted rate of $8BLN p.a.) that the cumulative effect is utter dysfunction. My own experience of trying to command data with utility in agency settings, is of oil and water that mix only when copious branded detergent ads are applied. (Because detergents are typically marketed by "under the line" advertising, coupons, direct mail (as Prof Ritson argues the web became in L.C.D. finality) where numbers are considered appropriately valuable.
That was long wind talk to support a flippant view that if ad agencies knew how to use the data they are collecting, it would cost maybe more than cents in the dollar, to reliably pull complete personal records to "enrich" a website's logs. I'm talking your cell no., income, every personal aspect, recent purchases this week, diet, health data too often sold. Because it has only limited marginal value to each user, meaning advertiser or seller, for websites being direct mail then because direct mail responses hold at a single digit percentage for all i unknowingly may surmise may be a fundamental law of nature, the value of any record is held very low indeed. Yet at each passing through the system, data attaches to the record, and the probability of incredibly invasive data being available on anyone lapse even momentarily regarding their cookie oversight drifts upwards to one. Which makes astonishing detail of data perpetually anyone's for peanuts.
I omitted my flippant belief that agencies are unable to learn how to use data, causing the overflow ad oversupply and undervaluation of dangerous intimate data, but the above marginal value and incremental tendency of records which rarely are pruned, accurately explains the sad real mechanism selling our privacy for oh, maybe 20 cents for a map of your life this past week...
Can we not bury the ad network servers at sea?
I guess that only means more latency..
If you're a startup and can find a good small agent to buy print adverts, look to the myriad association vanity magazines, that parallel vertical trade magazines. Prime positions can be had for peanuts. Amid hardly any competing advertisers. Three, last time I got a copy of The Royal Institute Of Engineers in house glossy magazine, Ingenia. (excellent read, too. Just three advertising pages. The fourth might be your company, negotiated fora couple thousand. Gales used to do the International Professional Associations Directory, which we used starting out too long ago, to broker at first by hand, pencil, HP17 and phone. Phones. Trader turrets...
I think we need a law to actually throw the unthinkable mass of data out there in private company hands, too easily bought, too cheaply bought, by anyone, into the sea already. A restart with only brief amnesty.; If you did succeed in not being tracked and profiled, you'll be recorded as a infill extrapolation or pure guesswork, and i think made up data, by the wrong parties, is even more dangerous. Those incremented "enriched lists" are too easily salted.
(Disclaimer: my company now works on developing we hope will allow monitoring of such data records without leaking identities of subject customers. But we'd rather not think the job is worth doing. If anyone intrepid or reckless or otherwise misguided ever desires advice how to best book pint ads for the customer, for your own use, i'd be delighted to respond best i can, email in profile)