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The Persuader
My personal blog, started in 2006. No paid or guest posts, no link sales.
Posts tagged ‘targeting’
05.05.2021
‘We can’t level, you crazy bastard, we’re in advertising!’âPaul Reiser as Stephen Bachman, in Crazy People (1990)

Signal
You can run ads with misinformation, and you can launch bot nets of thousands of accounts, but what canât you do on Facebook? Buy ads that expose their tools with which you have bought their ads.
Thatâs exactly what happened to Signal when it attempted to run ads on Instagram that illustrated the targeting.
I donât believe thereâs anything in their T&Cs that disallow this, but Facebook has never been about those. You can breach them as much as you like with running scripts and creating bots, after all. One bastard streamed a massacre on March 15, 2019, which was accessible for some time afterwards; and a year later, eight copies were still on the platform. Facebook âenforcesâ what it wants to, and that includes disabling accounts that show just how invasive they are.
Iâve already had a taste of this after I began deleting my ad preferences and exposing how terrible they were. And they probably didnât like my pointing out that they were collecting those preferences long after I had opted out of their ad targeting (at a time when their own site suggested that opting out meant just that). Now that feature is gone for me.
Itâs what Facebook does. It lies, and even uses those lies to plant software on your computers that never show up in your programsâ list. And, like Google, the timing of when ad accounts are disabled is interesting: it’s not the first time this took place right after you do something that reveals some hard truths about them.
Personally, I believe Facebookâs preferences are a joke, so Signal may have found their ad account cancelled not because they reminded everyone that the conjurer had a trick, but just how lousy the trick really was. Imagine getting one of these ads and thinking, âThat ainât me at all.â That would get certain Facebook advertisers thinking twiceâthat is, those who give Facebookâs many bots a pass, and donât mind that Instagram is 45 per cent bot, 55 per cent human, and donât mind that their demographic estimates have no basis in reality. I mean, weâre already talking quite a gullible bunch who are doing an activity thatâs marginally above setting fire to banknotes in terms of monetary utility, or donating to Jeb Bushâs presidential tilt in 2016.
Facebook wants to keep as many of them as possible, and theyâre taking no chances. You just never know where the tipping point is, when the masses finally decide to jump ship.
Tags: 2021, advertising, bot, deception, Facebook, film, Instagram, New Zealand, privacy, Signal, targeting, technology, USA, Vivaldi Posted in business, internet, marketing, New Zealand, technology, USA | No Comments »
15.11.2019
Facebookâs 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 Iâve been telling people that they can delete their interests from Facebook if theyâre uncomfortable with the targeting, since Facebook gathers these interests even when you have opted out of targeted ads. Now, you canât. If youâre on the desktop, Facebook just wonât show them to you. You can have this window open for hours for nothing to appear (and yes, I have tried regularly).

Maybe you donât have any, Jack? You just said you deleted them. Fact: I do have them, except they are only visible on the cellphoneâand as usual theyâre not that accurate. However, on the cellphone, these cannot be deleted or edited in any way.

I also have a set of different ones if I export my Facebook data, but that’s another story.
And remember when I said I opted out of alcohol ads, yet I still see plenty, especially from Heineken, which has even uploaded my email and private information to Facebook without my permission, and refuses to respond? (I may have to get the Privacy Commissioner to intervene again.) Facebook does say that opting out doesnât necessarily work. In which case, you have to wonder why on earth the feature is thereâregardless of what you toggle, Facebook does what it wants. Even Google doesnât get this bad.
Remember: Facebook offers you features, but they donât necessarily work.
And advertisers: Facebookâs audience estimates, by their own admission, have no bearing on the real population, and there is no third-party auditing. Even if you tailor your promotions, thereâs no guarantee theyâre even reaching the people you want. My interests are certainly incorrectânot that I can do anything about it so you donât waste your money. Now multiply that by hundreds of millions of users.
Tags: 2010s, 2019, advertising, cellphone, deception, Facebook, Heineken, privacy, targeting, USA Posted in business, internet, technology, USA | 2 Comments »
01.06.2018

Thereâs a rumour circulating that Fiat (specifically, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, or FCA) will kill the Chrysler marque today.
The range currently consists of two models: the ageing 300 and the relatively fresh Pacifica.
It seems to be another step in the mismanagement of car marques, especially US ones, something I wrote about many years ago when Condé Nast Portfolio was still running. (Note: it was a published letter to the editor, not an article.)
