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GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

blogs.harvard.edu

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Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#351

Post by taeric »

reaperducer wrote: post #279
rossdavidh wrote: post #59

Oddly, I think the article underestimates the size of the change coming. I think one side affect of the surge of IT into advertising, is that it has become easier to measure exactly how well advertising works. By and large, it doesn't, very well. I am reminded of this, from Paul Graham, about his time at Yahoo: http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html "...The reason Yahoo didn't care about a technique that extracted the…

>I think one side affect of the surge of IT into advertising, is that it has become easier to measure exactly how well advertising works. By and large, it doesn't, very well. If that was true, Coca-Cola and McDonald's wouldn't exist.

Coke's most successful marketing trick was a giant fluke. Even then, most of their success is probably in cornering the market, not just marketing. In large, many (most?) places sell it because they have an exclusive license that provides cups and supplies.

McDonald's is a funny one. They really don't seem any worse than most other fast food to me. I suspect they saw more expansion from their franchise methods than anything else, though.

Which is not to say the marketing isn't important. I just don't think it deserves the full victory.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#352

Post by kalleboo »

briandear wrote: post #229
downandout wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The guidance we have received is that if your business is not located in the EU, not targeting EU countries, you don't have parts of your site translated to languages spoken in EU countries, and do not have an EU-based domain name extension, your EU traffic is considered incidental and GDPR probably does not apply to you. But, as with everything in the GDPR, that is extremely murky. This law is subject to unique inte…

Language is a horrible benchmark. French in Canada, English and Spanish in the US, German among German expats (of which there are millions.) Targeting a business for extortion because of the languages offered? Ridiculous. GDPR should only apply to businesses with a physical nexus in Europe, anything else is an attempt to assert extraterritorial jurisdiction. Europeans don’t have to visit US/Canadian/Chinese websites.…

Targeted advertising is not being banned, just regulated. Tobacco and Alcohol are already highly regulated. Junk food is being increasingly regulated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugary_drink_tax#Countries

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#353

Post by gaius »

m-localhost wrote: post #242
gaius wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the odds of someone offical even noticing that you are in violation of GDPR? Plenty of ordinary people will be actively looking for opportunities to file GDPR complaints. I know I will. This is a crusade. Taking the Internet back from adtech.

Are you going after amazon or my neighbours small online flower business?

If they have Google ads they’re fair game.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#354

Post by downandout »

taeric wrote: post #350
downandout wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By and large, it doesn't, very well. If that's true, it's not because ad tech doesn't work, it's that most advertisers don't use it properly. A large percentage of my company's revenue comes from performance marketing (running paid traffic to affiliate offers) and it works very well for us. You just have to know what you're doing, make sure you're not getting too much bot/junk traffic, and bid the appropriate amounts…

Is that 30% confirmed by a hold out group? The cynic in me suspects most measures, nowadays. I can't believe nobody is making a profit. I just suspect most of the trick is in generating demand, not finding it. That or diversifying offerings.

Is that 30% confirmed by a hold out group?

I’m not sure what you mean by that. But generally we get about a 30-50% ROI on our native ad campaigns once they are optimized, and most affiliate networks pay weekly if you produce significant revenue. We do better than most because I wrote some clever stuff to identify sites that were sending us mostly bots/bad traffic and automatically blacklist them from showing our ads. There are a ton of these in the native ad space.

I just suspect most of the trick is in generating demand, not finding it.

There are evergreen affiliate niches such as weight loss, hair loss, erectile dysfunction, etc. Aging, bad genetics, and poor lifestyle choices generate the demand for us. Making money in these niches is generally as simple as placing ads on sites where people that belong to certain known demographic groups visit, and reducing fraudulent traffic by as much as possible.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#355

Post by evfanknitram »

bostik wrote: post #168
evfanknitram wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like a weak argument though. Two humans can also have same name and zipcode. They can also have same personal number and bank account number if they are in different countries. Without tracking and correlation, most information on its own is useless.

