As much as I dislike some of the current trends (and I do digital media for a living mind you), I do have to point out that this stuff wouldn't be done if it didn't work.
Ultimately this implies that there are enough people out there who engage with or...dare I say...want...the bullshit, that their collective voice outweighs those that do not simply by the fact that those are often the users who click ads, share things, and otherwise generate more value and revenue for the publishers than those that do not.
While the arms race to fight this stuff is commendable (I myself run at least NoScript at home and it is beautiful), I can't help but think the only way to win is to not play.
By that I mean coming up with revenue alternatives for publishers that not only generate more revenue than this approach, but also provide a direct incentive to not use these things.
If such magical solution existed, they would switch of their own volition. Instead, they focus their efforts and dollars (and by extension the focus of an entire industry that has been built on those dollars) on adding more items to the list of bullshit.
The problem is that bullshit is a negative externality. It's cognitive pollution. Those who clutter the world with bullshit reap the rewards of nabbing the suckers who respond to it, but don't pay the costs of imposing those cognitive loads on everyone else. That leads to more bullshit than would be economically efficient.
Take a simple example like billboards. If billboard advertisers had to pay every person whose life experience is degraded by seeing a billboard for a product they'd never buy, the equilibrium amount of billboard advertising would go way down.
If billboard advertisers had to pay every person whose life experience is degraded by seeing a billboard for a product they'd never buy
I've never found my life "degraded" by a billboard, even if it was for a product I'd never buy. In fact, some of them are still useful, especially when driving long distances on the Interstate. They're something to break the monotony and give you something to think about, if only for a minute or two. Some are downright funny/amusing, and others at least provoke a "I wonder what that's supposed to mean" reaction.
"cognitive pollution"? That smells suspiciously like bullshit to me.
You may welcome the billboards, but "cognitive pollution" sounds like a perfectly good description to me. Something that disrupts your focus and is forced on you as part of the environment rather than asked for.
Why would you say a billboard is any more disruptive than whatever else I'd be looking at if the billboard weren't there? Maybe it's a tree, or a fence, or a cow, or a farm tractor, or just sand and dirt... but when you're driving on the Interstate, at some point you're going to get bored and your eyes are going to wander looking for something to fix on for at least a few seconds, other than the road in front of you. Well, mine do anyway. Maybe I'm abnormal.
Anyway, I acknowledge that a lot of people get really worked up over billboards. I just have a hard-time getting excited over that. Maybe there are better examples of this "cognitive pollution". shrug
There certainly are better examples[1], but I think you are being willfully obtuse.
Of course there would be something where the billboard would have been, but advertising is designed, at great expense and with a huge amount of effort, to arrest the attention of the audience. (A significant amount of which is accomplished by being intentionally obnoxious.)
There certainly are better examples[1], but I think you are being willfully obtuse.*
Please... that kind of thing just lowers the level of discourse for everybody involved.
Of course there would be something where the billboard would have been, but advertising is designed, at great expense and with a huge amount of effort, to arrest the attention of the audience.
Perhaps it is, and what I'm saying then is that that doesn't bother me. But it's probably a reflection of some ideological / philosophical bias on my part. I've never been up-in-arms about advertising the way some people are. I don't even surf the web with an adblocker installed. Ads are something I see as occasionally beneficial, occasionally Really-Fucking-Annoying, and mostly just ignorable background noise. The only time I find myself drifting into anti-ad rage is when the ads are particularly obnoxious, or repetitive, etc. For example, video/audio ads on a page that start playing with no prompting from the user. That gets on my tits a bit, and that's where I jump on the "end the bullshit" bandwagon somewhat.
> Something that disrupts your focus and is forced on you as part of the environment rather than asked for.
By that definition, anything outside of one's immediate focus and interests is "cognitive pollution." If that's the standard, then it's so vague and subjective as to be nearly useless. As forms of advertising go, I can't think of many which are less disruptive, or easier to simply ignore, than billboards.
I've been thinking it over. Dang left an agreement, so the premise is worth reconsidering. It seems like the problem was that billboards were a remarkably bad example.
A better example might be alternative medicine. It's bullshit because it's mistaken. It's a negative externality because it costs nothing to imply that it works. And it's harmful because it can kill you.
