#275/ FEB 20, 2022

GOOGLE CON GAME: THE SEQUEL.

For those with short memories, in January of 2020 Google promised it would phase out third-party cookies. "People shouldn’t have to accept being tracked across the web..." said Google's Director of Product Management, Ads Privacy and Trust -- Privacy?...Trust? ...Google?...is this a joke?

Well, surprise!, it turns out Mr. Trust was was not so trustworthy. Within months they changed their mind and called a do-over. In golf that's called a Mulligan. In business it's called a lie. It turns out that people do have to accept being tracked across the web.

This week, Google management went back to their three-card monte playbook and announced that they are going to end the current practice of allowing tracking of individuals across apps using their Android mobile operating system. When are they going to do this? Um...well, uh...sometime. Well, maybe sometime but definitely not in the next two years. But don't worry... sometime.

This horseshit got nice headlines and commentary in the pathetic advertising trade press (a wholly-owned subsidiary of AlphaGooMetaFace) and even received favorable coverage in major news outlets. The NYTimes wrote, "Google Plans Privacy Changes, but Promises to Not Be Disruptive."

Of course, spokesquids in the adtech industry were all hyperventilating about how thoughtful and sensitive Google is to their needs. These guys know mealy-mouth bullshit when they see it, and this was definitely their flavor of mealy-mouth bullshit.

In their new Android "privacy initiative" Google is promising absolutely nothing except to continue their policies that enable the disreputable and illegal tracking of people across apps for at least two more years.

In Google world, respecting privacy is always going to be awesome some day. It's just never any good right now.

You might ask why agencies are so enthusiastic about using celebrities in Super Bowl ads. Here are a few reasons:

1. A celebrity is easier to find than an idea.
Don't kid yourself, making good advertising is really fucking hard. I know. I spent 40 years trying to do it -- mostly unsuccessfully. When it's Super Bowl time and your back is against the wall and you need to come up with something good... well, a celebrity can take something crappy and make it appear like an idea. You just reference the celebrity's personality and go against the grain and you have something that, to the untrained eye, appears creative.

2. Your client will think you're "thinking big."
To most CMOs and brand managers the most important audience is not the 100 million people watching on TV, it's the CEO and his/her pals. CEOs are famous star-fuckers. Give CEOs a platform for telling their pals some insider dirt about what a jerk/great guy/lush/hot piece/idiot/stoner (CELEBRITY NAME GOES HERE) is, well, you've got yourself some big-time equity.

3. Celebrities bring stuff to the party.
Big names often have ideas of their own, plus teams of writers, directors, etc who come along for the ride. Sometimes these people are a huge pain in the ass, but sometimes they have ideas that are a lot better than yours.

4. Celebrities give your spot that "Super Bowl" feelin'.
Take a dumb idea and stick a movie/rap/pop/TV star in it, and you have what appears to be Super Bowl level advertising. It may suck, but it sucks Super Bowl-style.

So, what kind of outcomes did the use of all these celebrities produce for advertisers this year?

- According to one measure 2/3 of the spots performed no better than run-of-the-mill, everyday TV spots. It cost a lot of companies a lot of money this year to be average.

- Three years from now the one spot we will all remember had no celebrities. In fact, it had no people. It was the one with the floating QR code. The only problem: no one outside the marketing industry knows what the hell it was for.

Like I said, making good advertising is really fucking hard.

This is important here in the states because the GDPR framework is what the California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA) is based on. Most of the big tech companies are based in CA and are supposed to abide by it. So CCPA is as close to a proxy for a national regulation as we have.

The IAB Europe, whose idiotic “Transparency & Consent Framework” (TCF) was the basis for consent pop-ups, has been given six months to come up with a legal way to comply with GDPR. It is my opinion that under the current programmatic advertising model this is impossible.

Programmatic advertising relies on real-time bidding (RTB) as its underlying engine. RTB spews private personal information about us all over the web hundreds of billions of times a day. How this can ever be reconciled with the privacy requirements of GDPR is beyond me.

Hey, you need legal advice? Ask a blogweasel.

Smith's point is that the great number of "passive" consumers of social media are far more important to you than the tiny number of "engaged" ones.

Some excerpts from Smith's piece:
     - According to the Nielsen Norman Group "90% of (social media) users are lurkers who never contribute; 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action."
     - On Twitter, 25% of users in the US produce 97% of all tweets. And of these, only 14% were original tweets. The rest were mostly retweets (49%).
     - On LinkedIn, less than 5% of users ever post anything.
     - Echobox estimates that "average click-through rates for major media Facebook content were around 2.5%." And if you believe Dr Augustine Fou (which I do,) high CTRs are not evidence of more effectiveness, they're usually evidence of more fraud.
     - Jerry Daykin, Senior Media Director for GSK says in "Eat Your Greens" (a wonderful book that your favorite blogweasel contributed to) "It is still commonplace for marketers to focus on improving their engagement as a key performance indicator of their social campaigns. Not only is this something of a wild goose chase, it’s also potentially actually quite a bad idea..."

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