> a Super Bowl ad cost three million dollars. Why? Because that’s how much it cost. What does it yield? Who knows.
This article is awesome. In my free time I'm building an advertising platform that topic matches ads off the content of the web pages. No tracking of users.
I'm hoping to allow people to host and run their own all inclusive self contained advertising platform for just a licensing fee. I also have a way to beat adblockers that I'm afraid of bringing to light since I only want it tied to my own companies completely non tracking and ethical ads.
Hope it's not a bubble! Though first I have to finish the work and get a few customers so it's not like I can't pivot if it is.
I find, as a consumer, I disagree with the text only requirement.
Videos are certainly off limits as a nuisance. However images convey a lot of information very quickly, and can be visually "skipped" in a way text cannot.
When presented an ad for protein powder alongside my workout diets article, I want to see what it looks like. The presentation of the product is an important factor in whether or not I pursue it.
It has to be remembered that advertising is a three way relationship, and all three stand to gain (presuming no scam). This is more complex than financials - displaying an advert leads to a bi-directional association in the consumers mind between the entity being advertised and the entity advertising it. It is beneficial to advertise products that have Brand values similar to yours (or ones you want to appropriate).
In all cases it can benefit the user to be advertised to as a means of discovery.
Many of us forget (or do not realise) that there are (and historically were a lot more) "papers" proudly proclaiming themselves "advertisers". People willingly read pages of adverts in order to discover products and services.
> images convey a lot of information very quickly, and can be visually "skipped" in a way text cannot.
Some images can be skipped. I installed an adblocker on this browser today because of an advertisement that could not. An obnoxious facial expression on both sides of the article can't be ignored; the subroutines running in a brain to detect faces and eye contact seem to be pretty highly prioritized. That's why those stupid youtube thumbnails are so effective.
>This is more complex than financials - displaying an advert leads to a bi-directional association in the consumers mind between the entity being advertised and the entity advertising it. It is beneficial to advertise products that have Brand values similar to yours (or ones you want to appropriate).
I agree, and I think that's part of why I disagree so hard with you on the primacy of images.
I mean, i'm not saying that a preference for text vs. a preference for pictures is objectively right or wrong, it's just a really good example of your aforementioned alignment of brand values between the content provider, the brand doing the selling, and the consumer. pictures are a way of associating your brand with values, but eschewing the (possibly extraneous) extra data in that picture, you are also associating your brand with a set of values.
I am also a consumer of protein powder... but you are way better off appealing to me with text. Ingredients, (tell me what the stuff is made of, and don't add any sweeteners) purity (Test for heavy metals or the like!) and then price are probably the attributes you want to bring forward, if you are trying to sell me a protein powder, approximately in that order. If you instead show a nice picture of the can or have a model preparing some in your ad, I'm going to see that, at best, as an irrelevant distraction. (again, I'm not saying those are the objectively most important attributes of a protein powder, but if you want my protein powder budget, that's how you get it; At a cultural level, the more I feel you focus on the things I care about and the less you focus on things I see as irrelevancies, the more I feel you align with my values.)
I mean, I'm not saying that pictures are good or bad in general, just that advertising with pictures and advertising with text have very different cultural connotations, and that advertising with text only can be a striking alignment with a consumer's values.
i.e. you want to see the facets you'd be looking for when choosing a product to purchase.
For many products and people that will just be the visual appeal, and advertisers target their widest audience.
This is a case where tracking can actually be seen in a positive light - I too think I would be more likely to convert if I saw a datasheet as an ad, but that's definitely not majority. At the same time, obviously fashion ads will convert better as images, in almost everyone.
>For many products and people that will just be the visual appeal, and advertisers target their widest audience.
I... think this is usually unwise. If you attempt to appeal to everyone, you appeal to no one. I personally think one of my advantages when I ran prgmr.com was a consistent brand? At the very least, it was very recognizable. (I don't run it anymore, and I'm not claiming to have done a great job when I did. But I can point out several mistakes I made where I would have gotten... big at least by my standards if I had zigged rather than zagged. I think I did a memorable, if not a good job at branding, and "just get my name right" is... well, it's halfway there.)
Personally, I think that if you want to appeal to different markets, you should use a different brand with a different customer-facing layer, even if in the bowels, the product is produced on the same equipment.
>This is a case where tracking can actually be seen in a positive light
I'm not sure? I mean, I think that the connection between the advertiser/brand values is important, and you destroy some of that if you tailor your advertising to the consumer... if different people get different views of the same brand, well, it's really different brands.
(Also, the decision to track/not track is a brand value decision in and of itself- a rather big one, if you can credibly communicate that to your customers.)
Attempting to appeal to everyone by serving a different ad based on tracking is precisely what I meant, but I'm thinking more from a platform standpoint than as a brand. An ideal marketplace would prefer to sell a spot to brands who advertise in a way that appeals to the buyer.
And since we re considering new advertising ideas, how the ads are presented matters. We could perhaps be thoughtful about when and how to present ads instead of plastering our sites with more banners than content because that's what adsense says that works. E.g. why are there not ads at the end of the video? Why are there 5 minute ads (seriously?)? Just saying "this worked" is not enough - this might have worked for an ad but destroyed the field for all other ads.
Even doing that you can block ads trivially. I can set up a filter right now to block any element on the hn page forever if I wanted. You can always serve an ad to most people, but anyone willing to slip down the rabbit hole and end up with u block origin will be able to foil any advert with a right click.