Most cases of bullshit aren't as extreme, and I'm trying to think of some better examples of bullshit that won't kill you but will degrade your life. TV comes to mind.
Even tv is a problematic example. It's nothing more or less than a medium, and that medium can vary widely in the quality of what it presents. You could replace it with any other medium (film, radio, books, the internet) and have the same effect. One person's bullshit is another person's popular culture and creative outlet.
They're not funny / amusing / thought provoking anymore. They're not even readable or recognisable because there's too many of them. The photo title from the link is "300 billboards on a 20km road". And it's a fairly standard thing in Poland for example.
Right, but the counterpoint is that, for me, all forms of advertising are negative. I dislike them and would prefer to never see another one again. I'm sure there are plenty of people like me and the problem is that we aren't compensated for the economic harm they cause us.
I seem to have no way to signal my demand for such things other than avoiding products and brands that advertise, but my signal is probably misinterpreted by companies thinking they're not advertising enough.
Maybe a better term is just negative externality. The masses suffer the negatives while the advertiser and the business paying for the ads receive nearly all the benefits.
It's worse. In a typical tragedy of the commons scenario, common resource eventually get depleted and the responsible parties leave. Here, you can't really deplete the commons, you can only compete for the share in it. Which means there is no limit within the system for the negative feedback loop that occurs.
Advertisers play a zero-sum game, committing more and more resources to one-up each other. They're wasting ever increasing amount of fuel, minerals and man hours on epsilon marginal benefit. Those are real, tangible costs for society.
Out of curiosity, how do you balance the negative feeling you have towards that stuff against the companies you consider investing in? Do you simply choose not to invest in companies that promote these practices?
Billboards are pretty helpful. They often tell me I can get food by taking the next exit. Someone might be pulling out their phone while driving instead, because the only alternative is to pull over first. Affecting the equilibrium might have obvious consequences.
Are you sure the prevalence of bullshit isn't healthy? If there weren't so much bullshit, you'd be less immune to it when it matters. Seeing the wrong kind of doctor after being diagnosed with cancer, for example.
-> Billboards are pretty helpful. They often tell me I can get food by taking the next exit.
Usually I find the state-made info signs on the sides of freeways more informative than the advertisement billboards because it displays everything I need in one quick glance. The tiles of each "food" or gas or whatever option partitioned left or right, denoting which way I need to turn after the exit. That's just me, though. And I'm a weirdo who sometimes drives with his phone in airplane mode and chases NPR on the dial.
-> If there weren't so much bullshit, you'd be less immune to it when it matters.
I don't think this is necessarily true. It's not like it's 2 alternatives of content we're talking about, one legitimate and one not. I think it's more that there's legitimate content that's constantly getting interference from this extraneous and meaningless noise.
It's not like it's 2 alternatives of content we're talking about, one legitimate and one not. I think it's more that there's legitimate content that's constantly getting interference from this extraneous and meaningless noise.
It's important to remember that such abstractions enable you to reject the content you don't personally see as meritorious as unwholesome. And that's a sure way to fool oneself. Rewind the clock a hundred years and you might be arguing for prohibition. It's also classic no true Scottsman, for what it's worth.
One's noise is another's music. Why is it there if no one finds it helpful?
-> One's noise is another's music. Why is it there if no one finds it helpful?
Sure, but I'm not talking about subjective opinions about content. I'm talking about the other things interfering with my ability to consume the content I'm trying to consume. And I don't think that this is a classic "no true Scottsman" in that sense. I'm not making any statement about what is or isn't true internet content (because obviously that would be silly). Perhaps my word choice of "legitimate" was unwise in that way.
"negative externality".. "It's cognitive pollution".. "imposing those cognitive loads on everyone else", "life experience is degraded by seeing a billboard"
I'm seeing some BS here..a lot of hyperbolic, pseudo-psychology BS.
I like the term "cognitive pollution" only as a metaphor but the rest is just economics.
A negative externality is when one does something which imposes a cost or an 'economic bad' on someone else who is not being compensated for it.
