NEWSLETTER #85/ October 1, 2017
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CREEPS AND CRIMINALS
In today's newsletter we're going to take a short stroll through just one week's news about the creeps and criminals who infest the world of online advertising and media.
We'll start in France. Under the EU's data protection law, every citizen is entitled to have access to the personal data that has been collected about him or her. Although no one ever does so, the writer of an article in The Guardian decided to try.
She enlisted the help of a privacy activist and a human rights lawyer and petitioned Tinder for a copy of the files they had on her. The result was astounding. She got back 800 pages of information they had collected - that's about the equivalent of War And Peace.
From the article...
...“I am horrified but absolutely not surprised by this amount of data,” said Olivier Keyes, a data scientist at the University of Washington. “Every app you use regularly on your phone owns the same [kinds of information]. Facebook has thousands of pages about you!”
You can and should read the entire article here.
Organized Slime
Next we'll move to the UK where the Financial Times warned advertisers that they had found bogus websites pretending to be the Financial Times website on 10 different ad exchanges and "video ads on 15 exchanges, even though the FT doesn’t even sell video ads programmatically." You can read about it here.
“The scale of the fraud we found is jaw-dropping,” said Anthony Hitchings, the FT’s digital advertising operations director. “The industry continues to waste marketing budgets on what is essentially organized crime.”
Critical Of Criteo
Criteo is a very large retargeting company. They're the people who direct non-stop ads at you after you visit a site. So if you look at sneakers online they send you sneaker ads for the next 100 years.
A report by Gotham City Research that you can read about here claims that...
-Over 50 per cent of Criteo’s revenues originate from suspect sources (e.g. clickbots, fake/low quality web sites, etc)
-Criteo takes credit for clients’ sales it did not contribute to and, in some cases, that never actually occurred
Gotham City are apparently notorious short-sellers and I would not put much faith in their claims -- however, according to the article the claims seem to be based on a report by Method Media Intelligence, a company I greatly trust run by ad fraud researcher Shailin Dhar. Somehow Gotham seems to have gotten hold of a private report about Criteo that MMI did for one of its clients.
Facebook Playing Games
Despite being one of the largest media companies in the history of the world, the great game Facebook plays is pretending they are not a media company. They claim they are just an online bulletin board where users put up content that they can't control. This is their legal defense for escaping responsibility for what they publish.
Legally, a media company, like a TV or radio station, has to ascertain where a political message comes from ("I'm Bob Hoffman and I approved this message") and make sure it is identified as such. Not Facebook. This is why Russian propagandists were reportedly able to use FB to game the 2016 election.
Facebook's squalid assertions notwithstanding, the public is apparently not buying their story. According to research reported in The Seattle Times, "..78 percent of people said they want Facebook to prevent inaccurate stories from being widely shared on its platform."
AdvertisingMeek
Last week was the annual AdvertisingWeek 5-day festival of self-promotion in NYC. They had presentations and panels about every hackneyed marketing subject you can imagine. The one subject they never seemed to address was the most important and dangerous subject the ad industry faces -- the three-headed monster of tracking, surveillance marketing, and ad tech. If you're wondering why they didn't touch it, have a look at the sponsors... (h/t Patrick Coffee)
New News
My recent talks in Australia are still getting some ink. Here are links to stories that ran this week:
- MediaWeek devoted a large TV segment here (scroll down a little.)
- In Australia's largest newspaper, The Australian here (may be behind a paywall.)
- Excellent interview on AdNews podcast here.
- ICYMI, video interview with Mumbrella (largest trade website) here.
A Hit On Our Hands
The "BadMen" ebook was released this week and cracked the top 10 best sellers in both categories Amazon has it listed in. Big thanks to everyone who downloaded it. There's a very flattering review here. You can download the book now for only $2.99 here. Hurry before they run out of pixels.
