NEW PAPER: The construction of marketing measures

This paper reveals the fundamental lie of contemporary marketing – particularly marketing analytics and digital marketing. The data they analyse are stupid!

It details how marketers ignored this fact until powerful actors (primarily Google) realised they could make more money selling their products if marketers were convinced to care about a new type of data.

They called it viewability. It was meant to represent that an advert has been viewed by a consumer. But guess what? It doesn’t measure this at all.

The paper explores how and why marketers can be so stupid!

Ad blocking

It’s a few years old now but I just came across this series of posts by Ad Block Plus  in which they surveyed users of their Adblocker about the service. One of the questions asked why people used Adblocker. The results are quite interesting.

They gave respondents 7 possible reasons and forced a choice through a four point scale (ie there was no ‘neutral’ option). Forcing choice in this way can distort results as it, obviously, forces people to express an opinion on a matter they might not care about.

I think we can group 3 items as ‘content issues’ (distracting animations and sounds, offensive or inappropriate content and missing separation of ad an content); 3 items as ‘provider issues’ (security concerns; privacy concerns and page load times); and one as a personal issue (ideological reasons). If this was done more robustly we might separate each of these items out into multiple dimensions and see how they inter-relate. But it wasn’t.

Just eye-balling it, it seems that most of the motivations for Ad Blocking relate to a lack of trust – provider issues.  This is followed by content issues. Although ideological reasons motivated about half the sample (and given the selection bias you’d expect this is an over estimation), that leaves about one-third of the sample who block ads not because they are “anti branding” but just because they don’t trust advertisers to act responsibly and because their ads are kind of annoying.

If I were a brand I’d find this very hopefully as these are much easier to fix than overcoming ideological opposition to ads. In fact, the same problem has already been solved on other media through regulation initatives (see my other blog on advertising governance).

 

Google’s YouTube Battles with Big Brands

Here’s a short article I wrote for The Conversation on Google’s current battles with brands… More on this to come I think.

https://theconversation.com/googles-youtube-battle-with-big-brands-could-shake-up-how-content-is-shared-75033

Why target people with ads who are turned off by targeted ads?

For several years the DNT (Do Not Track) initiative has been trying to formalise a standard feature for the worldwide web to allow users to tell a website whether they are happy to have their activities tracked by the website and their partner. These initiatives have been opposed by a group of organizations with clear interests in the digital marketing market (IAB in particular). They have confused, obfuscated and in some cases intimidated participants in the project. This lead the New York Times to describe DNT as a ‘slow death‘.

But, I came across this interesting study by Goldfarb and Tucker. Put very simply, they find that consumers respond best to ads which are contextually targeted or highly visible on screen but that contextually targeted and highly visible ads perform relatively badly. The paper speculates that consumers privacy concerns might be the explanation for this effect. A targeted and visible ad reminds consumers that the site is tracking them and makes them more critical of persuasive communication.

So, just imagine the power of knowing which consumers cared about privacy and “detargeting” them – but perhaps using highly visible ads instead. In the paper, Goldfarb and Tucker estimate that 5% of digital ad spending is wasted targeting people who are turned off by targeting. That’s a spicy meatball.