Targeting is a piece of the puzzle. As an advertiser I need frequency capping, brand safety, page quality, geo, etc. Ignoring all that.. I still need to measure results.
Yet somehow advertising existed for decades without being able to completely track the full path from viewed ad to purchase.
Seriously, the completely f'd up view of advertisers ("Ads won't work unless I can basically track everything about you!!") shows how bonkers the world has become. If your job can't exist without in-depth tracking of how a shown ad influences purchasing behavior, maybe your job shouldn't exist.
Seriously, ads would work plenty well enough by just showing the same ads to all users based on the contents of the page (or search query). Honestly, I'd be all for a legal framework that completely outlaws any "personalization" on the internet unless a user clearly and optionally opts in.
I mean.. so did medicine, buying stuff from the store, and social interaction. That doesn’t mean we stopped innovation when it went slightly awry.
Medicine works well enough with leeches, why would improve that.
There is a path to achieving similar adtech outcomes that are privacy focused, and that is what google is trying to accomplish. Why hate something that is trying to achieve what you want?
How about this: Every user, when setting up a new device, gets a clearly displayed option as to whether or not they want to be shown personalized ads based on the tracking of their browser history. Basically, a clearly displayed "Yes, I want to be tracked for the purposes of showing me ads" option. How many people do you think with want to opt in if they really had the choice? Heck, why do you think Facebook is going so bananas over Apple just asking people to opt-in to tracking?
The only 'innovation' going on is making the tracking difficult for your average, non-technical person to (a) know what is going on and (b) how to opt-out.
There is nothing your client can do (other than blocking ads entirely) that would stop a company from serving you car ads on a car site - that's contextual ads.
Personalized ads are the opposite - you're browsing a fashion site, but you'll get car commercials because you've been visiting car commercials lately.
Randomise HTML elements (div names, classes, a random amount of empty divs in between).
That can be countered by adaptive element-matching algorithms.
Just like with cracking software, it's a cat-and-mouse game, and there are far more mice out there... mice who are willing to work completely for free just to fight back against you.
If I'm reading an article about the pandemic, I probably don't want to see ads selling me face masks. If I'm reading an article about the inauguration, I probably don't want ads selling me inauguration t-shirts.
I am however more likely to click on ads selling me home renovation stuff because they know I've recently bought something in Home Depot. Even though I'm not currently on a home renovation website.
The most effective ads on me, in terms of intentional click through rate (not going to count predatory clicks) are contextual ads on specialized sites. This doesn't work well for general stuff like news sites, but webcomics that do their own ads, or a super focused forum like candlepower or head-fi? Contextual ads are ideal there.
Second most effective are platform-specicic hypertargeted ads, such as Facebook ads. Lot of misses there too, but their first party targeting is good to the point of actually giving me some interesting content.
In practice the third party "contextual" ads mostly are misses for me. Wow, another ad for the home improvement thing I either researched and bought last month, or that I was looking up on a whim and don't have any intention of actually purchasing.
Ok you are extrapolating your experience to millions of others in the world. Nothing wrong with that but it isn’t going to give you universal insights since you’re a special case.
Maybe some articles just shouldn't have ads at all. That would be refreshing. Sites publishing ad-supported content obviously need to put the ads somewhere, but that doesn't mean every single article needs its own revenue stream to justify its existence.
You've just given two bad examples, contrasted with one good example, to prove your point. Pick a good example of a contextual ad and a bad example of a personalised ad (there are many) and the proof is reversed.
Except that my example is more the more popular scenario. Pageviews of general news site surpass pageviews of niche websites about a specific topic. Just go look at the top visited websites.
Right but your example is still intentionally bad, no one is going to put an inaugration t-shirt ad as the contextual ad for a news article. An ad on a general news site can be related to the preferences of the readership of that paper, like how it always worked in print. Or it can even be targeted based on information about you that is gathered first-party, from the patterns in your use of the news website.
I totally agree. But that probably won’t involve programmatic/traditional advertising. It will probably involve first party ads. Which I am definitely in favor of!
