People are waking up to the fact that online advertising isnât what itâs cracked up to be.
Last month, Bob Hoffmanâs excellent The Ad Contrariannewsletter noted, âI believe the marketing industry has pissed away hundreds of billions of dollars on digital fairy tales and ad fraud over the past 10 years (in fact, Iâm writing a book about it.) If I am right, and if the article in question is correct, we are in the midst of a business delusion unmatched in all of history.â He linked to an article by Jesse Frederik and Mauritz Martin (also sent to me by another colleague), entitled âThe new dot com bubble is here: itâs called online advertisingâ in The Correspondent. In it, they cast doubt over the effectiveness of online ads, hidden behind buzzwords and the selection effect. If I understand the latter correctly, it means that people who are already predisposed to your offering are more likely to click on your ads, so the ads arenât actually netting you new audiences.
Hereâs the example Frederik and Martin give:
Picture this. Luigiâs Pizzeria hires three teenagers to hand out coupons to passersby. After a few weeks of flyering, one of the three turns out to be a marketing genius. Customers keep showing up with coupons distributed by this particular kid. The other two canât make any sense of it: how does he do it? When they ask him, he explains: âI stand in the waiting area of the pizzeria.â
The summary is that despite these companies claiming thereâs a correlation between advertising with them and some result, the truth is that no one actually knows.
And the con is being perpetuated by the biggest names in the business.
As Hoffman noted at the end of October:
A few decades ago the advertising industry decided they couldn’t trust the numbers they were being given by media. The result was the rise of third-party research, ratings, and auditing organizations.
But there are still a few companies that refuse to allow independent, third-party auditing of their numbers.
No surprises there. Iâve already talked about Facebookâs audience estimates having no relationship with the actual population, so we know they’re bogus.
And, I imagine, they partly get away with it because of their scale. One result of the American economic orthodoxy these days is that monopolies are welcomeâitâs the neoliberal school of thinking. Now, I went through law school being taught the Commerce Act 1986 and the Trade Practices Act 1974 over in Australia, and some US antitrust legislation. I was given all the economic arguments on why monopolies are bad, including the starvation of innovation in their sector.
Roger McNamee put me right there in Zucked, essentially informing me that what I learned isnât current practice in the US. And that is worrisome at the least.
It does mean, in places like Europe which havenât bought into this model, and who still have balls (as well as evidence), theyâre happy to go after Google over their monopoly. And since our anti-monopoly legislation is still intact, and one hopes that we donât suddenly change tack (since I know the Commerce Act is under review), we should fight those monopoly effects that Big Tech has in our country.
What happens to monopolies? Well, if past behaviour is any indication, they can get broken up. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is simply recounting American history when she suggests that thatâs what Facebook, Google and Amazon should endure. There was a time when Republicans and Democrats would have been united on this prospect, given the trusts that gave rise to their Sherman Act in 1890, protecting the public from market failures like these. Even a generation ago, theyâd never have allowed companies to get this influential.
Also a generation ago, we wouldnât swallow the BS an advertising platform gave us without something to back it up. Right now, it seems we donât have anythingâand the industry is beginning to cry foul.
I believe one of the Democrat-leaning newspapers in the US compiles a list of lies by Donald Trump. I really think we should be doing one for Facebook, as it would make for impressive reading, though it would also take some time to compile.
Founder Mark Zuckerberg claimed he talked to media from âacross the spectrumâ, but as The Interceptâs Jon Schwarz and Sam Biddle discovered, this is another lie: Zuckerberg cultivates relationships with US conservatives, not their liberals, based on the duoâs checks.
This adds fuel to the fire that Zuckerberg dreads US senator Elizabeth Warren getting into the White House, and has said so, and we know the buck really stops with him when it comes to Facebookâs activities. Facebook even pulled Sen. Warren’s ads from their platform briefly: so much for impersonal algorithms, ‘We’re just a platform,’ and free speech. We also know from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezâs questioning of the Facebook founder that he claims he passes the buck on what media are considered legit to a conservative group, something heâll have sanctioned, so be prepared to see Facebook reflect his (and Trump-supporting, Facebook board member Peter Thielâs) right-wing political views.
