Facebook’s advertising preferences are getting more useless by the day. Even a company as dodgy as Google has managed to keep its preference page working. Over the years I’ve been telling people that they can delete their interests from Facebook if they’re uncomfortable with the targeting, since Facebook gathers these interests even when you […]
Read More… from Facebook takes away user control over their own advertising preferences
People are waking up to the fact that online advertising isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. Last month, Bob Hoffman’s excellent The Ad Contrarian newsletter noted, ‘I 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, […]
Read More… from Big Tech and advertising: the con is being revealed
I would have loved to have seen this go to trial, but Facebook and the plaintiffs—a group of advertising agencies alleging they had been swindled by the social network—settled. Excerpted from The Hollywood Reporter, ‘The suit accused Facebook of acknowledging miscalculations in metrics upon press reports, but still not taking responsibility for the breadth […]
Remember Tumblr, the platform owned by Verizon that I left? I left because of Verizon’s policies, of placing their corporate agenda ahead of the users. I went to NewTumbl instead—a site that Tumblr users might not know about, since Verizon has ensured that searches for its competitor come up empty. I was […]
Read More… from Verizon’s continued hypocrisy borne of pettiness
Long before Mad Men, and before I got into branding in a big way, I had an interest in advertising. One of the greatest send-ups of the industry was the 1990 Dudley Moore starrer Crazy People, set in the advertising industry against a politically incorrect—actually, cruel and inaccurate—look at mental health. It’s one of those […]
Here’s a sure-fire way to lose readers and cost you ad revenue. It seems Haymarket’s Autocar (which I have been reading in print since 1980) wasn’t pleased about people using online ad blockers, so it created a warning. The trouble is I don’t use ad blockers. In fact, you can see a massive […]
Read More… from How to lose readers: accuse them of something they don’t or wouldn’t do
Megan McArdle’s excellent op–ed in The Washington Post, ‘A farewell to free journalism’, has been bookmarked on my phone for months. It’s a very good summary of where things are for digital media, and how the advent of Google and Facebook along with the democratization of the internet have reduced online advertising income to a […]
Read More… from Why paywalls are getting more prevalent; and The Guardian Weekly rethought
This post was originally going to be about Facebook lying. It still is, just not in the way originally conceived. Those who follow this blog know that, on Instagram, I get alcohol advertising. Alcohol is one of the categories you can restrict on Facebook. Instagram claims that it relies on your Facebook ad preferences […]
Read More… from More lies: Instagram’s separate (and now possibly secret) set of ad preferences
Either Mark Zuckerberg is woefully ignorant of what happens at his company or he lied during his testimony to US lawmakers last week. As reported by Chris Griffith in the Murdoch Press, Zuckerberg said, ‘Anyone can turn off and opt out of any data collection for ads, whether they use our services or not.’ […]
Beyond all that had gone on with AIQ and Cambridge Analytica, a lot more has come out about Facebook’s practices, things that I always suspected they do, for why else would they collect data on you even after you opted out? Now, Sam Biddle at The Intercept has written a piece that demonstrates that […]
Read More… from Cambridge Analytica is merely Facebook’s ‘smaller, less ambitious sibling’