Beyond the Eyeball
We’re Making Some Progress on Adblocking
I recently attended my third invited roundtable discussion among industry giants on the subject of ad blocking, this one convened by PageFair and hosted by Mozilla U.K.
PageFair made a name for itself by igniting the broader discussion on ad blocking by releasing its report with Adobe, projecting that software to block online ads is quickly hitting 200 million worldwide users, and potentially costing industries billions and billions. It certainly earned people’s attention, and was released right around the time Apple also made ad blocking more of a household term by enabling it in iOS 9.
Mozilla has made a name for itself making Firefox, but it has also released a privacy-enhancing content blocker for iOS 9 called Focus. This free tool blocks ads, trackers, social sharing buttons, etc., all in the name of rescuing user data from abuse as a means to reassert control in the contested space of targeted and behavioral advertising.
It’s notable that PageFair, a company that sells an anti-ad-blocker service to publishers, is friendly with Mozilla, a nonprofit that encourages people to install a product made to fight ad tech. We’ve witnessed other situations in this conflict where the various species in this ecosystem do not play nice together and boycott and un-invite each other in public. For example, two industry trade groups — Digital Content Next (DCN), which represents premium publishers; and Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), on the side of the ad-tech industry — declined to send their respective CEOs to a comparable roundtable in New York City, hosted by the makers of AdBlock Plus, the world’s most popular ad blocker, one that uniquely employs a controversial paid whitelist for so-called “acceptable ads.”
Ad tech cannot save itself until it comes clean about the privacy, security and data protection issues that represent some of the carcinogens in this pathology metaphor.
This particular business model of paid whitelisting concerns the trade group of premium publishers as foregrounded by Jason Kint, the CEO of DCN, who offered his reasonable questions about transparency and shared-governance in an open letter with ABP to decline his invitation. By contrast, ABP’s paid whitelist drives Randall Rothenberg, CEO of IAB, absolutely bonkers, and he still seems convinced that hurling histrionics at this company and its practices is the silver bullet to kill ad blocking.
ABP’s invitations to the IAB annual event, ironically delivered by targeted advertising, were rescinded. Blocker blocked. When it’s not issuing invectives at its nemesis, the ad-tech trade group has devised two acronyms that distill their solutions to the existential threat of their industry, as LEAN and DEAL. The first acronym refers to IAB’s pledge to make their ads less toxic. The second acronym refers to IAB’s recommended trick to fight ad blockers: Block them back until users give up. Unsurprisingly, these concoctions are all about protecting ad tech from extinction, and do not address root causes of ad blocking. They are palliative care, when this industry needs chemotherapy and invasive surgery.
I’ve argued that ad tech cannot save itself until it comes clean about the privacy, security and data-protection issues that represent some of the carcinogens in this pathology metaphor. Despite the claim that ad tech respects our privacy (LOL), the members of this industry prefer to keep their personally identifiable information under secure protocols and crystal-clear terms and conditions when a roundtable is formed to discuss their prognosis for survival.
LEAN and DEAL are palliative care — this industry needs chemotherapy and invasive surgery.
All three of these closed meetings that I’ve attended have been subject to Chatham House Rule, which means I’m blocked from attributing any statements from these meetings to specific individuals or organizations. This rule, intended to promote an uninhibited discussion, could also be understood as a form of secrecy-lite, or at least that the meeting had a privacy policy.
In that way, though, the rule has a chilling effect on the other end, as I can’t speak as freely about these meetings as I would prefer because I’m usually the only attendee of these meetings with no vested interest. I don’t represent any organization, for-profit or nonprofit, with an express purpose related to the publishing or advertising businesses as an extracurricular activity, nor an advocacy group that promotes privacy and consumer rights, unless teaching about it counts as such. I’m merely an educator and a researcher who gets paid to serve the common good through research, scholarship, creative practice, teaching and service.
In that regard, the Chatham House Rule inhibits my ability to perform my duties to the fullest, but I aim to respect its purpose, and the ability to participate in these discussions outweighs the downside of feeling gagged by vested interests. PageFair was kind enough to circulate notes from the meeting that comply with Chatham House Rule, so I can cautiously share them here.
The “synthesis of points” of the six-hour meeting among representatives of consumer group organizations, trade bodies, government, advertisers, agencies, publishers and browsers were circulated as follows:
- The user must have simple tools to reject and to complain about advertising. This puts the consumer at the core of reform.
- There should be a more sustainable balance between “above the line” and “below the line” advertising on the Web. Rather than restore all ads, we should display only a limited number of premium advertising slots. This will make a better impact for brands and clean up the Web.
- Contextual targeting can be used to establish ad relevance. This will end the over reliance on behavioral tracking of users.