As Schwarz and Biddle also note, Facebookâs VP for US public policy is a George W. Bush aide and a board member for the former presidentâs museum.
Jack Morse at Mashable, meanwhile, reported that Zuckerberg is attempting historical revisionism on why he started Facebook. Retconning might work with comic books but less so in real life. Apparently, instead of the truthâa website which scraped photos of students and asked people to rate who was hotterâFacebook is now something created to give people a voice after the Iraq war in 2003.
Sorry, Mark, we know you didnât have such noble intentions, regardless of what they eventually became.
Itâs an insult to all those entrepreneurs who actually did start businesses or ventures with noble intent or socially responsible purposes.
Frankly, sticking to the truth, and saying you discovered the power of connecting people, is a far more compelling story.
Except, of course, Facebook no longer connects people. It divides people by validating their own biases, including less savoury viewpoints. It stokes outrage because that’s worth more clicks and time spent on its site. At worst, itâs a tool used for genocide. It’s a shame Facebook refuses to acknowledge the Pandora’s box it has opened, because its top management has no desire to do a thing about it. And as such it loses my respect even further. Don’t want the likes of Warren calling for breaking your company up? The solution is actually quite simple, but you all have become too rich and too establishment to want to break things.
I actually had to write this in my opâed for Lucireâs 22nd anniversary last week: âIn this respect, we see our mission as the opposite of social media: we want to bring people together, not usher them into silos and echo chambers.â The narrative Facebook wishes to spin, like so many in its past, is an easily seen-through joke.
I would have loved to have seen this go to trial, but Facebook and the plaintiffsâa group of advertising agencies alleging they had been swindled by the social networkâsettled.
Excerpted from The Hollywood Reporter, âThe suit accused Facebook of acknowledging miscalculations in metrics upon press reports, but still not taking responsibility for the breadth of the problem. âThe average viewership metrics were not inflated by only 60%-80%; they were inflated by some 150 to 900%,â stated an amended complaint.â
Facebook denies this and settled for US$40 million, which is really pocket change for the multi-milliard-dollar company. Just the price of doing business.
Remember, Facebook has been shown to have lied about the number of people it can reach (it now admits that its population estimates have no basis in, well, the population), so Iâm not surprised it lies about the number of people who watch their videos. And remember their platform has a lot of botsâI still have several thousand reported on Instagram that have yet to be touchedâand Facebook itself isnât exactly clean.
Every time they get called out, there are a few noises, but nothing ever really happens.
This exchange between Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Mark Zuckerberg is a further indication that nothing will ever happen at Facebook to make things rightâthere’s no will from top management for that to happen. Thereâs too much to be lost with monetization opportunities for questionable services to be shut down, while Facebook is all too happy to close ones that donât make money (e.g. the old âView asâ feature). The divisions and “fake news” will continue, the tools used by all the wrong people.
It’s your choice whether you want to be part of this.
"So, you won't take down lies or you will take down lies? I think that's just a pretty simple yes or no."
Complete exchange between @RepAOC@AOC and Mark Zuckerberg at today's House Financial Services Cmte hearing.
That #Brexit bill is typeset in Palatino. That was designed by a German. Come on, people, donât you want to use British typefaces? Tell Johnny Foreigner what you think of his fonts!
Strictly speaking, I realize it was Book Antiqua, though as we all know, that’s a Palatino clone.
Since even English types like Baskerville were influenced by what was happening on the Continent, for official use, the UK really needs to go back to Old English. And yes, I realize that suggestion has unpleasant parallels to what was going on in Germany in the 1930s âŚ
There was a great follow-up to my Tweet, incidentally:
I need a "Tell Johnny Foreigner what you think of his fonts!" tee shirt, and I do not even wear clothes with writing on them.
When I wrote this post in May 2018, ‘People are waking up to Wikipediaâs abuses’, even I didn’t expect that Wikipedia would act so harshly when it gets criticized on its own platform.
