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GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

blogs.harvard.edu

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Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#421

Post by datenwolf »

JeremyBanks wrote: post #157
icebraining wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can know how many people, as long as they don't store personal information. Keeping a counter doesn't require consent.

Keeping a reliable counter of meaningful interactions is hard without personal data to correlate unique users.

> Keeping a reliable counter of meaningful interactions is hard without personal data to correlate unique users.

It's hard if visitor numbers would directly translate into revenue or similar. The trouble you're running in then is discerning organic hits from clickfarming.

If all you care about is when, where what content is popular on your website, there's a pretty simple method: Tally 200 and 304 responses. 200 tells you how many visits you get. 304 tells you, how often people hit refresh, or re-visit your page within the expiration time of the URL that 304s.

Also there's little value in identifying individual visitors. Getting a coarse idea where visitors are located in the world might be nice (for a regional news outlet for example). So just slap some coarse grained. GeoIP on it.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#422

Post by hadrien01 »

robin_reala wrote: post #411
TylerE wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems extraordinarily flippant. I can't imagine giving up Google Analytics for http logs on a content-driven site.

Why would you give up on GA? You’re already not allowed to store personal data in it according to their TOS so (assuming you’re abiding by them) you can just leave it running.

By default GA stores IP addresses, so you need to get consent about storing this personal data. There's a flag you can set to tell Google you want no IP addresses in your data collection.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#423

Post by tjoff »

wdr1 wrote: post #299
tjoff wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are the marketers other choices? Advertise on a tech site, 80+% will be interested in tech. Advertise on a dog community site is probably pretty spot on if you want to target dog owners... Far better than what, 5% ? This isn't rocket science, we sold everyones integrity for pennies. > who watch the ad, and aren't buying an iPhone. It's waste. No, advertisements like that are more about selling the brand than s…

> Advertise on a dog community site is probably pretty spot on if you want to target dog owners... Big brands struggle with UGC. Witness the events of YouTube & brand safety. But even without that, what you're saying just isn't scalable. What community site can reach even 50% of dog owners -- let alone what a primtetime sitcom or YouTube can reach? > No, advertisements like that are more about selling the brand than…

Only google et al cares about scalability, everyone else cares about results. Only google needs to sell ads without any knowledge about the product or audience, this scales extremely well but leads to poor results.

> But you're really saying Apple doesn't dramatically increase its spend when a new phone is released? That's poppycock.

When is the best time to sell the brand? When your flagship is a year old and still costs as much as on launch day and when the competition has surpassed you? Hardly.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#424

Post by SmallDeadGuy »

tzs wrote: post #277
solomatov wrote: post #30

One surprising side effect of this might be that the hordes of machine learners and data scientists who used to work for adtech might go to healthcare/bioinformatics where we might get new breakthroughs.

They can still use sufficiently anonymized data under GDPR. They also will have data from people who have consented to have their data used. They will also have data from visitors who are not in the Union. I would not at all be surprised if this is enough for the machine learning and data science people to be effective, especially at very high traffic sites like Facebook and Twitter.

But that still prevents the entire targeted ad industry. If you can't hold any identifying information on a user that didn't opt-in to tracking, you can't show targeted ads to that user.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#425

Post by taeric »

wastedhours wrote: post #414
taeric wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

I think you're doing a disservice to marketing - both of the elements you've mentioned actually fall under the marketing banner: - Coke: their branding, market research, and consumer strategy got them where they are today. All are marketing functions. - McDonald's: franchise go-to-market strategy, branding, consistency of product. All are marketing functions. Whether or not paid advertising helped them is a whole dif…

Then I contend that marketing is expanded to too large a term. And at that point, yes, it is responsible from everything including product strategy, but also worthless as a term. :(

Might as well debate that "business" is responsible.

Especially if the success is not repeatable. Which, most early practices of large companies today are not repeatable by smaller companies.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#426

Post by taeric »

downandout wrote: post #354
taeric wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

How do you measure the 30%? Compared to previous revenue or compared to a cohort you purposely don't advertise to, but is randomly selected from those you do?

That said, the niches you describe sounds like snake oil markets. :(

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#427

Post by FooBarWidget »

zaarn wrote: post #389
beberlei wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! The fud keeps increasing every time another gdpr related post pops up here.

I'm 60% sure it's people who read articles from Adtech Corporations about GDPR and not from people in the EU having to deal with it. The only bad thing that I've noticed about GDPR is that some niche sites that rely on ad revenue are getting fucked over by Google (if you turn off personalized tracking for your visitors you still need the consent to track, there is no difference) so their income might break down. That…

I doubt it's only that. I think it's also the tendency of people nowadays to only read titles and not to investigate further. I think some people are triggered by the phrase "right to be forgotten" and they jump to conclusions without finding out what it's really about.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#428

Post by wastedhours »

taeric wrote: post #425
wastedhours wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're doing a disservice to marketing - both of the elements you've mentioned actually fall under the marketing banner: - Coke: their branding, market research, and consumer strategy got them where they are today. All are marketing functions. - McDonald's: franchise go-to-market strategy, branding, consistency of product. All are marketing functions. Whether or not paid advertising helped them is a whole dif…

Then I contend that marketing is expanded to too large a term. And at that point, yes, it is responsible from everything including product strategy, but also worthless as a term. :( Might as well debate that "business" is responsible. Especially if the success is not repeatable. Which, most early practices of large companies today are not repeatable by smaller companies.

Marketing has always been defined by the 4P's: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion.

The "business" defines the problem-space and strategic direction (in these cases, food/drink), marketing defines how you address the space (specifics of the products from research and evaluation, market positioning, promotion to audiences), operations executes on the above (supply chain, training, maintenance), and then customer support feeds into all three of the above.

This GCSE Bitesize piece (revision material for UK exams students take at 16) outlines why marketing is more than simply advertising and promotion: http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/business/marketing...

Advertising is a subset of marketing, but marketing is a broad term, and is often mistakenly limited in how it's used in arguments (usually to belittle the role of it).

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#429

Post by wilsonnb »

jimktrains2 wrote: post #185
dbasedweeb wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so it’s hard. Nobody is entitled to that being easy in the way that they are to privacy.

What privacy? Knowing that user dhsidhujdjdowhdyyehheis is using my website is not an infringement on your privacy! Why do you think you can control what I do with data you send to me? Don't send me data I'd you don't want me to have it.

I agree with this perspective. I haven't seen anyone present a compelling case as to why a person should own all data about themselves.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#430

Post by donovanh »

M2Ys4U wrote: post #83
CamperBob2 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minimum fine is $20 million, isn’t it?

No. It's part of the calculation for the maximum fine. The maximum fine is defined as €20,000,000 or 4% of your global anual turnover, whichever is largest.

Yep

> Up to €20 million, or 4% of the worldwide annual revenue of the prior financial year, whichever is higher

https://www.gdpreu.org/compliance/fines-and-penalties/

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