- Better metrics of advertising success are needed to reform the economics and quality of online advertising. This will end the race to the bottom.
Let me explain some industry jargon here for the uninitiated, and make the case for these proposals:
Above the line refers to brand advertising, where no response is required. Its purpose is to signal confidence and engender awareness of a product, service or company. These are the kind of ads people generally don’t mind, because they tend to have glossy pictures of beautiful people and things captivating our desires for them through the power of suggestion. You don’t need much tracking or targeting above the line, because there’s arguably no waste.
Below the line refers to direct-response marketing, and online, this means a click-through is desired, so its purpose is to trigger an action or behavior, and if 0.001 percent or more responses occur, the ad is often considered worthwhile. These are the kinds of ads that people generally detest, because they tend to resemble junk mail, but made worse by being cheap and overabundant. Real-time marketplaces that programmatically sell digital ad impressions with the speed and efficiency of Wall Street drive the marginal cost to near-zero.
In that sense, online, below-the-line ads are a scourge, because they aren’t commensurate to their cost. This ad spam gobbles up our mobile data plans, so it ends up costing more to load them than to buy them and the wrong party is footing the bill. We’re paying twice — once in data plan costs and again with our data privacy — all in the hope that one real human will click. This ad spam insidiously induces serious questions about the incontrovertible principles of net neutrality and the necessity of privacy so that we can own our own identities and assert our personal agency in an increasingly algorithmic world.
Contextual targeting refers to the old-fashioned method of matching advertisers to audiences, before the advent of Web URLs and cookies and a whole toolkit of trackers which nurtured the idea that advertisers could buy access to “eyeballs” instead of purchasing placements in publications. Advertisers used to rely on the readership of publications to reach their intended targets. Ad tech established this notion that digital ads should be delivered entirely independently from the visited publication. In so doing, ad tech created behavioral advertising, which collects your browsing history and assembles a consumer profile about you to make advertisers feel like they waste less money.
Until recently, we had no reason to be concerned with the fact that dozens of companies are sharing and synchronizing our data in milliseconds to load the ads on every page we visit. These companies do not like to draw attention to the fact that among premium publishers, this behavioral advertising makes up a single-digit percentage of their ad revenue.
Publishers don’t really need or want ad tech’s shady behavioral advertising anymore, and agencies don’t really want to target people who block it.
In other words, the particular kind of online advertising that ruins our privacy, is easily exploitable by fraudsters and hackers, and strongly correlates to ad-blocker adoption, could disappear tomorrow and the publications we know and love would be fine. Contextual targeting would probably mean that advertisers could go back to buying ads directly from publishers and reduce dependence on third-party cookies and other kinds of invasive trackers. You can imagine why the ad-tech industry is reluctant to dump the behavioral business model, even though it appears to have created a subprime market on the verge of collapse.
PageFair hopes to conduct some evidence-based tests with stakeholders to assess if people who block ads will more readily accept scant above-the-line ads that have been contextually delivered. These ads wouldn’t be spammy, because they would be relatively rare, glossy, nonintrusive, safe and far more privacy-positive than the status quo. Importantly, these ads would be measured by a new metric that evolves past the viewable impression, the dreaded “eyeball,” in favor of something that actually considers our engagement and satisfaction.
Consumers want a new deal with publishers and advertisers: Don’t annoy me, don’t creep me out, don’t get me hacked, don’t waste my time, my data, my battery.
Ad tech, advertisers and publishers insist on Chatham House Rule for themselves when the topic is ad blocking. They too are sensitive about their personally identifiable information and how it might be shared with third parties. We know that publishers are eager to restore privacy for their consumers (DCN proclaims this). We now know that advertising agencies do not want to show ads to ad-blocking folk because they think it will harm their client brands (I heard this for the first time at PageFair’s summit, but can’t attribute, per Chatham House Rule). Publishers don’t really need and want ad tech’s shady behavioral advertising anymore, and agencies don’t really want to target people who block it. Research suggests that up to 80 percent of those who block ads might renegotiate the deal. Your move, ad tech.
I hope PageFair succeeds in devising an effective test that yields promising results shareable with the industry and broader community. If we can show that users want digital ads that aren’t spam, then they’ll accept a new deal with publishers and advertisers: Don’t annoy me, don’t creep me out, don’t get me hacked, don’t waste my time, my data, my battery — then and only then, we can de-escalate this arms race and get back to the task of saving the open Web from big platforms that will gobble up everything and never give it back.
Originally published by re/code as Beyond the Eyeball: We’re Making Some Progress on Ad Blocking on March 28, 2016 at 5:00 AM PDT