One editor decided to create a page on Philip Cross, who (or which) received a great deal of attention that month, and was probably deserving of a page detailing his notoriety. Cross, as I detailed in May 2018, is a person or entity that is anti-Jeremy Corbyn and favourable toward right-wing figures. He ‘has not had a single day off from editing Wikipedia between August 29, 2013 and May 14, 2018, including Christmas Days.’ Wikipediaâs reaction? Delete the page, and subject its creator to a lifetime ban. Then, any record of the Philip Cross page was scrubbed cleanâforget page histories. The story is detailed at Off-Guardian here.
In other words, Wikipedia was complicit in biased editing. I’ve been saying Wikipedia was questionable for over a decade, but to actually protect someone who engages in what some might call libel?
It’s entirely consistent with Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales’s attitude to the whole thing, as Craig Murray detailed at the time.
After five years of Cross’s inputs to Wikipedia, he was finally discussed by Wikipedia by a principled editor, KalHolmann, though not without opposition (KalHolmann was initially “punished” for even bringing it up). Like all big sites, Wikipedia decided to show people that it has some form of governance only after it had been outed (including a BBC World Service radio story that went out during the arbitration process) for allowing abuse.
And by means of a postscript to these events of mid-2018 that I missed till now, George Galloway, a regular target of Philip Cross’s Wikipedia activity, claims he has identified the man, and knows the background behind him.
One mayoral candidate recently asked me for my advice. I wonât name who it is, since I want those who contact me to know Iâll keep their communications in confidence.
Now, the first thing to do is to get a time machine and ask me the same question 18 months earlier.
But I can only provide tips for coming third in Wellington:
⢠have forward-thinking policies;
⢠appeal to thinking voters of all ages;
⢠resonate with younger voters who are most affected by them;
⢠frighten the establishment with common sense.
I canât advise how to win since I didnât. Presumably it is to do the opposite of my approach?
⢠Use rose-coloured glasses;
⢠appeal to non-thinking voters of all ages;
⢠resonate with older voters more likely to vote;
⢠suck up to the establishment.
This is with the greatest respect to many previous winners, who actually didnât do all these things. But they make for a couple of fun Tweets.
I repeat the call to administer the Voigt-Kampff test to all candidates.
Ken Clarke has been around long enough (indeed, as the Father of the House, he has been in Parliament for longer than my lifetime) to see through political shenanigans, and Bojo and Brexit are no exception. (Yes, Minister is also instructive.)
Ken Clarke nails Boris Johnson's oh so transparent strategy 👏
1. Set conditions which make No Deal inevitable
2. Make sure blame is attached to the EU & Parliament
3. Fly a flag waving general election before the consequences of No Deal become too obvious pic.twitter.com/hoNKc9hysv
Subsequently, Jacob Rees-Mogg, who lives in a dream world detached from understanding others, inspired even more rebellion, and with the PM’s speech, it played out exactly as Clarke predicted. Not predicted: Iain Duncan-Smith picking his nose.
Johnson is acting like the schoolboy who hasn’t done his homework and is trying to hide it in a myriad of excuses. The UK doesn’t even have a negotiating team, according to former Chancellor Philip Hammond, and the PM’s claims of ‘progress’ are a mystery to those in Brussels. There is only so much nationalistic bluster will get you if you don’t actually do the workâeven if you voted leave, you would expect this government to have advanced your interests even slightly. It appears that that was never its aim. It feels a bit like the last days of Mao: keep it messy in a hope to hold on a little longer.
As an expat, Iâve been asked a few times about what I think of the Hong Kong protests. Thereâs no straight answer to this. Here are a few thoughts, in no particular order.
The British never gave us universal suffrage, so the notion that it was all roses before 1997 is BS. The best the Brits managed was half of LegCo toward the end, but before that it was pitiful. And the express reasons they didnât give it to us, certainly in the mid-20th century, were racist.
Having said that, Iâd love to see half of LegCo up for grabs, if not more.
The extradition bill is, in the grand scheme, pretty minor. If the PRC really wants to grab you, they will.
However, I totally get that codifying it into law gives them greater authority, or is perceived to give them that.
It wouldnât be the first time the US State Department and others meddled in our affairs, and I donât believe this is an exception.
