NEWSLETTER #115 / May 20, 2018
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CHAOS IN ADLAND
This is the week the snow hits the fan in the online ad industry. On Friday the GDPR goes into effect in Europe. In anticipation, online advertisers, publishers, and ad tech companies are running in circles trying to figure out what the hell to do.
Everyone seems to have a different opinion of what the impact of the GDPR is going to be. Which is another way of saying that no one has a clue.
According to an article in Ad Age, at least 25% of American companies who do business in Europe say they either have no plan to be compliant with the GDPR or are not sure if they do. And these are just the ones who admit they're clueless.
Those who have a plan may not know if the plan is compliant until they get hit with fines from EU regulators. Fines can equal 4% of annual gross revenue.
A good indication of how ill-prepared most companies are can be inferred from the two who have the most skin in the game -- Facebook and Google. These two essentially own the medium of surveillance, oops I mean, internet advertising so what they can get away with is likely to set the tone for the rest of the rats and mice.
Facebook's policy is essentially, "agree to our terms or get out." To this international lawyer those terms are totally incompatible with the GDPR which clearly states that companies cannot make the use of their service contingent on users agreeing to be spied on.
How will EU regulators react to this? Who the hell knows?
Meanwhile Google has thousands of unhappy publishers on its hands because it has placed the burden and responsibility for getting user permission for data collection in the hands of the publishers if they want to use Google services.
Digital expert Dr. Johnny Ryan, Head of Ecosystem for PageFair, says, "It's all a game of chicken with regulators."
How's all this confusion going to shake out? We won't know until we see who's playing hardball and who's bluffing. (Self-Promotion Alert: Johnny Ryan and I will be speaking at the Norwegian Advertiser's Association conference on June 14th in Oslo.)
London Conference On BadMen
Speaking of conferences... on Friday this week Silence Media in London and the great Lee Henshaw will be hosting a conference "discussing themes from Bob Hoffman’s new book BadMen." From what I understand the conference is free but it's almost sold out. So if you want to attend or if you want more info, go here.
They have also produced a six-part podcast series based on the book. The first of the podcasts are now posted here.
Each episode features three media professionals and discusses a different topic from the book. So far it's pretty clear to me that most of the media experts on the podcasts have a broad and mature view of the issues...most of them.
By the way, it wouldn't kill you to buy the freaking book.
Falling Out Of Love?
These figures from Pivotal Research show a sharp decline in the amount of time people - across all age groups - spent on Facebook over a 6 month period ending in January. Of course, if this were television we'd be reading about how it's dying.
Right Hand, Meet Left Hand
Jake Needham is a successful writer of crime novels that very few in America know. Although he has sold hundreds of thousands of books worldwide, HK Magazine in Hong Kong says, "Surely Jake Needham must be the best known American writer almost nobody in America ever heard of."
Recently, Needham started receiving messages from Facebook imploring him to advertise on their site. He ignored the messages until one day he received something from them in which they had actually created an ad for his latest book. Needham thought the ad wasn't too bad. So he got out his credit card and laid down a few hundred bucks to see what the ad could do.
But, of course, nothing at Facebook is ever what it seems to be. Needham soon received a message from Facebook telling him that they wouldn't be running his ad.
Why? Because the ad they created didn't meet their advertising standards.
No, you can't make this shit up.