> I also have a way to beat adblockers that I'm afraid of bringing to light since I only want it tied to my own companies completely non tracking and ethical ads.
Beating ad blockers is not hard. Just serve them from the first party domain. If you’re not tracking users outside of whatever the first party tracks, you don’t need third party cookies either.
As a former ad tech guy though... I think the biggest hurdle you will run into is precisely the lack of tracking. It’s both problematic for privacy but also crucial for measuring ROI.
> Beating ad blockers is not hard. Just serve them from the first party domain.
But I've been seeing an increasing amount of talk and effort in the online marketing community about finding ways to bring this first party data into the existing third party data collection machines.
If websites start doing this, all it will do is bring the privacy heat down harder, directly on the publishers themselves. I hope that websites manage to operate without sharing that data with the martech world, but I fear that they won't.
> If websites start doing this, all it will do is bring the privacy heat down harder, directly on the publishers themselves. I hope that websites manage to operate without sharing that data with the martech world, but I fear that they won't.
I think this is the crux of the issue. Up until now publishers have been insulated from the problem specifically because third party cookies allow it to be not the publisher's problem. If publishers bring this in-house, then the martech market will push for a standard API to allow advertisers to evaluate metrics on the ads they place, which means we've just kicked the can down the road.
Fortunately this is not a distinction that GDPR cares about.
> It’s both problematic for privacy but also crucial for measuring ROI.
Worse than that: buyers would have to not only trust the ad-network to not make up impression numbers, but also every single content provider.
But that would easily be solved by edge server ad splicing. Much easier to trust the CDN than a scrappy content provider. I really don't get why that hasn't been a thing for at least a decade. CDN business just going well enough as is?
But the article is wildly exaggerating the "nobody knows" gap of superbowl ads. There's an entire industry specializing in measuring the effect of "write only" ad channels and all the big TV advertisers spend a considerable fraction of their ad budget on commissioning those measurements.
Now the immediate, built-in metrics of online advertising have been eroding the business of that industry for quite a while. Those metrics are far more detailed, they boast low SNR and absolute precision as opposed to the murkyness of extrapolated trendlines in polls. It's very tempting to rely only on the built-in metrics then, and that's exactly where the problems the article is exploring are kicking in. Those old-school pollster methods that start with zero data and only measure the continual development of brand awareness plus the occasional campaign trace have something big going for them, which is that the little data they yield is universally relevant, whereas that ocean of numbers that is produced by built-in metrics can easily be a useless distraction or at worst actively misleading. Perhaps our would be wise for big ad spenders to employ some of that "zero data" brand awareness observation that could measure TV ads even when all the ad-spending is going online, into the realm of built-in metrics.
> an advertising platform that topic matches ads off the content of the web pages
Reading this article I had the exact same thought that I relayed to a buddy of mine. I've built some conceptual search engines on top of LSA.. and my thoughts from the article about brand/keyword targeted advertising is that it doesn't get to the heart of it.
To increase the advertising effects, not just the selection effects, you need to go deeper. Drawing on the analogy from the article a smarter teenager handing out coupons wouldn't stand just anywhere or stand just in line at the store. He would say, okay this is a pizzeria. (Assuming they serve nothing else) The smart marketer should think "Maybe I should advertise at italian restaurants." The analogy doesn't really show the full depth, right? There are many products where you can get some really off the wall potential customers you wouldn't know how to reach based on concept search.
Factoring in "documents" that they're reading online back into the search engine for conceptually similar ads is a good idea.
The weird thing about websites like YouTube is they do a combination of topic matching and user matching. Why bother with tracking users so extensively if you're going to just go ahead and demonitize videos that are "sensitive" content. Just place the ads in front of the audience regardless of what they're watching. At the end of the day, advertisers and viewers can't possibly care what video it's showing on as long as they're getting the right target audience. The only people that do care are journalists looking to write a sensational hit piece to fan outrage culture.
I hope your method succeeds because it would be a whole lot better than this crappy middle ground that we have right now.
> At the end of the day, advertisers and viewers can't possibly care what video it's showing on as long as they're getting the right target audience.
This isn't true?
Advertisers certainly do care. They don't want their ad dollars to be spent paying publishers for content that's controversial because it makes them look bad. It also has the potential to damage their brand.
This actually happened and is what led YouTube to lose a significant amount of ad revenue which in turn created the situation we have now.
> ... advertisers ... can't possibly care what video it's showing ...
I read this as 'advertisers don't care about the particular topic of the ad in general.' They don't care if you're watching a DIY home fixit video, or a coder streaming his working session, as long as you're a target for diapers and they're advertising diapers.
Ah, the old endemic versus non-endemic debate. Increasingly, you're right, but some brands really like the prestige of having their ads appear with content related to their topic.
Or, how about letting the publisher specify keywords they want to attract? I 'd love to have some control on which ads show on my site and do my own tests. If you have setup the tracking right, the advertisers have nothing to lose
Breaking ad blockers, respecting privacy, and the option to essentially white label the service. I see these things coming together to create a unique and value proposition.
This article is awesome. In my free time I'm building an advertising platform that topic matches ads off the content of the web pages. No tracking of users.
I'm hoping to allow people to host and run their own all inclusive self contained advertising platform for just a licensing fee. I also have a way to beat adblockers that I'm afraid of bringing to light since I only want it tied to my own companies completely non tracking and ethical ads.
Hope it's not a bubble! Though first I have to finish the work and get a few customers so it's not like I can't pivot if it is.