Expecting the British to help out is a hiding to nothing. The Shadow Cabinet was critical of John Majorâs Conservatives in the 1990s over Hong Kong, and when in office, months before the handover, was arguably even less effective. Thereâll be the occasional op-ed from Chris Patten. Not much else. The UK is too mired in its own issues anyway, looking more and more like the sort of failed state that it professes to âhelpâ right now.
It hasnât helped that HK Chinese feel that our culture is under threat, including our language, and there hasnât been any indication from the PRC of alleviating this (the old playbook again). Observers inside China may see HKersâ embrace of its internationalist culture as colonial and subservient to foreigners; HKers see it as a direct contrast to the lack of openness within the PRC between 1949 and the early 1980s and as a âfreerâ expression of Chineseness. Arguments could be made either way on the merits of both positions. That resentment has been stoked for some time, and HKers will only need to point to the Uighurs as an indication of their fears.
Withdrawal of the bill, even temporarily, would have been wiser, as itâs not a time for the PRC to get hard-line over this. This shouldnât be a case of us v. them. This is, however, a perfect opportunity to have dialogue over reinterpreting âone country, two systemsâ, and persuade the ROC of its meritâthe Chinese commonwealth idea that has been in my thoughts for a long time. However, Xi is one of the old-school tough guys, and this mightnât be on his agenda. China hasnât exactly gone to young people to ask them what they thinkâwe never have, whether youâre talking about the imperial times, the period between 1911 and 1949, or afterwards.
This might be my romantic notions of Hong Kong coloured by childhood memories, but the place thrived when the young could express themselves freely through music and other arts. They felt they had a voice and an identity.
Right now thereâs a huge uncertainty about who we are. I think weâre proudly Chinese in terms of our ethnicity and heritage, and we might even think our ideas of what this means are superior to othersâ. Rose-coloured glasses are dangerous to don because they donât tell us the truth. But we might be nostalgic for pre-1997 because the expression of our identity was so much clearer when the ruling power was nothing like us. Who cares if they thought we were a bunch of piccaninnies if they just let us get on with our shit? Now thereâs a battle between âour Chinesenessâ versus âtheir Chinesenessâ in the eyes of some HKers. Thanks to certain forces stoking the tensions, and probably using the resentment HK Chinese feel, there isnât a comfortable, foreseeable way out any time soon.
Thanks to my friend Bill Shepherd, I’ve now subscribed to The Ad Contrarian newsletter. Bob Hoffman is one of the few who gets it when it comes to how insignificant the FTC’s Facebook fine is.
Five (American) billion (American) dollars sounds like a lot to you and me, but considering Facebook’s stock rose on the news, they’ve more than covered the fine on the rise alone.
Bob writes: ‘The travesty of this settlement guarantees that no tech company CEO will take consumer privacy or data security seriously. Nothing will change till someone either has to pay personally or go to jail. Paying insignificant fines with corporate money is now an officially established cost of doing business in techland andâwho knows?âa jolly good way to boost share prices.’
There’s something very messed up about this scenario, particularly as some of the US’s authorities are constantly being shown up by the EU (over Google’s monopoly actions) and the UK’s Damian Collins, MP (over the questions being asked of Facebookâunlike US politicians’, his aren’t toothless).
The US SEC, meanwhile, has released its report on Facebook, showing that Facebook knew what was happening with Cambridge Analytica in 2015â16, and that the company willingly sold user data to the firm. SEC’s Stephanie Avakian noted, ‘As alleged in our complaint, Facebook presented the risk of misuse of user data as hypothetical when they knew user data had in fact been misused.’ You can read the entire action as filed by the SEC here.
Woah this was 12 days before US elections. Facebook employees knew stuff was going on but their DC office appears to have frozen them. Consumers were deceived and harmed through their personal data likely in order to protect Facebook's reputation and share price. pic.twitter.com/rTpSYptVPG
As I have been hashtagging, #Facebooklies. This is standard practice for the firm, as has been evidenced countless times for over a decade. The settlement: US$100 million. Pocket change.
Ken Clarke has been around long enough (indeed, as the Father of the House, he has been in Parliament for longer than my lifetime) to see through political shenanigans, and Bojo and Brexit are no exception. (Yes, Minister is also instructive.)
