Brands need to fire adtech

> 1) People straight up don't want to see ads. Ad blockers, Netflix, etc. are a natural response to this. If your medium relies on traditional ads, there's an increasingly large chance that your audience won't ever see those ads in the first place.

People actually do want to see ads in certain contexts. In many cases, they actually buy magazines like Vogue where it's filled with hundreds of pages of ads, because of the ads. People also buy local newspapers because of the ads & coupons.

The context where people want ads are shopping contexts. If you design your media property around a shopping context, featuring buyers guides or exclusive shopping info, the public will be more appreciative of your ads.

> Assuming mobile data is $10/GB, a 1MB video ad costs the end user 1 cent.

Yeah and then the ads aren't even remotely interesting - most of in-app video ads for me are uninteresting-as-... F2P games (Clash of clans and countless variations - just how in blazes do these actually make money?!).

But what I find even more annoying: that there apparently seems to be no way for the in-app ads to check if I already have a certain application installed. It's wasted money for Deutsche Bahn to spam me with ads for their (actually highly useful) app when I already have it installed... but then again, it's bad for privacy if any adtech company can profile me based on the set of apps I have installed.

I see ads on facebook so that I can laugh at how badly targeted they are. I don't believe this ad'tech' hype for a second, because there isn't any actual intelligence it it.

Right now Facebook suggests I like some furniture store - it should know by now that I don't give a shit about furniture or shoes or womens clothing, just because I am friends with people who do (mostly, funny enough, women).

Really facebook knows just about everything about me, yet they have never come up with an ad for a product I wanted to buy.

> Companies want to know that their advertising dollars are actually producing results, and traditional advertising completely sucks at this. If you've never run a traditional ad campaign, I suggest giving it a try and then decide how much value you think you got out of it. You can spend thousands to millions of dollars and have absolutely no idea if your money impacted sales even the smallest amount. Compare that to adtech, where you get real data on outcomes on a regular basis. Even if it's crap data, it's often better than "well we think the brand is stronger now".

They want it this way. My company at its core relies on traditional advertising. Our leads are finally at the point that we're roughly 1:1 between traditional and online.

We've built tools to determine the effectiveness of our traditional ad spend so that we can better target our spend, but we're getting a ton of resistance to us using them. This is from our own internal person who has been running the traditional side of our ad spend for 30 years. Every player in the traditional ads game benefits from keeping the people controlling the spending completely in the dark.

> Think paid placements in movies. podcast/youtube sponsorships etc.

Well, product placement in movies is well known. Nearly everyone should know that companies pay millions of dollars to e.g. have James Bond drive their car.

What is way more evil is that what is called "influencer marketing", which you are addressing in your last part. It's especially evil because the target group for "influencers" is usually little kids.

But, once again, regulation comes to the rescue - at least in Germany, it's outright illegal. To quote §5a, sect. 6 UWG (law against unfair business practice):

    (6) Unlauter handelt auch, wer den kommerziellen Zweck
    einer geschäftlichen Handlung nicht kenntlich macht,
    sofern sich dieser nicht unmittelbar aus den Umständen
    ergibt, und das Nichtkenntlichmachen geeignet ist, den
    Verbraucher zu einer geschäftlichen Entscheidung zu
    veranlassen, die er andernfalls nicht getroffen hätte.

Translated (roughly, IANAL):

    He acts unfair, who hides the commercial purpose of a
    business transaction as long as this is not obvious
    from the circumstances, and the hiding is able to
    trick the consumer into a business transaction he
    would not have done otherwise.

The illegal act hereby is, e.g. as a youtube influencer, hiding that you were paid by an advertiser/vendor to promote a certain item in a "review", because an unsuspecting consumer may not know that your "review" is bought.

This is the reason why "sponsored content" is clearly marked as such in German newspapers. Youtubers, on the other hand, have mostly ignored the law (and I'm happy for the day once someone uses the law to shut down the more obnoxious of the bunch like BibisBeautyPalace).