Got to love the irrepressible Bob Hoffman.
In his March 23 newsletter, he notes that Adlook studied target segments from popular data providers, and asked the people in those segments about themselves.
I won’t spoil Bob’s entire list but the top two are: 47 per cent of the people who the data said were women were men; and 50 per cent of the people who the data said were men were women.
I haven’t been in the business for as long as Bob, and you can bet he’s been calling out the BS of the ad industry for far longer than me. I’ve only really been calling it out since Google came on the scene.
Also this gem: ‘the programmatic advertising ecosystem is largely a fraud factory.’
The thing is no one in the programmatic ad business has ever been able to explain to me in plain language what they do and why their set-up is superior to a basic system showing ads or one that shows them contextually.
Therefore, I considered it BS. And so does Bob.
On March 30, he notes that online ad fraud is costing the industry US$100 milliard, according to Juniper Research, but no one does anything about it. That was the case even before the current US administration.
Better, then, to be old school about advertising. Give us some money for some exposures. At this company, I have virtually no idea who is visiting unless they volunteer information themselves. And I know we’re just as effective as the dodgy ad tech crowd, maybe even more effective, since I’m seeing an average clickthrough ratio of 0·3 per cent across our sites (one agency I spoke to yesterday cites 0·2 per cent as the average they see, and we’re talking about professional creative). Looking at the 11 individual companies currently entrusting us with their ads, four fall below this and seven are above. Of the ones above, the ratios are between 0·36 per cent and 1·86 per cent.
Sadly, I can’t find a web version of Bob’s latest newsletters, but you can subscribe here.
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