NEWSLETTER #108 / April 1, 2018
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AD FRAUD OFF THE CHARTS
In one of the most imprudent announcements in years, the ANA (Association of National Advertisers) congratulated itself a while back on having achieved a 10% reduction in ad fraud in 2017.
"The fraud decline is particularly impressive recognizing that this is occurring when digital advertising spending is expected to increase by 10 percent or more."
According to their calculations, global ad fraud dropped from $7.2 billion in 2016 to $6.5 billion in 2017.
The ANA announced this despite unmistakable indications that ad fraud is growing ferociously and is completely out of control. Every reputable independent ad fraud expert I know peed their pants laughing at this bullshit. Now there's some serious data indicating how ludicrously delusional the ANA and the marketing industry are.
A new report released by Adobe last week indicated that actual losses to ad fraud may be 10 times the ANA's number. The Adobe study, reported in The Wall Street Journal, claims that...
"...about 28% of website traffic showed strong “non-human signals,” leading the company to believe that the traffic came from bots or click farms."
Using Adobe's 28% number and projecting this out over $237 billion in estimated online ad spending this year (WARNING: COPYWRITER MATH COMING UP) I calculate that online ad fraud may reach $66 billion in 2018. This is astonishing, even to an old hysteric like me.
And it may even be higher. The Adobe calculation is based on the signals that Adobe can detect. Since the fraudsters are always one step ahead, it is reasonable to assume that there is some undetected fraud. Praneet Sharma CTO of Method Media Intelligence says, "Avoiding detection will be the major obstacle that fraudsters will present."
According to another ad fraud expert, Dr. Augustine Fou, "No matter what you are hearing or reading about digital ad fraud, I can assure you it's actually worse than you think."
Ya know, ten billion here, ten billion there...it starts to add up.
ANA's Appalling Hypocrisy
I'm not finished with these ANA bozos...
After two weeks of wisely keeping their stupid mouths shut about the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica shit show, the ANA couldn't control themselves and issued a press release this week that was thrilling in its hypocrisy.
These are the people who lined up with the 4As and the IAB to kill the FCC's privacy regulations for broadband providers.
Listen to this horseshit...
"Our industry has a responsibility to strengthen consumers' fundamental rights to privacy" and "Transparency must be our industry's cornerstone principle"
Really? That's great. So, please Mr. P&G and Ms. Pepsi, since you are so committed to privacy and transparency, I would like to know...
- what data do you have on me?
- where I can find out what you're doing with it?
- I would like to know who you share it with and what they do with it?
- If it's not too much trouble, I'd also like to know who you are buying information about me from?
- And, by the way, are you selling any information about me?
Your commitment to pretending to care about privacy and transparency is very heartwarming. (See, I can lie, too!)
BTW, congratulations to the 4As. Despite their equally irresponsible stance on privacy and transparency they have the good sense to keep their mouths shut.
Parade Of Apologists
As in many businesses, Facebook is just the elongated shadow of the founder, Mark Zuckerberg. It's a bad shadow. Like many tech entrepreneurs he's 100% ambition and 0% responsibility. To get a sense of how clueless these FB people are, here is a statement leaked this week from a 2016 memo from a Facebook VP...
“Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And still we connect people. The ugly truth is that we believe in connecting people so deeply that anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good.”
Of course, now that the memo has gone public, the VP and Zuckerberg have disclaimed it. The Facebook management team is always amazingly principled after the fact.
Meanwhile, the online ad industry and the marketing industry are mounting a subtle excuse offensive for Facebook. As the outrage subsides, the apologists move in.
Soon all the air will go out of the Cambridge Analytica balloon and we'll move on to something else. Congress will do a whole lot of posturing and blowing hot air when the Creepy Zuckerberg Kid testifies but nothing will happen.
It's a good thing for consumers that the European Union is instituting the GDPR or data abuse would just go on forever.
The Last Word
This week the Pope declared that there is no hell. The great Sharon Krinsky doesn't agree: "Obviously, dude never presented creative to car dealers."
