"Only about a third of ad dollars reach their intended audiences".
We let these insufferable pricks built an entire global surveillance apparatus that tracks our every digital interaction from cradle to grave, we rolled over and sacrificed the internet for the metrics of eyeballs and rageclicks, we spent all this time hearing about the brilliant engineering acumen of Google and Facebook and whoever else, and the whole thing is only 36% cost-effective end to end.
@mhoye Unless I misread the article ~30% is the adtech companies' margins.
Discounting that still means a around half of the ad-spend is going to SEO spam sites that are a complete waste of the advertisers' cash. That's unquestionably a failure on the part of the adtech companies at vetting the folks they do business with.
Gotta love how they build these insane technical "solutions" yet utterly fail at solving normal human business problems like this.
@beeoproblem @mhoye They managed to construct the world's tallest stack of principal-agent problems.
A shareholder of a brand advertiser wouldn't buy an ad on a domestic terrorist site, but a shareholder/board/CEO/CMO/VP/agency/DSP/SSP/dark pool ad stack does it all the time
The finest line of poetry ever uttered in the history of this whole damn country was said by Canada Bill Jones in 1853, in Baton Rouge, while he was being robbed blind in a crooked game of faro. George Devol, who was, like Canada Bill, not a man who was averse to fleecing the odd sucker, drew Bill aside and asked him if he couldn't see that the game was crooked. And Canada Bill sighed, and shrugged his shoulders, and said, 'I know. But it's the only game in town.'”
Every once in a while an intermediary gets caught and has to back off, but realistically the advertisers won't be able to fix this on their own.
Advertisers would be the bonus beneficiaries of better privacy laws and of a Google breakup if they can ever manage to do that (If Chrome wasn't part of Google, they wouldn't have to keep coding support for Google's crooked ad schemes into their browser)
@dmarti @mhoye agreed, the most advertisers can do is go NOPE and take their dollars elsewhere. But, online, all options suck.
My ire is reserved for Google et al who rely on tech alone in the process of connecting advertisers to ad space without properly vetting anything. A simple human check should be more than sufficient to stop most SEO'd click farm sites from receiving any ads. Ditto for stopping a "family friendly" brand being shown on a porn site.
But human vetting is expensive/slower
There is, if you read the right IAB standards and know what to ask for and insist on, a fairly clean way for a *big* brand to do web ads.
1. You have to use an inclusion list of known good sites (which is not that hard to make, you already know the legit sites that cover your area)
2. And you have to (adtech nerdspeak warning) "validate SupplyChain objects" to check that your ads actually made it to the right sites.
@beeoproblem @mhoye Unfortunately the way things work now, this is not really accessible to smaller advertisers. Lots of b2b dark patterns to trick them into running legit ads on problem sites.
For a smaller advertiser the best route is probably individual sponsored posts or videos, plus try to get the customers as tracking-protected as possible to play defense against less legit competitors
mhoye
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