The noise from the neighbor who mows his lawn at 7:00 on a Sunday morning is a negative externality. The neighbors lives are slightly worse off because their sleep, which was interrupted, has value to them.
When determining what should be done about this there are only a few ways this could go, the lawn-mower compensates his neighbors for the noise, the neighbors compensate the lawn-mower to mow his lawn at some other time, or the homeowner's association compels the lawn-mower to stop.
But there's at least one solution with a problem. If the neighbors pay the lawn-mower to not mow his lawn then we've created a situation where someone can be paid for doing something annoying to others and then demanding compensation to stop.
Hopefully you've seen how this metaphor translates to advertising, and specifically for the practice of paying to remove advertising.
Based on the numbers of users of various ad blockers there are a huge amount of people who find ads in general as a negative externality. Although you might argue that they're being compensated on websites by receiving some desirable content in return this doesn't translate to billboards where the annoyed viewer is gaining no other value.
Certain types of bullshit (if not all) are built on the phenomenon of Eternal September[1]. There are always those who are clueless enough to trust a spam/scam email or who'd believe that the hamburger on the billboard would be as beautiful in reality. The rest of us who already have the experience and skills for separating the seeds from the fluff, suffer only losses from the bullshit that surrounds us. But the profit made on the few clueless ones keeps the bullshit economy going.
> But the profit made on the few clueless ones keeps the bullshit economy going
You make it sound like the clueless ones are always the same people though. I certainly paid for my share of BS (and guilt-tripped my parents into paying before that) and now I feel like I'm not doing that any more (even though there was no point when I didn't feel this way..).
It's considered common knowledge in internet advertising that these are, in fact, mostly the same people - that's why everyone tries to do as much retargeting as they can.
> As much as I dislike some of the current trends (and I do digital media for a living mind you), I do have to point out that this stuff wouldn't be done if it didn't work.
> Ultimately this implies that there are enough people out there who engage with or...dare I say...want...the bullshit,
I don't think that's necessarily true. Just because deception is effective doesn't mean people want to be deceived. Just because alcoholism is "effective" in getting people to drink doesn't mean people want alcoholism. (A weird analogy, I know, but it logically parallels your conclusion, to an admitted extreme.)
> As much as I dislike some of the current trends (and I do digital media for a living mind you), I do have to point out that this stuff wouldn't be done if it didn't work.
Are we sure of that? It might depend on our definition of "work". A lot of the people responsible for doing this stuff may just be doing it because if they admit that none of it works, they'll have nothing else to offer and will be out of a job. It's not terribly hard to make up data showing some kind of effectiveness, or just to misinterpret real data in a way that can convince others to let you keep doing it. For every marketing or advertising craftsman out there who builds something that works, gathers useful data, and interprets that data honestly, there are probably 20 people who have no clue and just keep churning out the same stuff because they don't have anything else to offer. Whether it's profitable, or profitable enough to be worth doing, is anyone's guess. Given how cheap impressions are, especially the kind of ultra-low-value impressions that bullshit provides, it's pretty difficult to imagine this stuff paying for itself, even if most of it is autogenerated or written by the world's most desperate English-speakers.
It might help more to come up with other jobs for the people who are putting the bullshit out there. Jobs they can do well, ideally. As it stands, I'm not sure the bullshit is serving their employers as much as it's just something for them to do so they keep getting a paycheck.
> It's not terribly hard to make up data showing some kind of effectiveness, or just to misinterpret real data in a way that can convince others to let you keep doing it. For every marketing or advertising craftsman out there who builds something that works, gathers useful data, and interprets that data honestly, there are probably 20 people who have no clue and just keep churning out the same stuff because they don't have anything else to offer.
Let me share a personal anecdote from watching a social media marketing company at works.
These marketing people got contracts to do brand/site/service promotion on everyone's favourite social networking and image collecting sites. They wrote many posts, made interesting graphics, etc. Generally did a good, honest work at that. Then every month they had to write reports detailing the effectiveness of their efforts. The way they did it was like this:
1) gather metrics provided by social media platforms they used
2) put them in a DOC file
3) start with the conclusion that they did their job well and helped the marketed company tremendously
4) invent some plausible-sounding reasons to connect the data from 1) to conclusion in 3)
And mind you, this wasn't intentional dishonesty. They simply have no fucking clue about the meaning of the data, or what can (and can not) be reasonably inferred from it, so they don't even try. They don't even know what they don't know. But their clients don't know anything too; it's basically both sides not knowing what those colorful graphs and tables of numbers mean and bullshitting one another without even realizing it.
