The Invisible Ad Campaign

Stalkery

I've been in digital advertising for a long time, and one of the more amusing repeated patterns has been the deep and abiding faith in self-regulation. Just let us take care of things, and don't strangle the baby in the crib with the rope of government interference, and everything will be skittles and beer. Perhaps even beer-flavored skittles. It's hard to see how that would be a good thing, but hey, deregulation is almost always seen as necessary, especially in the concept stage. Maybe you could drunk on those skittles. Probably would sell well in college towns.

What happens next is, of course, the other word you call a deregulated market: lawless. Consumer privacy gets trampled, the first mover advantage tends to go to those that cut corners to get there, and soon enough, you get cries for regulation, usually from wronged consumers, or people who weren't quick enough to make their fortune from the gold rush. T'was ever thus, and why lawyers love, love, love new business models.

The latest manifestation of this is the AdChoices logo, that little i arrow that very few people, really, know is the indication of a behaviorally targeted banner advertisement. That icon appears over a trillion times a month on banners across the Web, and I'm only mildly overstating the case when I tell you, that, well, no one has ever clicked on it. (Well, OK, almost no one. Especially consumers. Adtech people click on that thing all the time while doing QA.)

What happens when you do click on that? Well, assuming you are exact enough with your clickery -- which is to say, you aren't on a mobile device -- you go to a landing page where you are told who served you the ad in question. You also get the option to opt-out of getting those ads any more. This allows you to get rid of those pesky retargeting ads that stalk you around the Web, and sounds like world's most useful secret of Web usability... but keep in mind that retargeters tend to overlap, especially for very aggressive retailers. So you might find yourself with a brand new hobby, because folks just have lots of free time to click on parts of a banner that they might not have even seen.

The industry will tell you that AdChoices landing pages are viewed so many times, and have been in place for the better part of a decade now. Or that the next campaign will build on the success of the last one, or how much traffic the landing pages are starting to see from mobile.

I don't normally cast aspersions on the motives of strangers, because, well, no one really knows what lies in the hearts of others. But I do know that the idea that the industry really wants to educate consumers, or have a vast and active audience opting out of ads that are targeted, and hence far more lucrative than non-targeted...

Well, I'm pretty sure you could grow a fine crop from that grade of manure.

What advertisers want from their banners is revenue. What publishers want from their banners is, also, revenue. If consumers complain about those ads less, or feel better about how they are seeing more relevant ads, that only really matters if it, well, backs out to revenue.

That logo is there as cover only, a kind story to tell legislators to prevent them from making their lives more onerous... but if the only thing that's keeping the industry afloat is this low bar of privacy protection?

Well, that really doesn't say much for the business model of something that's been around for a while, does it?

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