Marques do disappear, but when the wrong ones get killed off, long-term it leaves the company in a weaker state.
DaimlerChrysler found that out in the early 2000s when it decided Plymouth was surplus to requirements. Suddenly, its entry-level budget brand was goneâa very bad move when the recession hit later that decade. Plymouth had been conceived as a low-priced line that kept Chrysler afloat during the Depression.
DaimlerChrysler then found itself having to sell Plymouth products under the Chrysler marque, which was traditionally the priciest between Plymouth, Dodge and Chrysler.
Todayâs Chrysler resembles, at least in market ambition, the one of old, where it offers reasonably good quality vehicles, with Plymouth a distant memory.
It also offers Fiat a relatively premium brand in the US market. Itâs not Jeep, Ram or Dodge, all of which have very different brands, messages and brand equity.
The fact it is light on product could have been solved long ago if Fiat had adopted the sort of platform-sharing that is now commonplace in the car worldâyou only have to look at Volkswagen and the RenaultâNissan Alliance, now Renault Nissan Mitsubishi. Even Jaguar Land Rover is realizing economies of scale with Jaguar SUVs and a car-like Range Rover (the Velar).
While Chrysler found that the 200 had flopped, there was always room for a premium, American SUV to take over from the Aspen, for example. If Jeep can build SUVs on Punto and Giulietta platforms, why couldnât Chrysler, aimed at very different buyers?
The truth is that Fiat has a very confusing platform strategy, something I alluded to in earlier posts both here and in Drivetribe, and there appear to be no signs of bringing any harmony to the mess.
The firm hasnât been properly merged, and not enough thought has been given to reducing platforms, and sharing them between marques. Thereâs more in common on this front between Fiat and British Leyland than between Fiat and Volkswagen, which it once vied with to be Europeâs number-one.
The domestic range has cars on platforms shared with Ford, Chrysler and GM, not to mention OEM vehicles from Mazda, Mitsubishi and Peugeot. I might not love SUVs, but the public does, and the Fiat range is light on them. Thereâs not enough of a global effort, either: the Ottimo and Viaggio are Italian-styled, based on the Alfa Romeo Giulietta (or more specifically the Dodge Dart), and they are only sold in Chinaâa ridiculous situation when Fiat doesnât have a CD-segment saloon in any other market. The rationalization of the range in South America has helped, with the Argo and Cronos streamlining a confusing array of Palio, Linea, Siena and Grand Siena models, but they bear little resemblance to the models on offer in Europe.
Lancia, which had benefited from Fiat platforms, is practically dead, its 500-based, Polish-made Ypsilon being deleted this year. As models at Lancia died out, they were not replaced. Yet things could have been so much better, had Fiat allowed Lancia the sort of freedom it needed to sell Italian luxury and innovation. Those values are different from Alfa Romeoâs, yet through its conduct, Fiat seems to think that if Alfa and Lancia have similar prices, then they must vie for similar buyers. They never did. It seems to believe that costs will be saved through axing marques and model lines, which can be true in some casesâbut those cases tend to presume that what remains, or what replaces them, is stronger.
Iâm not being a Luddite or pining for the âgood old daysâ when it comes to Chrysler. I hold no romantic notions for the brand. But I do know that once theyâre gone, the firm doesnât necessarily find its resources are freed up to pursue surviving lines. It finds that itâs lost a segment that it once fielded.
Itâs sadder to realize that Chrysler, as a group, was much stronger in the early 1990s, with record development times and good platform-sharing. Plymouth was in the process of developing its own identityâthe PT Cruiser and Prowler heralded a new retromodern design language that was to spread throughout the range, while utilizing the same platforms as Chryslers and Dodges.
Fiat itself, too, was a strong company at this same period, riding high on great styling, with a reinvigorated line-up. Think Bravo, Brava, Barchetta, Coupé Fiat, 456, Quattroporte, Delta, Dedra, Kappa, 145, 146, GTV and Spider. A lot of these vehicles were talked-about, and considered some of the most stylish in Europe.
Last year, in Europe, luxury marques Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi all outsold Fiat, supposedly a mass-market brand. Its market share in Italy and Brazil, traditionally places where it was strong, has continued to dip.
In the US, itâs the same story, with Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi all outselling Chrysler both last year and year-to-date.