I guess one can't generalize from one example, but mind this: social media marketing companies are not staffed by math PhDs, they're staffed by social sciences undergrads who decided that, given current state of the job market, learning Photoshop is better than working at McDonalds. They may be good at making interesting content, but they have zero necessary knowledge for getting right conclusions from data.
Sounds like a low-quality shop or one that isn't being paid to do the strategic thinking around their measurement to determine "if it works."
As someone who is deep in the thick of that stuff, I'll be the first to admit the data is very fuzzy, and relies on a lot of statistics to really get a sense of whether things are working when there is not a strong direct response component (see: brand display advertising). Even the value things like paid search are entirely subjective depending on the attribution model you use and how you measure incremental lift.
But that isn't to say it is all voodoo that doesn't work. Its just that to measure it properly you need some very expensive technology and/or proper stats training.
It might help to be clearer about what I'm getting at here. The question is not whether effective (and cost-effective) advertising exists, nor whether anyone anywhere knows how effective their advertising is. Clearly it does and some people do.
It's whether (a) buying ad impressions on a clickbait listicle (or other "bullshit" page) is cost-effective or effective at all, (b) whether writing and hosting such pages is profitable once all internal costs are properly considered, and (c) whether the advertising formats the author is complaining about are cost-optimal or even effective at all. I took the GP's claim that "it works" to mean that the answers to all three questions are an emphatic yes. I'm not so sure we know that, and I'm not so sure it's true. It seems likely that the answers might well be "almost never", "probably not", and "maybe sometimes", but factors other than profitability are at work that cause the people making the decisions to do these things even when an omniscient rational corporation would not. Improper use of statistics or poor data collection could certainly be an explanation for that, but I propose that it's more basic than that. Of course, I might also be wrong, and maybe all this bullshit does work, and works very well. That just doesn't seem like the slam dunk that was implied.
Ok, let's get specific about listicle crap like this then (aka native advertising).
The formats, popularized by such ad networks as Taboola and Outbrain gained popularity because publishers needed ways to drive additional ad revenue without adding what appeared to be more display ads.
This happened to combine with the layout/design tactics of sites like Buzzfeed and HuffPo that have nailed the approach to keeping users engaged, clicking, and reading.
Coincidentally, this also helped provide a source of content for sites didn't really care about drawing the line between journalism and sales. Not that more respected publications haven't been trying them--just with tighter controls over the advertisers (perhaps via direct sales only).
Affiliates are all over these as expected, and if they can make it work, then that says something because affiliates operate on crap margins and have many other challenges.
That said, there's almost certainly a significant amount of dollars in there from companies just testing it because you need to constantly be testing new traffic sources and approaches. In fact, I always recommend companies carve out a test budget that they can just consider wasted, and if it happens to perform or they learn something, then it usually pays off in spades.
There are always those that are less savvy and tossing money away on wasted impressions. Then there are folks like myself who understand the limitations of the data, the nature of the medium, have their own audience data, etc. In many ways it parallels the differences between Wall St. and Main St. in the investing world.
> But that isn't to say it is all voodoo that doesn't work. Its just that to measure it properly you need some very expensive technology and/or proper stats training.
That's what I believe too. It does work when done properly, but most of the shops are not equipped to even begin to understand how to do it.
What kind of expensive technology do you mean in particular, if I may ask?
This is going down the whole attribution rabbit hole, which is arguably the most challenge issue in the advertising/marketing space today.
Static attribution models like first touch, last touch, U-shaped, and even custom weighted models provided multiple lenses through which to view your data to see how it would be valued if more credit was given towards it (since historically things were viewed via last touch lenses for the most part). Google Analytics offers some great attribution tools for free if you're interested in checking those out.
Beyond that, static models have their weaknesses, so dynamic models such as the data-driven model in Google Analytics Premium are a nice step up. There are other solutions that handle this too such as VisualIQ, Adometry, Convertro, etc. Those were all recently acquired by Google, and others btw.
