What I find odd is that digital ads gives you much more clarity of impact than tv/radio/print ads. It also gives you more detailed cohort data so that you can learn from experiments and adjust your buys based on where the impact is. It's as if the P&Gs of the world woke up recently and realized they need to understand impact of their media buys in general.
Ads offend me. They're an imposition, distracting, mind pollution. So I block them. And even when I see them, using a browser in a LiveCD etc, I pointedly ignore them.
Now maybe I'm unusual. Long ago, I did get used to an Internet without ads. And was sad when malware and ads started showing up. But given the increasing prevalence of ad blockers, I'm not that unusual.
So anyway, average view time of 1.5 sec for ads seems about right. Especially if that average includes lots of zeros.
I wouldn't say "instead". It's very hard to find unbiased reports and reviews of new hardware. Almost everything is advertorial, either based on manufacturer copy, or heavily influenced by bribes. And that's been the case for decades.
But maybe we'll see more of that. Even so, if it appears on more than one site, blocklists could be maintained. Advertorial text in sites could also be detected and blocked.
OK, so I get that the first "LiveCD" was Adam Richter's Yggdrasil. Maybe it was a brand, but Yggdrasil has been dead for over 20 years. And I had never heard of it before now.
Maybe I was innately more susceptible to advertising than most. And maybe that's why I've developed such extreme defense mechanisms.
Even before the Internet, I routinely ripped ads out of magazines, before reading them. Or added sarcastic commentary to ones with article copy on the back. And I remove logos from clothing and such.
You just reminded me! in high-school I bought a shirt which I liked, but I didn't like the logo emblazoned on the front of it. I unpicked the embroidered logo and wore it regularly. I had many people comment on that shirt, and I still own it 20 plus years later, but I still can't remember what brand it was.
It only gives you that clarity if you're getting the data unfiltered, though. As I read the article, the problem P&G was running into is that it was outsourcing the placement of its ads to third parties, meaning they didn't get access to the raw data on how those ads performed -- they only got whatever data the third party chose to share with them, packaged up however the third party chose to package it. That kind of relationship opens up all sorts of opportunities for the third party to fudge the numbers to serve their own interests, which is what it sounds like P&G decided was happening.
> What I find odd is that digital ads gives you much more clarity of impact than tv/radio/print ads.
That really depends on what you are trying to sell. A SaaS? Sure. But when your job is influencing which candy bar people select in the supermarket, you stare into exactly the same informational void, until you apply the crude but tried toolkit of ad effectiveness measurements that has been developed for broadcast. The traditional answer to that kind of advertisement task has been to just use blanket media if you don't need much targeting or direct affordability. But when a sizable part of the market just does not expose themselves to broadcast anymore, that might be insufficient, no matter how much money you throw that way.
> But when your job is influencing which candy bar people select in the supermarket, you stare into exactly the same informational void
Is that necessarily true? Most supermarkets have a 'loyalty card' program which requires the shopper to provide her name, address and date of birth. The supermarket could sell all their data to Facebook, which would then have the fine-grained information needed to allow the candy-bar company to very effectively target their ads.
It might not even require a loyalty card - the shopper's credit card info or security camera picture might be enough to accurately link her to her Facebook account.
My own personal opinion is that most of the time ads don't work.
They're noise that might, at BEST, bias the result of a decision I was already willing to make. (IE: I know I'm going to go somewhere for lunch and MAYBE an ad makes me pick one place over another.)
Really I see ads being useful only in three categories:
* Reminding a prospective customer your store exists
* Reminding a prospective customer what you sell
* Getting a customer to crave something you can provide.
The first two are generally good, however they don't really need to be done all that often. Once someone knows a service exists they'll likely return for more if they liked and need more of that service.
The last one is arguably amoral. Encouraging (needless or extra) consumption and trying to make someone dependent on the ad buyer for happiness. It also sounds a lot like what drug dealers do.
Even that third category, if a product was adding actual value or quality, needn't be done that often to reach effective saturation.
Speaking as an ex-Facebook growth employee, fake accounts actually hurt growth and are actively sought out and removed by a dedicated team. Think about it--if a user receives a bunch of fake friend requests, it's a bad experience. This is one of the (many) reasons MySpace died--because of the onslaught of porn-promoting accounts that they never cleaned up until it was too late.
Facebook certainly has been more diligent about stomping out fake accounts than most other services, with Twitter being social media's problem child.
A telling anecdote: A security researcher friend of mine found a somewhat small botnet of twitter accounts (~7000). Reported it to twitter, a few months passed and he noticed twitter hadn't done anything. So he turned it over to a journalist who eventually poked someone at twitter and... poof all 7000+ accounts were gone 6 hours later.
