Writing for Fast Company, Richard Stokes, a reformed advertising executive now running a privacy consultancy, explained why he left the digital advertising industry (link).
It's about the broken contract between advertisers and consumers - with "adtech" guilty of causing the split. Here's the key paragraph:
Advertising had ceased to be about connecting with consumers—it was now about finding novel ways of extracting evermore personal information from computers, phones, and smart homes. To many of the most powerful and profitable companies in the world, we are the products, and the services we all use are just afterthoughts they put out to keep us hooked. And the rest of the ad industry, which depends on their data to compete, has no choice but to go along with whatever whims and changes come their way.
It's sad but true that "the services we all use are just afterthoughts". Google, Facebook, Yelp, etc. make it impossible for users to contact them in any channel. They justify these policies because users aren't paying them, only advertisers do.
The latest fracas around hate speech and bullying on Youtube underlines this point: even as management accepted that the Youtuber violated community standards, they deemed the appropriate penalty to be "de-monetize," i.e. disallow the Youtuber from making money off advertisements in those videos -- instead of removing the offensive clips. The almighty advertising dollar: that's their paramount concern.
Richard proposes several steps to rebuild trust:
- Obtain consent before collecting and sharing data
- Stop refusing service if user does not consent
- Provide full disclosure of where the data go
- Never collect certain types of data, such as health-related, location-related
This list has some overlaps with my list of 7 Principles of Responsible Data Collection (link).
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For those in New York, Principal Analytics Prep is hosting an interactive workshop next Tuesday on digital ad fraud "hunting". Augustine Fou, an independent researcher on ad fraud, will lead the session and we'll use analytics to find fraud in advertising data.
To register for the workshop, go to our Meetup page.
To apply for our Summer 2019 bootcamp, go here.
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