This reads like you are intentionally trying to misunderstand. GDPR has two categories of user information: direct identifiers and indirect identifiers. Direct identifiers are pieces of data that allow to target a person, or a very small group of persons from a single data point . Indirect identifiers are anything that you could use to build a marketing cohort. Combining a few indirect identifiers allows to target ve…

I have no idea what you mean. I was not talking about GDPR.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#356

Post by [deleted] »

FooBarWidget wrote: post #73
wpietri wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is certainly fine with me. I'm always amused that the notion that I will regret not having "relevant" ads. Where "relevant" means more likely to get me to buy things I was not intending to buy. Ads make sense to me in the age of information scarcity. But now if I need a thing, searching always turns up what I want. If I need to figure out what kind of thing to buy, I can read review at places like The Wirecutte…

Isn't what you're saying in your first paragraph just strawmanning the definition of "relevant"? If you do not want to buy anything no matter what they show you then those ads are by definition not relevant. If they make you want to buy then the ads are by definition relevant. They aren't brainwashing you, at the end of the day the one in control of the credit card is still you.

[deleted]

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#357

Post by jes5199 »

rossdavidh wrote: post #59

Oddly, I think the article underestimates the size of the change coming. I think one side affect of the surge of IT into advertising, is that it has become easier to measure exactly how well advertising works. By and large, it doesn't, very well. I am reminded of this, from Paul Graham, about his time at Yahoo: http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html "...The reason Yahoo didn't care about a technique that extracted the…

advertising has never worked, but the delusion that it could work is strong - it seems like there’s probably a neverending supply of businesses who are going to throw some money down the drain, just in case they get lucky. It’s like buying lottery tickets - you don’t do it because of your great ROI, you do it because you’re having a fantasy about results

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#358

Post by pishpash »

rossdavidh wrote: post #59

Oddly, I think the article underestimates the size of the change coming. I think one side affect of the surge of IT into advertising, is that it has become easier to measure exactly how well advertising works. By and large, it doesn't, very well. I am reminded of this, from Paul Graham, about his time at Yahoo: http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html "...The reason Yahoo didn't care about a technique that extracted the…

I agree that as an aggregate we're probably massively overpaying for ads for little average effect, but there may be a game-theoretic reason why it does not go away. What if out of 100 competitors the top one gains a lot from ads but the 99 others lose? All 100 have to pay to play to try to be that one. If they cooperated as a cartel they could all pay less for ads and consumers could pay less for products but that is unlikely to happen.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#359

Post by chrismorgan »

dizzystar wrote: post #282
rossdavidh wrote: post #59

Oddly, I think the article underestimates the size of the change coming. I think one side affect of the surge of IT into advertising, is that it has become easier to measure exactly how well advertising works. By and large, it doesn't, very well. I am reminded of this, from Paul Graham, about his time at Yahoo: http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html "...The reason Yahoo didn't care about a technique that extracted the…

Advertising doesn't work that well if you look at the raw numbers. Assume you have a great campaign and awesome conversion funnel, so that you get 1% clicks and 1% conversion. The math is 100 x 100, or one sale for every 10,000 eyes who sees your ad. In a vacuum, those numbers are awful. If your entire marketing strategy is buying ads to convert to sales, then of course, advertising doesn't work, and really, you prob…

While reading your comment. I imagined 10,000 one-eyed people. :-)

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#360

Post by pishpash »

rebuilder wrote: post #121
madeofpalk wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By and large, it doesn't, very well. I know Twitter isn't known for being the best at advertising, but it was made exceptionally clear to me that online advertising is a massive bunch of lies when I did my GDPR Twitter data export and it included me in a bunch of incorrect, non-sensical and contradictory ad targeting groups. Twitter claims I: * Own a cat, dog and other animal (I don't) * Have between $100k- $999k l…

For the frugal/high spender conflict, I can kind of see how that might happen. I try to buy quality goods because cheap stuff doesn't last. That means spending more up front to spend less in the long run. So frugal, but also maybe high spender? My mom always says: if you're poor, you can't afford to buy cheap.

That almost never works for the reason you describe. For any quality item that lasts M times as long as the cheap item, you can almost always find N > M such that you can buy N copies of the cheap item for the price of one quality item. You do not spend less in the long run, though you can convince yourself of that. The primary effect of buying cheap is not financial, it's that you're dealing with less quality over the entire usage lifetime (hence getting less utility out of it) and the replacement effort has cost (but which for poor people is very little by definition).
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