I don't really understand singling out the specific combination of (advertising, behavioral targeting). The problems with behaviorally tailored content delivery products exist even if advertisers cannot directly monetize it. I think the focus on advertising is a real red-herring.
The EU's war on behavioral advertising
131–140 of 420 posts
Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would it? The EU is just protecting its own member states' IT industries and its own interest in undermining encrypted communications.
> The EU is just protecting its own partner states' IT industries Doesn’t the GDPR go back to a largely grassroots effort, including from members of the Pirate Party phenomenon that people initially scoffed at? I have no doubt that there has been local IT lobbying, but one cannot deny some level of true popular will.
Yes it does. The whole idea that grassroots organizations and - gasp - actual voters are behind the DPD and later the GDPR is something that some people have problems with, they would prefer it if the EU government was playing some shady protectionist game rather than to work on behalf of EU citizens, who very much appreciate them standing up to big telcos and big tech.
Google is so afraid of the EU legislators that they have literally plastered the whole of Brussels Airport ('Zaventem' for the locals) with wall to wall ads on how fantastically pro-end-user privacy they are. It's comical.
Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising
#133... for no reason , to no effect, except the destruction of the entire eu online advertising industry
That sounds like an ok reason to me. But I'll settle for 'damage them to the point that they come to their senses'.
Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising
#134I think this will evolve advertising in interesting ways. "Ads 1.0" had a viewpoint of trying to scrape every last little bit of data about a user's interests: from their email, messages, calendar, search history, friendships, and discussions. There was a mental model that you can't really know what's going to resonate with a person until you have their life under a microscope. This the "surveillance capitalism" take…
I am profoundly anti-advertisement because I believe in the pull model: if I want something I ask. So I think about 95% or more of advertisement today is annoying if not outright evil. But your comment got me thinking. Is there a world where advertisement is, um, just simply good? In other words, what makes advertisement bad today and how would these superapps make advertisement good?
I can imagine a world where advertising is good in the sense that it's always relevant, but such a world places heavier weight on ad "fit" than on the advertiser's bid for that ad inventory. For example, it's a bad user experience when you search for a product/vendor and the first result is their competitor instead because they bid more for that ad placement.
Unfortunately, I don't see how "good" advertising can exist outside of small niches with the economic incentives being what they are.
Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising
#135Seeing many folks ITT questing the value of advertising (behavioural/contextual) so some points:
1. Advertising ideally works as match making by connecting buyers to sellers where the seller is unaware of the buyer. (i.e. the unknown unknown problem). Companies usually collect advertisements and place them on limited ad slots.
2. In earlier, physical, forms of advertising such as newspapers, TV, Retail Stores etc, the same ad used to be shown to everyone so ad slots were fewer, much more expensive, and typically only big businesses could afford them.
3. In Digital ads where ads can be personalised to users, there are now a lot more ad slots and small businesses could effectively reach out to niche buyers who otherwise wouldn't be aware of them. The ads are thus cheaper as their budget is better focused on the right users.
4. Digital ads are broadly of 2 types: Intent ads, where the user submits their intent (Eg: Google search, Amazon, Maps etc) or Discovery ads, where the user is typically not present for any single intent (Eg: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube etc)
5. Discovery based ads in particular can help open up completely new behaviours (in an ideal world) where the seller wasn't aware of the buyer's product but found it very useful (i.e. The unknown unknown problem)
6. Both Intent and discovery ads can be harmful to the user. Intent ads basically charge a tax to prioritise their results (i.e. rent seeking: pay more to jump the queue). Discover ads degrade the user experience (i.e They could've shown you something more interesting but decided to show you something less interesting to you and received money for it from a 3rd party).
Some opinions below:
1. Making digital ads more like physical ads (Eg: By removing personalisation) will probably benefit big businesses by increasing ad prices and making it harder to match sellers to buyers. It's often small businesses who have a niche which increase competition in a market (The Innovators Dilemma)
2. In the EU's case, the ads can be personalised, just not based on behaviour but on context. So this will probably still increases prices but still not change digital ads fundamentally (i.e. they can still be personalised somewhat to the user) at least for now.
Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not "online advertising", it's just behavioral. There's nothing preventing corporations from advertising the old-fashioned way, like they did on TV, radio, newspapers, etc. Online != behavioral
all advertising was (and is) always behavioral
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Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising
#137Uh... hmmm. I work in the industry and this article is very even handed but still a bit off. We don't really have have a term for "behavioral" advertising. So a lot of things are being lumped together that don't necessarily fit. For example, Facebook USED to be highly valued because of the amount of "targeting" (again, we don't use the term "behavioral") data they had. When you went to tell FB what you liked and didn…
As someone who works in advertising, this comment is wrong in many many ways.
I don't work in advertising - I just use it as a customer.
To the extent that it is wrong it is because we, as an average customer, have a pretty bad customer experience using the products. Educate me.
Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising
#138Seeing many folks ITT questing the value of advertising (behavioural/contextual) so some points: 1. Advertising ideally works as match making by connecting buyers to sellers where the seller is unaware of the buyer. (i.e. the unknown unknown problem). Companies usually collect advertisements and place them on limited ad slots. 2. In earlier, physical, forms of advertising such as newspapers, TV, Retail Stores etc, th…
Note that you have an unshown assumption here.
That none of the participants lie and that you can infer niche effectively from the data. And that the ad can deliver the behaviour change
The ads are only cheaper if they actually find the niche people and change the behaviour. Otherwise you spent money for nothing.
The problem is that we have pretty good hunch from a bundle of clues that the data and org that validate these assumptions are lying.
We also have pretty good bundle of clues from the consumers that the ads are not hitting their niche pretty well.
So... We have an industry that breach privacy and lie, for a purported benefit based on seemingly false assumptions.
Maybe the results are not achieved.
Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising
#139Interesting how this is forcing these companies to objectively improve their products -- chronological feeds, friends and follows only, etc is what users have been begging for and being ignored, because advertising trash salad is more profitable. If the long-term effects end up being along the lines of the big social corps withdrawing from the EU, I see that as an enormous win for that economic zone. The presence of…
I'd really like Meta and TikTok threaten with withdrawal from the EU, after subsidizing the EU budget with violation fees. The thing is that then it might create a junk information void which will be promptly filled by Russian propaganda. They're already vehicles for propaganda distribution but more easy to regulate and control than lots of other small channels spreading misinformation.
Re: The EU's war on behavioral advertising
#140So one issue that this article glosses over is how contextual advertising interacts with attribution. Essentially, as an advertiser, in order to do effective contextual advertisement, you need to have some idea of how ads perform in a particular context - on a particular web page or app. So what you would really like to say is that "people who saw our ad on X were Y% more likely to visit or website, or buy our produc…
> However, in order to actually measure that, when a user comes to your website you need to know which of your ads they've seen.
That may be the case, but so what? If an industry can't function without abusing people, I would argue that it shouldn't function.
But this doesn't mean the industry can't function. It just means that advertising becomes less efficient (i.e., more expensive). Which is fine -- if it's more expensive to operate in a manner that approaches being ethical, I don't see that as a real problem.