Then there is software that attempts to help you model incremental lift in addition to dynamic attribution models. I just demoed Adobe's econometric modeling tool in their Adobe Analytics package (that feature set might be in the higher-level version) and that was about the closest I've seen to date for doing it the way I consider the "right" way (ie. user-path level attribution and modeling for incremental lift using literally whatever external data you can feed into it).
I'm an ad tech nerd so let me know if you have any other questions.
Do you know of any tools/studies/approaches which combine techniques from adtech attribution with techniques from online training, e.g. spaced repetition? E.g. are there timing models for saturation thresholds which cause users to ignore a message?
Are you getting things like modeling "banner blindness" and the reduction (or increase) in value of a given creative/channel based on increasing or decreasing the frequency cap?
I haven't seen anything really that handles the reporting of that specifically. Typically modeling ideal frequency caps is left as an exercise to the user, and banner blindness is typically looked at by CTR as certain channels like FB can see a steep drop in that pretty quickly after as little as 2 weeks if you have a relatively small audience you are saturating.
This gets more interesting on the retargeting side as people often complain about constantly seeing ads for a company--yet the reality is higher frequency caps often work because it keeps the brand top of mind or reminds them they needed to do something.
But again, not familiar with any specific technical solutions with features built around modeling that and providing recommendations. That is still largely a human effort that requires analysis of touch point data on the frequency cap side, and other directional metrics on the banner blindness side.
Would love to know if you or others know of any solutions that handle that better. I'm sure DSPs/networks like Criteo and others have their own in-house solutions, but part of the challenge is that there's no great way to set global frequency caps across DSPs/networks if you use multiple platforms.
Bullshit doesn't work so much as it works slightly enough to see a better return on investment than other kinds of promotion (and certainly a better success rate than a complete lack of promotion, a strategy many small websites apparently employ).
You know as well as I do that the myth of these strategies succeeding for every business cases and for every brand (and the propagation of that myth by the entire industry) is more of a strategy for bringing in clients than it is for helping them achieve more online success.
Simply put, we live in a world of bullshit. People are - by and large - bullshitters, or at least they don't care enough to figure out and implement non-bullshit solutions, because bullshit gets the job done so they can go do other things.
I think one would be better served learning how to coexist with the bullshit than trying to put a stop to it, and I'm usually pretty idealistic. It's just too uphill of a battle to fight millions of years of inertia across our whole species (look at the advertising industry, how huge it is, you think we're going to put a stop to that by simply appealing to people's senses of beauty on the Internet or whatever? And that's just one piece of the bullshit).
Except the call to arms is two pronged: call out bullshit, but also don't create bullshit. Don't do it is always achievable, even if it might take some time to extricate yourself from a situation that demands it, and still take care of your family.
Except the call to arms is two pronged: call out bullshit, but also don't create bullshit.
Never gonna happen. Human beings are born to bullshit. The fact that we compete for mates and the way the different genders have differing optimal mating strategies pretty much ensures that. We are always going to bullshit each other to a certain degree, as we try to achieve the ends we are innately wired to pursue.
That doesn't mean we can't fight back against bullshit of the nature described in TFA, but we won't ever live in a world with no bullshit. Or if we do, it won't be recognizable as anything like human society as we know it. If anything, it'd probably look like the worst dystopian nightmare scenario we can think of.
> The fact that we compete for mates and the way the different genders have differing optimal mating strategies pretty much ensures that.
I think we've accumulated some nuance over the millenia. Killing the mating competition, or even lower level violence, is very relatively rare these days. And I'm pretty sure that significant numbers of people approach meeting and mating with more sincerity than bullshit.
Yes, in many ways we have gotten rid of a lot of bullshit since the dawn of society, and one could argue that we have been on a monotonically upward slope over that period. One thing I think some people get wrong is the sense that the bullshit is a new thing, introduced by relatively recent societal/technological developments. People have been calling bullshit since as far back as we have records, and I think on the whole it has actually been steadily getting better, counting by the total percentage of the population that is educated or "enlightened" enough to recognize and condemn and not practice various components of what we are generally calling bullshit behavior.
