The "Badtech Industrial Complex" was built on "surveillance marketing" which comes from the misguided notions of the long tail, hypertargeting, and behavioral targeting. Ad tech and supporting services were designed with a singular goal - to extract as much value as possible from the digital marketing supply chain.
A new balance is required for the future of the Internet.
APNIC Updates presented by Paul Wilson at CaribNOG 27
Good Publishers Will Save Digital Marketing v2019
1. January 2019 / Page 0marketing.scienceconsulting group, inc.
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Good Publishers
Will Save Digital
January 2019
Augustine Fou, PhD.
acfou [at] mktsci.com
212. 203 .7239
2. January 2019 / Page 1marketing.scienceconsulting group, inc.
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3. January 2019 / Page 2marketing.scienceconsulting group, inc.
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Good Publishers Don’t
Have a Fraud Problem
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Local TV websites - clean
Great consistency in the data over long periods of time
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Local radio websites - clean
Great consistency in the data over long periods of time
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Magazine websites - clean
Great consistency in the data over long periods of time
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Good Publishers Don’t
Have a Privacy Problem
8. January 2019 / Page 7marketing.scienceconsulting group, inc.
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1st Party … now “badtech”
“Then” 1995 “Now” 2015
Real human audiences who
came to your site – 1st party
“badtech” trackers hidden from
user, tracking w/o consent
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Audiences stolen by badtech
specialized audience:
oncologists
jco.ascopubs.org
specialized audience can
be targeted elsewhere
“cookie matching”
(by placing javascript on your site)
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Badtech Tax: 60-70% extracted
Source: WFA, April 2017
Source: ANA, May 2017
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hypertargeting
behavioral targeting
“Badtech” harms all parties
Good Publishers
(lower revenue, CPMs)
Consumers
(privacy violations)
Advertisers
(ad fraud, no outcomes)
Badtech
Industrial
Complex
Badtech
Industrial
Complex long tail sites
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What Needs to Change?
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Key points
The scourge of “surveillance marketing” must be solved
1. Consumers need “digital clothes” (Doc Searls) so they
can signal and enforce their own privacy needs
2. Publishers need to take back control, win back trust
of users, reduce dependency on current “badtech”
and grow revenues
3. Advertisers need to understand that the long tail,
hypertargeting, and behavioral targeting are all
myths that don’t drive business outcomes –
therefore, stop “surveillance marketing”
14. January 2019 / Page 13marketing.scienceconsulting group, inc.
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Scarcity … vs unlim fake ads
Infinite quantities of digital ads can be created on real or fake sites
Unlike real billboards that
people actually drive by in
the physical world …
Limitless quantities of digital
ads can be created on fake
sites that humans never visit.
15. January 2019 / Page 14marketing.scienceconsulting group, inc.
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Myth of the long tail
Most people visit sites they know most; occasionally long tail ones
“There are numerous pieces of research on how even as people
accumulate hundreds of TV channels, they only watch seven. It's rather
commonly accepted that in a sea of millions of mobile apps, most people
stick to half a dozen.” http://www.businessinsider.com/the-advertising-industry-has-been-living-a-lie-2017-10
16. January 2019 / Page 15marketing.scienceconsulting group, inc.
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Myth of Hypertargeting
After 3 parameters, the matching audience gets really tiny
Female Male
18-25 13-17 25-34 35-49 50+
1. gender
2. age range
3. geographic location
50%
10%
2%
100 params?
300 params?
Starting Audience 100%
?
?
% of AudienceTargeting parameters
17. January 2019 / Page 16marketing.scienceconsulting group, inc.
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Myth of behavioral targeting
Ad tech sold the idea of deriving intent from web history
Outdoor
enthusiast?Male? Female?
“This works on simplistic examples, like the above. But when the list of sites grows
longer and more diverse, the assumptions used to derive data points, even gender, are
going to be less and less accurate. In fact, a recent study of online identifiers determined
that over 80% of the records were designated as BOTH male and female.”
Source: Yeah, Your Data’s Screwed
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(2018) Lotame purges bot profiles
“[LOTAME] purged 400
million of its over 4
billion profiles after
identifying them as
bots or otherwise
fraudulent accounts.
Lotame CEO Andy
Monfried estimated
that 40 percent of all
web traffic is fictional.”
Adweek, Feb 2018
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Chase: -99% reach, no impact
“JPMorgan had already decided
last year to oversee its own
programmatic buying operation.
Advertisements for JPMorgan
Chase were appearing on about
400,000 websites a month. [But]
only 12,000, or 3 percent, led to
activity beyond an impression.
[Then, Chase] limited its display
ads to about 5,000 websites. We
haven’t seen any deterioration on
our performance metrics,” Ms.
Lemkau said.”
“99% reduction in ‘reach’ … Same Results.”
Source: NYTimes, March 29, 2017
(because it wasn’t real, human reach)
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P&G: cut $200M, no impact
“Once we got transparency, it
illuminated what reality was,” said
Mr. Pritchard. P&G then took matters
into its owns hands and voted with
its dollars, he said.”
