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The advertising industry has been living a lie

businessinsider.com

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Re: The advertising industry has been living a lie

#11

Post by baybal2 »

avip wrote: post #6

I find most of the claims in this (obviously PR driven) piece misleading. Online marketers are aware of fraud. The common wisdom is to assume ~30% of your budget went into fraud. Advertisers measure ROI, don't bother much to dig into which form/shape fraud takes place, the tech details, or how to identify or stop it. Because that's technically far from trivial. It's like a restaurant assuming 15% loss on fresh suppli…

>Online marketers are aware of fraud. The common wisdom is to assume ~30% of your budget went into fraud.

Common wisdom does not account for that some cash cow keyword/adnet combination you can approach to 90% of traffic coming from bots, or conversions being near nil even without clickfraud being involved, or for ad nets having interest to actually go soft on clickfraud.

Whenever I worked in media agencies, I do see people running digital ads for major brands (coke, nike, li ning, microsoft level) being at least moderately competent in technicalities, yet I can't say that any of them ever approached to even partial understanding of what a total "Wild West" is the online ads industry today.

Re: The advertising industry has been living a lie

#12

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

> But that's not really how people consume media. Most people don't spend time on thousands of websites.

I found it difficult to read past that bullet point. It's such an obviously stupid mischaracterization of what "the long tail" is that it makes the rest of the arguments suspect.

Re: The advertising industry has been living a lie

#13

Post by lithos »

kurthr wrote: post #2

I always figured we should put advertising on the currency of exchange... seriously, just put what ever picture you want on an individual dollar bill (or a $10/$20/$50/$100) for a price you pay to the Treasury for printing it in volume. Different markets for different denominations and you could actually even target specific areas based on the Atlanta vs Frisco printing locations. The price of ads on a dollar bill co…

Trading this $20 bill that has 10% off at best buy, for one that has 10% off at Walmart.

Re: The advertising industry has been living a lie

#14

Post by analogic »

kurthr wrote: post #2

I always figured we should put advertising on the currency of exchange... seriously, just put what ever picture you want on an individual dollar bill (or a $10/$20/$50/$100) for a price you pay to the Treasury for printing it in volume. Different markets for different denominations and you could actually even target specific areas based on the Atlanta vs Frisco printing locations. The price of ads on a dollar bill co…

The pictures on currency is most definitely advertising, the government just usually has an exclusivity deal.

Re: The advertising industry has been living a lie

#15

Post by iaw »

gamesbrainiac wrote: post #4

I think the point that the article is trying to make is a lot less dramatic than the title would suggest. Basically, there has been a long standing assumption that, netizens in general spend their time on a plethora of websites, and that instead of spending money on specific sites, one should spend money on audiences. In other words, advertise in accordance with a person's interests. However, due to recent exploitati…

My suspicion is that it would become a game of whack-a-mole where the cost of identifying perpetrators is higher for the advertisers than it is for perpetrators to create a new identity and start again.

Re: The advertising industry has been living a lie

#17

Post by QAPereo »

suby wrote: post #3
kurthr wrote: post #2

I always figured we should put advertising on the currency of exchange... seriously, just put what ever picture you want on an individual dollar bill (or a $10/$20/$50/$100) for a price you pay to the Treasury for printing it in volume. Different markets for different denominations and you could actually even target specific areas based on the Atlanta vs Frisco printing locations. The price of ads on a dollar bill co…

I would hope that there would be massive backlash if we as a country tried to put advertising on our currency, because that's insane. It would be a fairly fitting illustration of what's wrong with modern society, though.

I look forward to pedaling for merits any day now...

Re: The advertising industry has been living a lie

#18

Post by jack9 »

gamesbrainiac wrote: post #4

I think the point that the article is trying to make is a lot less dramatic than the title would suggest. Basically, there has been a long standing assumption that, netizens in general spend their time on a plethora of websites, and that instead of spending money on specific sites, one should spend money on audiences. In other words, advertise in accordance with a person's interests. However, due to recent exploitati…

> this assumption has met some strong evidence that would disprove it.

There is no evidence either way. Behavioral targeting works to some extent, e.g. retargeting. I visit Ford Fusion specs, later on Fox News a Ford Ad for a different truck appears.

Detecting fraudulent sites is not only counter-productive for platforms (AOL One is shockingly lenient to pump up their "reach" numbers), but sites as well. Sites will pay for inflated automated traffic to consume advertising budgets. The foxes are decided how to parse up the hens.

Re: The advertising industry has been living a lie

#19

Post by jack9 »

baybal2 wrote: post #11
avip wrote: post #6

I find most of the claims in this (obviously PR driven) piece misleading. Online marketers are aware of fraud. The common wisdom is to assume ~30% of your budget went into fraud. Advertisers measure ROI, don't bother much to dig into which form/shape fraud takes place, the tech details, or how to identify or stop it. Because that's technically far from trivial. It's like a restaurant assuming 15% loss on fresh suppli…

>Online marketers are aware of fraud. The common wisdom is to assume ~30% of your budget went into fraud. Common wisdom does not account for that some cash cow keyword/adnet combination you can approach to 90% of traffic coming from bots, or conversions being near nil even without clickfraud being involved, or for ad nets having interest to actually go soft on clickfraud. Whenever I worked in media agencies, I do see…

I'm deeply involved in digital advertising and I don't even understand what you're trying to say, so maybe you could rephrase? At the very least, the "common wisdom" number is suspect (a random lampshade). I've measured bot traffic as high as 98% from quality news sites like the OCRegister.com

Re: The advertising industry has been living a lie

#20

Post by mjevans »

I honestly can't connect with the kind of people that ads (fully) work on.

The absolute /best/ case for an ad is that it might remind me that there's some consumable item that I buy every so often (food/etc) and that I either have some I can consume or that I'm getting low and might want to restock.

For example, an ad for a restaurant I already like might remind me of the positive prior experiences and encourage me to return sooner for more.

However, I'd probably go back there / buy more anyway without the ad. Is it really an /efficient/ use of their money? Couldn't they just make their products more attractive by cutting the costs (not spend on marketing)?

Other ads might be for products I don't already get/buy... those are probably most effective as 'suggested' results near the top of searches when I'm looking for a specific product or in a specific topic of inquiry that seems related to seeking a solution.

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