And "relative" really is a key word here because while this is happening insanely fast on universal time scales, it's actually agonizingly slow within the context of a human lifetime. Which creates a catch 22: I could devote my life to stamping out some form of bullshit (if simply by promoting education), and on my death bed wonder if my efforts were even distinguishable from noise. But it is combined efforts like these that do gradually move the needle, and for each person that makes that evaluation and decides it's not worth it, it will take that much longer.
And I'm pretty sure that significant numbers of people approach meeting and mating with more sincerity than bullshit.
You may be right. But that doesn't contradict what I said. I'm not saying we approach that, or anything else, with complete bullshit. I'm saying we all (or close to all) approach it with some bullshit. Perhaps not even consciously, but we're all trying to sell ourselves, make ourselves look more desirable, etc. in various ways.
Killing the mating competition, or even lower level violence, is very relatively rare these days.]
"Relatively" in this context is ill-defined, but I'd be curious to see the numbers on how many murders/assaults/etc. ultimately involve jealousy over romantic/sexual partners, infidelity, cuckolding, etc.
I don't think this is an example of the naturalistic fallacy, as least not as it's commonly understood[1].
I am not trying to reductively define anything in terms of "natural" properties, which would be an example of the naturalistic fallacy. I'm merely making an observation, that certain levels of bullshit are intrinsic in human nature and that it's probably fantastical thinking to believe we can ever completely eliminate bullshit.
Humans are also "born to lie" and "born to kill", but societies create structure and limits.
And have we eliminated lying or killing?
So too should we strive limit bullshit.
Agreed. We just shouldn't be naive in thinking that it's going to be easy to eliminate it completely. And we should probably acknowledge that it might not even be possible to eliminate it completely.
Personally I do suspect it's a multi-level, recursive scam. After all, convincing you that advertising works is itself advertising from the point of view of companies that you'll pay to advertise you (note: unless you are personally going door-to-door and telling people about your product, you're always paying someone; printshops that make your leaflets and posters are a big part of advertising industry). And since so many advertising is dishonest, it stands to reason that advertising of advertising will also often be dishonest.
A corollary: I do believe that "metrics" in on-line advertising are a tool for people using them to bullshit themselves into believing their ads work. Even an average college-educated person has zero understanding of statistics, and without it, it's easy to draw any conclusion you like from any dataset.
I don't know. It kind of sounds to me like you're saying that millions of people over hundreds of years are either running, or falling, for a huge scam.
Whereas the alternative is that maybe you're just wrong or misunderstanding of how things work.
I'd generally put higher odds on you being wrong, than of an entire field being so completely off base, at least a field as large and well researched as this.
> I'd generally put higher odds on you being wrong, than of an entire field being so completely off base, at least a field as large and well researched as this.
I generally would too. But we know now that it is indeed possible for a very large and "well researched" field to be wrong - just look at the state of soft sciences. A lot of evidence came up recently show that 90% of research in those fields is bullshit (often intentional). It's not beyond realm of possibility that a big part of advertising industry forms a self-contained system of moving money around with zero relation to the real world.
vs other users of advertisement? Its not that it doesn't "work" its that its an arms race. If your competitor does it, then you will lose if you don't do it as well.
So, the size of your marketing department is more related to the size of your competitors department, than any actual effectiveness. Which is another way of reinforcing monopolistic consolidation. A large competitor likely can significantly outspend a smaller one with advertising dollars, which just goes to cement its position in the market.
Ultimately this implies that there are enough people out there who engage with or...dare I say...want...the bullshit, that their collective voice outweighs those that do not simply by the fact that those are often the users who click ads, share things, and otherwise generate more value and revenue for the publishers than those that do not.
While the arms race to fight this stuff is commendable (I myself run at least NoScript at home and it is beautiful), I can't help but think the only way to win is to not play.
By that I mean coming up with revenue alternatives for publishers that not only generate more revenue than this approach, but also provide a direct incentive to not use these things.
If such magical solution existed, they would switch of their own volition. Instead, they focus their efforts and dollars (and by extension the focus of an entire industry that has been built on those dollars) on adding more items to the list of bullshit.