Re: [projectvrm] Targeted Advertising Considered Meh: Jason Kint on DNT

[Doc Searls < >]

Good catch, as usual. Responses inline below...

On Apr 13, 2015, at 3:37 PM, Don Marti < " class=""> > wrote:

More good info from Jason Kint (read the whole thing)

 Behavioral Advertising Might Not Be As Crucial As You Think
 http://adage.com/article/datadriven-marketing/behavioral-advertising-crucial/291858/

 "Considering the 50% of impressions classified as
 OBA are sold at rock-bottom prices, do publishers
 of all sizes really understand how little this
 matters to them?"

 "The report suggests publishers typically only
 sell 50% of their ads direct at high prices but the
 other 50% -- or as much as 60% for small websites
 according to the study -- sell for those rock-bottom
 $.77 CPMs if they sell at all. The real value
 of those ads is tremendously lower when measured
 in revenue."

I like Jason Kint's "OBA: Online Behavioral Advertising." Good label. Says what it is. But there are a lot of other things called OBA: https://www.google.com/search?q=OBA. 

Meanwhile, right next to Jason's piece in AdAge is (at least for me) is an ad for "An Ad Tech Glossary: Must-Know Terms, If You’re Looking for An Ad-Tech Partner": <http://adage.com/lookbook/topic/19>. It's by AdAge itself. OBA isn't in there.

So here's the problem.

1) Advertising used to mean one thing: messages placed in media and addressed to populations.

2) Direct marketing used to mean one thing: messages addressed to individuals.

3) Direct response used to mean one thing: messages wanting a response.

Or close enough. Whether or not one finds fuzz at the edges of those categories, they were pretty much self-explanatory and well understood both within the industries producing them and by those receiving the messages as well. The provenance and purpose of each was clear.

But that was before the Net came along. Now advertising means all that stuff and provenance is unclear. If the medium is online and personal (your computer, your phone, your view of a website, your app), there is no easy way to tell what an ad is doing in front of your nose or how it got there. Take a screen shot of an ad and ask the publisher exactly how it got there, and they probably won't be able to tell you, because adtech has become a three-dimensional shell game for everybody other than those billing for its particulars.

Worse, the new arcana within advertising — ad exchange, real time bidding (RTB), programmatic (direct, reserved, non-reserved, premium...), data (first, second and third party... never called "personal"), view-through rate (VTR), in-stream, out-of-stream, hashing, behavioral targeting, beacon, cookie, data ID, data-management platform (DMP), demand side platform (DSP), supply side platform (SSP) and so on (and there are many more) — are all Greek to everybody outside the business, and to many insiders as well. All those disciplines are battlefields of their own, and new ones show up constantly, all looking for a slice of the ever-growing advertising pie.

Though they are called advertising, the business models of Google, Facebook, Twitter and smaller players in various Lumascapes <http://www.lumapartners.com/resource-center/lumascapes-2/>) are not descended from Madison Avenue (category 1 above), but rather from the direct marketing and direct response businesses (categories 2 and 3), which have always had the same rough metrics and methods as spam, and rationalize waste and negative externalities the same ways. (All of which reduce to "they don't matter" and "we don't care.")

That system is best visualized by IBM's "Big Datastillery," in which human beings are represented as beakers on a conveyor belt <http://www.ibmbigdatahub.com/infographic/big-datastillery-strategies-accelerate-return-digital-data>:



So we need a new distinction here: between advertising that's based on surveillance, and advertising that isn't. 

I like OBA as a way to label surveillance-based advertising. ("Programmatic" doesn't do it, because it includes everything that's programmable. And adtech doesn't do it, because it includes ads that aren't surveillance-based.) But perhaps there's a better term.

Firefox tracking protection needs to launch with some
publishers and publisher organizations on stage and
quoted in the press release.  The usual suspects at
IAB are going to flip out, and the sooner the story
can be explained as users+brands+pubs vs. adtech as
usual, instead of being twisted into privacy freaks
vs. adtech+brands+pubs, the better.

Yes, this is critical. We need a line in the sand between users+brands+pubs and OBA.

If that line materializes, Mozilla/Firefox will clearly stands on the side of the former, because they work for and represent you and me — the users.

It should also be easy for everybody else working for users to stand on the human side as well. I suggest that Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and others who sell direct to individuals will gather on our side of the line as well.

So who's best to draw that line? Analysts? AdAge? The IAB? (It's not out of the question. Randall Rothenberg & friends might be ready for it.) One of the big Madison Avenue agencies that isn't too compromised already? Mozilla? The EFF? Customer Commons? PDEC?

I think it's a combination of the above.

Let's do it.

Doc

begin Don Marti quotation of Sat, Apr 11, 2015 at 10:52:26AM -0700:

Read the whole thing...

 Debunked: Five Excuses for Dismissing Do Not Track
 http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/5-excuses-dismissing-track-debunked/297992/

 Excuse No. 3: "DNT will destroy the web since much
 of the free content is funded by online behavioral
 advertising reliant on consumer data collection."

 Nothing could be further from the truth. As the
 leader of an association comprised of approximately
 sixty great media brands producing much of
 the quality digital content out there today,
 constraints on collecting third-party data across
 the web will be immaterial to what funds this type
 of content. And, in fact, this is the case for most
 content producers whether small or large.

I'm not sure how he gets "immaterial" -- data
collection is what poweres data leakage from
his member companies (high value sites) to lower
value sites.  Digital Content Next members should
do _better_ with less tracking.

-- 
Don Marti                    
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/

-- 
Don Marti                    
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/