Don't Fear the Boogeyman - Ads have always been about information you should parse

There's a recent Opinion piece in the New York Times that further perpetuates myths about digital marketing that should have been debunked years ago.   

I disagree strongly with this article. And except for select parts, it could have been written 20 years ago.  I started working in the ad tech industry in 2000 at Mediaplex. As far as I know, we were the first people to come up with behavioral targeting, though being on the buy side rather than the sell side, we could only use it to select creative rather than the advertiser. I left in 2014, when it had frankly become mechanical and boring rather than an innovative frontier.

 

First of all, advertising in concept is no different from what it's always been. Advertisers try to reach interested buyers, or in the best case, create interest by showing ads to people they hope are interested.  People try to be clever and scare you by saying, "You aren't the customer, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT!"  As if we weren't ALWAYS the product!  The idea that they target people with certain preference or lifestyle choices is not new. Sports sections have always run stamina and baldness ads. The audience at Harper's Bazaar is different from the one at Field and Stream. This has *always* been a profiling game. 

 

Second, ads have always included advertisers who are misleading or exaggerated. "Buyer beware" is part of the deal. We all know this. Despite that, I have been very happy with online-ad driven purchases that have alerted me to concerts I want to see as well as some products like the Grateful Dead metal logo that is now on my new car, or a free custom photo book that they usually charge $150 for but wanted me to try them out.

 

Third, and this is the one that people really don't want to admit, is that advertising is the tool that provides free content. Ads always paid most of the freight for newspapers and magazines. It was less obvious when it was a subsidy, and you still had to pay a subscription price. But the reason newspapers are dying isn't because you can read the news for free. It's because Craigslist and the like absolutely killed the value of want ads. It's another unintended consequence of the Internet, and Craigslist does no banner ads or targeting.

 

People have grown up with the Internet thinking that reading anything you want or using Google Maps or having an email address are all free because the Internet is a technology that makes them free. That is a COMPLETE LIE people like to tell themselves. Those things are free BECAUSE someone else is willing to pay for them. And those people are advertisers. 

 

People complain about compromised privacy, but if you make access to content "Free" if they'll only surrender some, they can't wait to click "Yes." We saw the same thing 30 years ago when people would give their personal information to anyone who would give them airline miles.

 

The true downside risk of the industry to society are these:

 

1) Advertisers are happy to target ads at stupid people because their money is just as green. Technology gives them greater ability to find the bigger fool.

 

2) The same technology can be used to manipulate the spread of fake news to the audience that wants to eat it up. Stupid people again... see point #1.

 

3) The technology only stops short of knowing people's actual identities with names by convention and compliance. There is the possibility of bad actors looking to do more than just sell products or swing an election. THIS is something worth focusing on.

 

If you're a teacher, fireman, or musician and you meet someone who asks you what you do for a living, it's easy to have a conversation about that. 20 years ago, when I told people I worked in Internet Advertising, they'd have one question before the conversation died: "So are you responsible for those annoying pop-up ads?" 35 years ago if I told them I wrote software for the phone bills, their one question would be, "Can you give me free phone calls?"

 

At this point, I have little sympathy for the fears of people who are suddenly freaked about what a big threat digital marketing is to the fabric of society. My own wife tried to use a Netflix special to claim more expertise than me in this area a few years ago and I asked her if she even understood what I did for a living for 15 years. Because I sure understand a lot more about what the psychotherapist experience is after being married to her for 20.