The Case for Non-Targeted Ads

Over the cries of the advertising industry, in 2017 Apple introduced Intelligent Tracking Protection (ITP) into Safari. Basically, when ITP notices identifying “cookies” following you around the internet to build a profile and serve you targeted ads, it blocks the cookie. It’s a great tool for user privacy, so naturally, advertisers hate it. And now, they’re hitting back.

Instead of the decentralized model of today, wherein every advertiser and website uses its own cookies to gather data, the new model would assign each user a single digital token to share its data with all advertisers. In theory, the token will not identify you by name and will offer you the choice of opting out entirely.

Rather than dissect the endless supply of painfully obvious problems here, for just a few minutes here, I want to talk about the fundamental issue at hand: targeted ads.

For our purposes here, we’ll limit the definition of a targeted ad to one that involves tracking and other privacy-infringing characteristics. For instance, in Reply All’s investigation to find out whether Facebook is secretly turning on your phone’s microphone to listen to you—something most users have accepted as fact—it found that in truth, the company simply doesn’t need to; it already has a staggering trove of data about each user it can cross-reference. Reply All compiled more than 52,000 demographic categories advertisers lump users into, which can be as broad as “millennial” or “Gmail user” to as highly specific as “close friends of men with a birthday in seven to 30 days” or “a person who likes to pretend to text in awkward situations.”

Accepting the industry’s proposal here requires accepting that targeted ads are superior to non-targeted ads. And I don’t accept that assertion.

I live in New York City. I see ads all the time: on billboards and buses, in subways and terminals, everywhere. Posters posted and stickers stuck. You cannot escape the ads in this city. No matter where you go, you will see ads.

That probably sounds like hell to a lot of you. Honestly, it sounds like hell to me, too. But I actually don’t mind it. In fact, I actually… kind of… like it? Weird.

The ads aren’t targeted to me personally, of course. They can’t be. It’s a city of eight million people. How could you possibly target an ad to any one person? If you follow the logic of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, who proposed the new digital token and represents online ad agencies, then these non-targeted ads should be ostensibly worthless to me.

They don’t know how old I am or where I live. They don’t know what sites or stores I visit. They don’t know what brand of socks I buy or how often I google “how many bananas is too many bananas?” They don’t know who my friends are or what music they listen to. They don’t know what movies I’ve seen recently or about my extensive YouTube playlist of Norwegian train videos. They don’t know anything about me, really. I could be anybody.

And yet, I love them.

I’ve gone on long diatribes about much I loved StreetEasy’s old “Find Your Place” campaign. Entire subway commutes with friends have been spent in fiercely debating answers to Casper’s clever “Sleep Puzzzles.” It is legitimately baffling to me that I can recite from memory many of the Oatly ads all over the city.

Yes, that’s right. Ads for oat milk, committed to memory.

The fact that I can rattle off those brands and their specific campaigns at all—and I could do the same for a dozen more—is a testament to how effective good advertisements can be, even when they’re not targeted to an individual:

• Sometimes they happen to align with my existing interests: I learned the premiere date for the second season of HBO’s Succession, a show I love, from ads in subway terminals and on buses. Just this morning, I learned from a random poster on a pole that Elizabeth Warren, a presidential candidate I support, is having a rally here next week. Fantastic.
• Sometimes they show me new stuff to be interested in: I didn’t know Good Boys existed at all until another subway ad caught my eye. It mentioned Superbad, one of my favorite comedies, so I looked up the trailer when I got on the train. Now I’m excited to see it. Great.
• Sometimes they’re advertising products I’m fundamentally not even in the market for, but they’re building awareness for the future. When I needed an apartment, I did end up contacting StreetEasy. I eventually replaced my mattress with a Casper. I even bought some Oatly milk, just to try it. And you know what? It was pretty good!

Targeted advertisements online have no craft: no riddles or clever messaging, no daring graphic design, no flair. They don’t even try. They just stalk me around the internet long enough to know what brand of socks I buy, then they shove them in front of me over and over hoping I’ll finally cave. But I already own those socks! I don’t need more! Maybe I don’t even like them!

Targeted ads completely miss the most crucial, fundamental rule in any creative field:

Don’t give people what they think they want. Tell them what they want.

A targeted ad simply cannot do that. A really good non-targeted ad can.

I had zero desire for oat milk before I saw Oatly’s ads. Zero. None. But I don’t know, they just stuck with me, echoing through my subconscious every time I ordered a latte with whole or almond milk until finally I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.

The ad industry doesn’t need this invasive data to sell you its products. The ad industry has simply become lazy and doesn’t want to sell to you anymore. They just want you to buy.

So what’s the game here? What can we do? The ad industry is not going to stop trying to track you; they’re going to keep trying to circumvent your attempts at privacy.

For most people, your first step should be to install an ad blocker. Go for AdGuard, Wipr or uBlock Origin if you’re looking for a “set and forget” experience that blocks ads across the board. If you’re OK with ads but simply want to remove tracking, Better, Disconnect or Ghostery is a better bet. In either case, support websites you frequent as often as you’re able, either with a paid subscription if they offer it or by sharing content you enjoy. If those sites have intrusive advertisements, be vocal about it and pressure the site to adopt more respectful ads.

High-profile websites need to stop with the delusion that they are powerless to do anything here. Generally, the online ad industry today works by offering an absolute pittance either per impression or per click, throwing in as much tracking as they can along the way. Most websites take the deal because in their view, asking for more is hopeless. There’s a disconnect between digital and physical ads because you have to print a physical one. That’s true real estate, while a digital one can be swapped out whenever with no work, so it’s basically worthless, right?

“There’s an unapproached opportunity in advertising that’s been bungled for 20 years by most people in this industry.”

The truth is, online advertisements are severely undervalued. Joshua Topolsky has been making this argument for years, and when he launched The Outline, he put his theory into practice with creative, well-designed ads that fit beautifully into the site’s design. Sure enough, he reported shortly after launch “an interaction rate of 13 times the industry average for The Outline’s ads and a clickthrough rate of 25 times.”

That’s impressive, but even still, the idea that an ad’s effectiveness should (or even could) be judged by metrics as basic as impression, interaction or clickthrough is a farce. The ads I mentioned earlier — the ones that actually got me to buy products — have no such immediate metric to judge. Just because I don’t act immediately to purchase a product advertised to me does not mean the advertisement was not effective.

Topolsky later told Recode, “There’s an unapproached opportunity in advertising that’s been bungled for 20 years by most people in this industry. Good advertising is good, and when it’s good it’s great. Also, we have to prove that we’re worth spending money on.”

If high-profile websites banded together to demand better advertisements that provide more value and less tracking to readers, the ad industry would have no choice but to evolve. Push websites you visit to do this.

The online ad industry has seen the writing on the wall. They know they have to change. Consumers have been blocking ads for years, but now corporations like Apple are getting more aggressive in the fight. The industry has no choice but to change—and unfortunately, it has chosen to dig itself deeper into the realm of tracking. It’s up to us to force them to change in the right direction.