NEWSLETTER #172/ August 11, 2019 No Images? Click here THE NIGHTMARE AROUND THE CORNER This week I watched The Great Hack on Netflix. It is the horrifying story of how Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, and other data abusers have dangerously undermined important principles of democratic societies. It is a perfect companion piece to PBS's "The Facebook Dilemma." I urge you to watch them both. There's only one problem. In both cases they let our industry off the hook. The villains in both these documentaries are cast as the collectors and weaponizers of massive amounts of personal, private information that is collected, stolen, shared, and sold 24-hours a day without our knowledge or permission. The people who get off scot-free in both documentaries are us -- the puppet-masters. The advertising and marketing industries are the ones behind the scenes financing and encouraging all this unconscionable spying activity. Ninety-nine percent of Facebook's revenue comes from advertisers. It is for our benefit that the abuse of privacy has metastasized to the point at which democracy may soon be facing an existential crisis. We really need to do something before it's too late, The "leadership" of our industry -- the ANA and 4A's and IAB -- have proven themselves to be utterly incapable of even understanding what's at stake. We need to throw these incompetents out and identify some people who comprehend what's going on, understand the consequences of our activities, and have the balls to do something about it. The stakes are too high for us to continue on the path we're on. Facebook vs FBI "You know it's going to wind up in governmental hands because governments are brilliant at inventing crises at which they need to take extraordinary measures, which means gather all the information from all the marketers and find out exactly who we are and what we're doing and who we're talking to. You know the day is going to happen that that's going to come. It always does." But who had any idea that it would happen so soon? Right on cue this week, The Wall Street Journal had a front page story about how the FBI is trying to raid Facebook and other social media platforms for their "data." According to the Journal, "The Federal Bureau of Investigation is soliciting proposals from outside vendors for a contract to pull vast quantities of public data from Facebook, Twitter ...and other social media 'to proactively identify and reactively monitor threats to the United States and its interests.' ” And here's the laugh line: The Journal reports that the FBI says, "it believes the data can be collected 'while ensuring all privacy and civil liberties compliance requirements are met.'" Yes, that's coffee coming out of my nose. And Speaking of Slime... The complaint alleged that the IAB's "Transparency and Consent Framework" is total bullshit (well, they didn't use that exact word) and is not compliant with the GDPR. Since then, the Data Protection Commission has on several occasions attempted to get a response from the IAB. The IAB refuses to reply. As Dr Johnny says, "It is now clear the advertising industry cannot rely on IAB Europe for GDPR guidance...IAB Europe's own website infringes the GDPR...and it refuses to answer formal contacts from GDPR regulators." The Irish Data Protection Commission will now hand this issue off to the Belgian Data Protection Commission which has authority to compel answers from the IAB. Meanwhile Real Time Bidding (RTB), a second issue of contention between the IAB and privacy advocates, is under attack. RTB is one of the foundational practices of adtech in which data about individuals is strewn all over the web billions of times a day. Recently an investigation has been initiated to determine whether Google's DoubleClick ad exchange, which makes substantial use of RTB, is illegal. Trust me, it is. Video Report Card There's no doubt that cable companies are getting hammered and broadcast TV is losing viewers to new delivery systems. But traditional TV viewing is still huge. What these charts, formulated from Nielsen's Q1 2019 Total Media study show is that despite the growth of streaming, traditional viewing continues to totally dominate both television viewing and video viewing as a whole. The chart below, lifted from Nielsen's Q1, 2019 Total Media report shows that total video viewing dropped about 3% in Q1 compared to the same period last year. Nonetheless, on average, American adults spent over 5 1/2 hours a day watching video, 4 1/2 of those hours were with traditional broadcast television. For another perspective, Comcast says that the average US household watches about 6 1/2 hours of broadcast TV a day, including live and on-demand. They also claim that average household viewing across their customer base increased 20 minutes/day in the past year. Oh, and by the way Ms Marketer, if you want to know what accounts for the continued growth of time spent on the web, it's simple. Three of the ten most visited web sites in the US are porn sites... Next time you're at a marketing conference and some genius wows you with stats about time spent online, ask him how significantly that time would decrease if it was adjusted for porn. Language Meant To Confuse, Not Clarify The San Francisco Board of Supervisors is one of the world’s great clown shows. This week they passed a resolution intended to re-invent language about criminals because “negative predispositions associated with justice-involved individuals create societal stigmas, attitudinal barriers and continued negative stereotypes.” From now on they want convicted felons to be called “justice-involved persons” or “returning residents.” Parolees will be called “persons under supervision.” A juvenile delinquent will be a “young person impacted by the juvenile justice system.” And the victims of rape and murder? Maybe we should call them “individuals negatively impacted by justice-involved persons.” No, my friends, you can’t make this shit up. From the Great Walt Kraemer It would make a great t-shirt. gremlin@thekremlin Next stop on The Ad Contrarian Worldwide Annoyance Tour is Moscow where I'll be speaking to their National Advertising Alliance in early September. More news on this and other autumnal yakking in upcoming weeks. By the way, what does it say about the integrity of our industry that I've been invited to speak in Moscow but unceremoniously cancelled from the ANA's official podcast? Not that they've got anything to hide... |