Itâs all very romantic, and good press, to show off premium Alfa Romeos and Maseratis, or money-making Jeeps, but many of these models donât donate any of their architecture to Fiatâs troubled brands.
In 2018, when you see that certain Fiat marques arenât getting access to platforms, you have to wonder whyâespecially when so many other big players donât place such restrictions on their brands.
A new 500 and Panda might be around the corner, but weâll need to see far more logic applied to the business, especially with Alfaâs Mito and Giulietta looking more dated, Fiatâs range in a mess, and Chrysler barely making an effort in China, a market where its sort of positioning would have attracted luxury-conscious buyers who might prefer foreign brands, such as Buick.
Even if Chrysler gets a stay of execution, Sergio Marchionneâs successor will have a very tough job ahead.
Tags: 2018, Autocade, branding, car industry, Chrysler, FCA, Fiat, history, marketing, targeting Posted in branding, business, cars, China, marketing, USA | No Comments »
14.04.2018

Beyond all that had gone on with AIQ and Cambridge Analytica, a lot more has come out about Facebookâs 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 whatever Cambridge Analytica did, Facebook itself does far, far more, and not just to 87 million people, but all of its users (thatâs either 2,000 million if you believe Facebookâs figures, or around half that if you believe my theories), using its FBLearner Flow program.
Biddle writes (link in original):
This isnât Facebook showing you Chevy ads because youâve been reading about Ford all week â old hat in the online marketing world â rather Facebook using facts of your life to predict that in the near future, youâre going to get sick of your car. Facebookâs name for this service: âloyalty prediction.â
Spiritually, Facebookâs artificial intelligence advertising has a lot in common with political consultancy Cambridge Analyticaâs controversial âpsychographicâ profiling of voters, which uses mundane consumer demographics (what youâre interested in, where you live) to predict political action. But unlike Cambridge Analytica and its peers, who must content themselves with whatever data they can extract from Facebookâs public interfaces, Facebook is sitting on the motherlode, with unfettered access to staggering databases of behavior and preferences. A 2016 ProPublica report found some 29,000 different criteria for each individual Facebook user âŠ
⊠Cambridge Analytica begins to resemble Facebookâs smaller, less ambitious sibling.
As Iâve said many times, Iâve no problem with Facebook making money, or even using AI for that matter, as long as it does so honestly, and I would hope that people would take as a given that we expect that it does so ethically. If a user (like me) has opted out of ad preferences because I took the time many years ago to check my settings, and return to the page regularly to make sure Facebook hasnât altered them (as it often does), then I expect them to be respected (my investigations show that they arenât). Sure, show me ads to pay the bills, but not ones that are tied to preferences that you collect that I gave you no permission to collect. As far as I know, the ad networks we work with respect these rules if readers had opted out at aboutads.info and the EU equivalent.
Regulating Facebook mightnât be that bad an idea if thereâs no punishment to these guys essentially breaking basic consumer laws (as I know them to be here) as well as the codes of conduct they sign up to with industry bodies in their country. As I said of Google in 2011: if the other 60-plus members of the Network Advertising Initiative can create cookies that respect the rules, why canât Google? Here we are again, except the main player breaking the rules is Facebook, and the data they have on us is far more precise than some Google cookies.
Coming back to Biddleâs story, he sums up the company as a âdata wholesaler, period.â The 29,000 criteria per user claim is very easy to believe for those of us who have popped into Facebook ad preferences and found thousands of items collected about us, even after opting out. We also know that the Facebook data download shows an entirely different set of preferences, which means either the ad preference page is lying or the download is lying. In either case, those preferences are being used, manipulated and sold.
Transparency can help Facebook through this crisis, yet all we saw from CEO Mark Zuckerberg was more obfuscation and feigned ignorance at the Senate and Congress. This exchange last week between Rep. Anna Eshoo of Palo Alto and Zuckerberg was a good example:
Eshoo: It was. Are you willing to change your business model in the interest of protecting individual privacy?
Zuckerberg: Congresswoman, we have made and are continuing to make changes to reduce the amount of data âŠ
Eshoo: No, are you willing to change your business model in the interest of protecting individual privacy?
Zuckerberg: Congresswoman, I’m not sure what that means.
In other words, they want to preserve their business model and keep things exactly as they are, even if they are probably in violation of a 2011 US FTC decree.
