AdTech Sucks

> I’d love for data to be seen as a liability - something audited and discarded often to minimise risk.

Perhaps it's just the industries I've worked in, which tend to be highly regulated, but I have such a hard time seeing why this idea isn't more intuitive to people. Every single scrap of sensitive information you have laying around is something that has the potential to fuel a very expensive, possibly even existential, crisis for your company.

Even for the non-sensitive stuff, keeping it around "just in case" increases the risk that somebody who has taken a couple classes in how to use R or Pandas and is still a bit starry-eyed about Big Data starts making questionable business decisions based on unskeptical interpretations of biased results drawn from convenience-sampled data of uncertain provenance.

The default shouldn't be collecting and warehousing everything, the default should be, "when in doubt, throw it out."

This is done all the time by credit score companies.

My first ever "earning money in Internet" experience was in my teen years when I ran my own ad farm as a part of an ad farming collective 2005-2007. Back then, things were simple: you open a website, sign for 100+ banner networks, then drive in traffic with all tricks imaginable, including "buying it." Part of your revenue goes to group's 'big papa' who does all the "business cover" in the West: setting up companies, bank accounts, accounting, tax reporting, and cashing out payments from ad nets.

My second venture into Ad industry came rather unexpected. In 2016, when I had to leave Canada because my employer was denied LMIA (a paper "certifying" that you are not stealing a job from locals.) I called up all my friends with whomever I had working relationship before I moved out of Russia.

A man who once was a guy behind of Russia's biggest ad farming group back in mid-naughties called me back. Unbeknown to me, he worked day and night to up his profile for 10 years, and became a "big name man" in Ad industry, moved to USA, and opened one of the biggest DSP on the market today.

What shocked me, is that the nature of the industry and attitudes to the client hasn't changed a dime since 2005. The slang for F500 clients there is still a "whale" (the term itself originally came from either "ad farming" circles or banking)

After passing through shock coming back to Russia after 8 years and coming back to my senses, I said *ck with that and left. Been happily working in OEM electronics again since.

Is there a "pull" rather push aspect to advertisement? Sort of a trade-show equivalent of digital advertisement?

Issues with pushing ads down my throat are as follows:

1. I don't want to buy another Sony XM3 headphones. I just fucking bought them and I am seeing more ads of the same thing.

2. Even if I saw ads for relevant accessories, say, I bought an iPhone and I am seeing ads for phone cases; I don't want to see them when I am browsing Instagram or a lecture video on YT about how to meditate.

3. Say the timing is right and the ad is relevant, I still am repulsed by advertisers. I don't like salesmen. I find them sleezy and annoying. It is like walking into Radioshack and a platoon of salesmen are trying to sell you Sprint cell phone and I am here to buy a goddamn electrolytic capacitor.

However, when I am searching for a pressure cooker, it would be great to go to a centralized repository of ads and look through who markets this sort of thing the best and may be have some objective reviews along with it. May be have a standardized ad template and guidelines so the marketing dickheads don't go overboard with flashing lights and sparkles. Have a standardized page full of pressure cooker ads, let them fight over my business in a level playing field. No psychological tricks, no sleezy techniques, I want to see increased competition based on value they provide to consumers. Not weak anti-competitive deceitful marketing.

I love going to trade-shows. They're all salesmen but there is something about serendipitous discovery of new stuff, seeing things that you may not need immediately but it goes in the back of your mind and you remember it at some obscure situation (especially in hardware engineering, I run a lab that serves 50 engineers). Most importantly, I am in the mindset when I visit a trade-show. That mindset is different than when I am desperately looking for a tire shop nearby to fix my flat tire.

Fuck advertisement. It is the worst thing modern society is plagued with.

We need yellow pages, not 60 second interruptions during a cooking show. YC folks are reading this - there is a huge gap for a "pull" advertisement model. AdTech guys can still collect data and be assholes about it, but at least you won't be bothering me when I need not.

I worked in adTech. The company I worked for did not collect personal or demographic data, and we did not care about users' cookies, so I did not feel too conflicted from the ethical perspective, but still found it difficult to explain to non-tech people exactly what my job was.

The thing that attracted me to it was the technology and scale of data involved. From a purely engineering perspective, it was highly attractive. It was a small company, and as a small company in ad tech that still meant rapid and 0-downtime deploys, deeply-ingrained devops culture, rapidly evolving technology, and indexing/reporting/decision-making on thousands of events events every second. During peak seasons, every day we'd have another terabyte of data in the database.

AdTech also affords a lot more transparency into company finances than you would in other companies. You're building the tools used for reporting on revenue and costs that the entire business uses for almost all decision-making. Engineers don't live in a silo from that perspective.

From a product perspective, it was much less rewarding. You know how often times internal-facing applications have the worst UX? Everything we built felt like that because ultimately it was. There is also a lot of pressure that comes with the points above -- every second our system takes to throttle an ad campaign that has reached their budget, encounters an unavoidable AWS downtime, or exposes a reporting bug is company dollars down the drain.