NEWSLETTER #159/ APRIL 21, 2019
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A BLOG WITH NO NAME
It's been a week of flying, speaking, jet lag, insomnia, and poisonous airline food. Consequently I have not been able to do a proper job on my weekly festival of whining. So here's what I've been able to serve up on short notice.
Perhaps the most frequent question I get is, "What is ad fraud and how do the fraudsters make money?" The answers to these questions are far too technical for a dumbass blogger and I usually give some idiotic answer that doesn't really explain anything.
So today I'm going to link you to three articles about ad fraud that do a better job of explaining it than I do. The first is about how there are basically two kinds of fraud. The second is about ad fraud in general. The third is more focused on mobile ad fraud and apps.
I hope these make sense to you (so you can explain them to me.)
The Epilogue
Someday when I have the energy I am going to write a second edition of BadMen. The story of online spying and privacy abuse has grown so much darker since I wrote the book. Meantime, later this week I'm going to add an epilogue to the original. Here it is...
Epilogue
As I write this, it has been almost two years since I published BadMen. The events of the past two years have been head-spinning. It seems that every week another scandal erupts around the abuse of privacy by the online advertising industry.
You may have noticed that the very first thing I wrote about in the opening paragraph of this book were the dangers of a company called Cambridge Analytica. When I published it in 2017, I could never have imagined that Cambridge Analytica would become the subject of the biggest news story of 2018.
And yet the abuse the public is suffering at the hands of the online ad industry has only gotten worse.
It would take another book to explain the lies and abuses of Facebook alone. But Facebook — and the rest of the online publishing industry — are not the only villains here. The advertising industry has been hiding behind Facebook’s skirts for too long. The unconscionable collection of personal, private information about each of us by the online publishing industry, browsers, and search engines is done at the behest of the ad industry. We are the hidden hand behind the abuse. It is for our benefit that this spying is conducted.
The excuse we use to justify our surveillance tactics is that it provides us with information on how to create “more relevant” advertising. As if more relevant advertising is one of society’s most urgent imperatives.
I’m sorry, that’s not good enough. In a democratic society, the privacy rights of individuals are far more important than the convenience of marketers.
Bob Hoffman
April, 2019
Odds & Ends
- Are you sick of A.I. babble yet? Good, me too. I wrote a blog piece about it earlier this week. Here it is.
- There's just no excuse for letting seven days go by without dumping on Facebook. So here are our Facebook Outrages of the Week. First, from the Wall Street Journal, here's "Facebook’s Scandal of Fake Celebrity Ads." And then courtesy of NBC we have Zuckerberg caught red-handed.
- After horrifying Easter violence, Sri Lanka shuts down social media.
- I was interviewed recently about my thoughts on copywriting and the state of the ad industry by The Copywriter Club. You can catch it on their podcast here.
- And a word of thanks to my hosts at AMIN and Eesti Ekspress this week. Two great events half a world apart.