The BBC World Service News had carried the hearings but, as far as I know, little made it on to the nightly TV here.
This is either down to the natural news cycle: when Christopher Wylie blew the whistle on Cambridge Analytica in The Observer, it was major news, and subsequent follow-ups havenât piqued the news editorsâ interest in the same way. Or, the media were only outraged as it connected to Trump and Brexit, and now that we know itâs exponentially more widespread, it doesnât matter as much.
Thereâs still hope that the social network can be a force for good, if Zuckerberg and co. are actually sincere about it. If Facebook has this technology, why employ it for evil? That may sound a naĂŻve question, but if you genuinely were there to better humankind (and not rate your female Harvard classmates on their looks) and you were sitting on a motherlode of user data, wouldnât you ensure that the platform were used to create greater harmony between people rather than sow discord and spur murder? Wouldnât you refrain from bragging that you have the ability to influence elections? The fact that Facebook doesnât, and continues to see us as units to be milked in the matrix, should worry us a great deal more than an 87 million-user data breach.
Tags: 2018, advertising, consumer behaviour, Facebook, industry, law, Mark Zuckerberg, marketing, media, online advertising, politics, privacy, targeting, The Observer, UK, USA Posted in business, internet, marketing, media, politics, technology, UK, USA | No Comments »
14.07.2012
I remember when Michael Wolff was very bullish about the internet in the 1990s, so when he starts sounding warning bells, we had better take heed.
The way Michael paints Facebookâand a belief that its advertising model will eventually collapse for being so limitedâis not unfamiliar to anyone who ever wondered, during the dot-com boom, just why those companies were worth that much.
If AltaVista, the world’s biggest website, could fall once someone (Google) figured out a better search model, then Facebook, with what Michael thinks is an ill-defined purpose, could suffer a similar fate.
Doc Searls picked out this bit from Michael’s article:
At the heart of the Internet business is one of the great business fallacies of our time: that the Web, with all its targeting abilities, can be a more efficient, and hence more profitable, advertising medium than traditional media. Facebook, with its 900 million users, valuation of around $100 billion, and the bulk of its business in traditional display advertising, is now at the heart of the heart of the fallacy.
The daily and stubborn reality for everybody building businesses on the strength of Web advertising is that the value of digital ads decreases every quarter, a consequence of their simultaneous ineffectiveness and efficiency. The nature of peopleâs behavior on the Web and of how they interact with advertising, as well as the character of those ads themselves and their inability to command real attention, has meant a marked decline in advertisingâs impact.
Consequently, Facebook will face ever-decreasing advertising prices as it plateaus, and it will need to either reinvent itself or define itself more properly; or, possibly, even define itself more narrowly.
Doc makes some further points in his piece, saying that advertising that is so personal might actually be unwanted. And he’s right.
It all points to how brands need to engage, and that the shape of advertising, just as with branding, has changed markedly in the last 30 years. Whereas brands were topâdown, they are now informed more by audiences, and strategies adjusted to match. Advertising is the same: personalization can’t work because it’s still a topâdown process that disengages audiences. Facebookers have already taken exception to their own faces being used on advertisements within the social network, so personalization based on friends’ uptakes of a brand isn’t welcome by all, either, for the same reason: there was no engagement. An inhuman algorithm drove that, and one that didn’t necessarily have the consent of the parties involved. And even if advertising were still topâdown, for people who advertise using the service, how many truly know what their target audiences are, to that professional degree?
Based on this, Facebook’s contribution to advertising is providing the platform for engagement, and letting advertisers discover who their target audiences are, to set the stage for greater understanding. It’s letting go of the idea of the hard sell, one that doesn’t really build brand equity anyway. Fan pages have been helpful, based on the ones I have run, but Facebook erred earlier this year by putting member comments into a box, whereas they should have equal prominence with official company updates. Minimizing the audience’s importance in favour of topâdown pronouncements goes against the way branding and marketing have developed, and the way advertising is evolving.
If Facebook sees itself as a means of creating topâdown marketing because of its sheer scale, then it is a step behind the gameâand it’s a means to nowhere.
Tags: 2010s, advertising, audience, branding, consumer behaviour, Doc Searls, engagement, Facebook, history, internet, Jack Yan, marketing, Michael Wolff, social media, social networking, targeting, USA Posted in branding, business, internet, marketing, technology, USA | 2 Comments »
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