“As we all chased the Holy Grail of
digital, self-included, we were
relinquishing too much control—
blinded by shiny objects,
overwhelmed by big data, and ceding
power to algorithms,” Mr. Pritchard
said.
Source: WSJ, March 2018
21. January 2019 / Page 20marketing.scienceconsulting group, inc.
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Human audiences are
scarce and valuable
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You get what you pay for ...
Low CPM sources result in
higher cost per human –
like 11X the cost.
Sources of different
quality send widely
different amounts of
humans to landing pages.
23. January 2019 / Page 22marketing.scienceconsulting group, inc.
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Good Publishers vs “Badtech”
Ad Exchange Good Publisher Take-Away
Left after
Fees
60% 100% When buyers buy direct from publisher, 100%
of every dollar goes towards “working media”
Not Bots 74%
(avg NHT 26%)
97%
(avg NHT 3%)
Not bots, but doesn’t necessarily mean
humans. Buy direct from good publishers,
rather than use fraud detection tech to clean
up afterward.
Viewable 41% 91% Viewability is generally much higher in good
pubs than sites that belong to exchanges.
Not Ad
Blocked
80%
(avg 20% blocked)
100% Good publishers don’t call ads when ad is
active. This is confirmed when measuring in-ad.
Confirmed
Humans
16% 61% Good publishers have real content that real
humans want to read; so they have human
audiences. Also bots can’t make money going
there.
Productivity
of Ads
2% 54%
Buying from good publishers means your
dollar goes at least 27X further than buying
from programmatic sources. This is BEFORE
targeting and ad effectiveness.
24. January 2019 / Page 23marketing.scienceconsulting group, inc.
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Better media = better outcomes
Measure
Ads
Measure
Arrivals
Measure
Conversions
346
1743
5
156
A
B
30X more human
conversion events
• More arrivals
• Better quality
more humans (blue)
good publishers
low-cost media,
ad exchanges
25. January 2019 / Page 24marketing.scienceconsulting group, inc.
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Widely different relative quality
Campaign 1
• Blue means humans
• Red means bots Campaign 2
“increase spend on sources driving more humans
(blue); reduce spend on sources with more bots (red)”
26. January 2019 / Page 25marketing.scienceconsulting group, inc.
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Display 4
2,036 humans
human conversion rate
More humans = more outcomes
Site Traffic Conversions
8,482 818
4,216 humans
5%
human conversion rate
14,539 193
225 humans
9%
human conversion rate
2,248 23
168 humans
5%
human conversion rate
1,527 9
Display 3
Display 2
Display 1
Humans
40%
27. January 2019 / Page 26marketing.scienceconsulting group, inc.
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How do you tell “good” from “other”?
Independent 3rd party certification provides trust and
assurance needed to distinguish good publishers from
other “sites that carry ads”
28. January 2019 / Page 27marketing.scienceconsulting group, inc.
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Never has there been a
bigger opportunity for
good publishers.
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How Do We Get There
from Here?
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Roadmap
privacy violating privacy protectingneutral
SafeBrowser NetSafe
“digital clothing” for consumers
to signal their privacy policy
1. Publishers minimize
3rd party trackers -
Confiant
2. Shift impressions
from exchange back
to site - IPCPricing
3. Deploy ad server -
Revive
User Data
Exchange?
TrendMD
“if we’ve defeated
surveillance marketing,
there’d be no need”
“surveillance marketing” CustomerCommons
1. “protect users” 2. “protect publishers”
“Publishers take back control;
earn consumers trust back”
3. “win over advertisers”
31. January 2019 / Page 30marketing.scienceconsulting group, inc.
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Consumers enforce own privacy
User privacy policy versus 100s of privacy policies from 100s of sites
HIDDEN – block everything and hide me (VPN On)
PROTECTED – block everything (trackers and ads)
GREEN – block trackers, allow ads from sites I trust
OFF – allow everything (trackers and ads)
See: http://customercommons.org/
32. January 2019 / Page 31marketing.scienceconsulting group, inc.
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Good publishers protect users
42 trackers
24.3s load time
8 trackers
1.3s load time
“minimize 3rd party javascript trackers on pages”
33. January 2019 / Page 32marketing.scienceconsulting group, inc.
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Good publishers protect advertisers
On-Site measurement,
bots are still coming
In-Ad measurement, bots
and data centers filtered
11% red
-9% (filtered GIVT
and data centers)
2% red
“Filter data center traffic and not call the ads”
34. January 2019 / Page 33marketing.scienceconsulting group, inc.
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“New Deal” – balances 3 parties
Good Publishers
(higher CPMs, revenue)
Consumers
(privacy respected)
Advertisers
(business outcomes)
35. January 2019 / Page 34marketing.scienceconsulting group, inc.
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About the Author
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Dr. Augustine Fou – Digital Marketer
2013
2014
Published slide decks and posts:
http://www.slideshare.net/augustinefou/presentations
https://www.linkedin.com/today/author/augustinefou
2016
2015
2017