I set up a fake Facebook profile a long time ago as a prank, added everyone at my college as friends, and people I know still say they get notifications about his birthday. And people still reach out to wish him a happy birthday.
I have no idea what credentials I used to create it so I can't delete it, but it still exists (unlike the person it's pretending to be).
I think the signature of those kinds of fake accounts are different than most of the malicious accounts though.
You creating a fake college account and forgetting about it probably passes as human enough, there's no concerted effort or agenda to that account besides existing and adding friends at your college.
I think what makes bots and fake accounts generally detectable is consistently pushing certain messages in ways that exceed normal human behavior, as well as showing patterns across many fake accounts.
It's hard to see a pattern in one fake account, but easy to spot it across many.
Twitter is full of those porn promoting accounts. Typically this is an account with some female name and a profile pic of a person in a state of undress following lots of popular accounts.
Twitter doesn't even take them down if you complain about them. Very annoying.
Not just porn. My account with ~150 followers was, out of the blue and within a week, followed by a dozen different "startups". Every single one of them follows tens of thousands of people in the hopes of getting followed back. It's pathetic.
I'm not sure that's quite the same thing. That seems to be an example, at least somewhat, of using the platform as intended.
If your profile is public, and they decide to follow it, in part, to make you aware of their existence, perhaps that's a feature not a bug, given that the main use for the thing is to connect with accounts and follow them and discover content.
I see random accounts occasionally following me, and it's clear that they're just casting a very wide follow net to see who will follow back, presumably to get their readership up. To me, that's spam, no question about it. Even if it's targeted. (Targeted spam is still spam.)
I want people to follow me because they're interested in what I post, not because they're looking for me to follow them. Perhaps I'm asking too much of the platform, but... it is what it is.
I have had a Twitter account for I think close to a decade that I never use. I’ve never tweeted or followed anyone. Last time I logged in which was probably over 2 years ago, I had dozens of followers, all following nothing!
Yeah that’s probably accounts managed by some random shaddy tool that follows tons of people in the hope of getting follow-back then massively unfollow everyone.
> Think about it--if a user receives a bunch of fake friend requests, it's a bad experience.
Except that Facebook knows who is real and who fake. Just like my mail provider knows who sends spam and who doesn't.
Facebook can display ads to fake users and still make the campaigner pay for the impression, or make a group pay for reaching more users, fakes included.
Facebook can easily filter requests from fake profiles, so no, fake users do not necessary worsen the experience for real ones.
"Facebook can easily filter requests from fake profiles"
"Except that Facebook knows who is real and who fake."
You say that so definitively. Have you worked on a product with millions of new users a week? It's an extremely hard, constantly shifting problem.
"Facebook can display ads to fake users and still make the campaigner pay for the impression"
Facebook's entire business relies on user and advertise trust. Why would they sacrifice that for some short term growth that would inevitably kill the business by eroding trust?
While I don't pretend to have been party to internal FB conversations when certain decisions were made, as an advertiser, FB has definitely done some things to significantly erode that trust over the years.
For starters, encouraging advertisers to spend money to build up an audience with the assumption they could continue reaching that audience much like email, only to throttle organic reach to zero was pretty bad.
There have been other things such as being extremely...generous...with the definitions of how some ad metrics are defined and what defaults are presented. Even as an experienced advertiser who knows to look for those things, the lengths to which some of it it is buried is astounding to the point of it being hard to trust that it wasn't intentional. And the recent lawsuits around such things shows I'm not alone in that feeling.
> You say that so definitively. Have you worked on a product with millions of new users a week? It's an extremely hard, constantly shifting problem.
Facebook has hundreds of engineers and enough data to do match patterns against. Facebook can largely identify who's who.
> Facebook's entire business relies on user and advertise trust. Why would they sacrifice that for some short term growth that would inevitably kill the business by eroding trust?
"Facebook has hundreds of engineers and enough data to do match patterns against. Facebook can largely identify who's who." I know, I used to work there. I was asking you. Pattern matching isn't black-and-white, as you alluded to in your previous comment.
"Yes, the infamous 'they trust me, dumb fucks'?"
You didn't do or say stupid things when you were 19? You don't believe in giving second chances, let alone to a teenager?
Weirdly enough and probably unrelated, I had at least 4 fake friend request from “attractive” women in the last 2 weeks on FB. Mostly these accounts would disappear within hours or minutes. Never had that in x years of being on FB.
