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Tag Archive for advertising

Unnecessary Apology

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/10/15/amid-the-adblockalypse-advertisers-apologize-for-messing-up-the-web/

I think this may not be apology-worthy.  I mean, I can appreciate that the advertisers seem to have, essentially, shot themselves in the foot.  Sucking up bandwidth, chewing through the battery on mobile devices, ensuring that users are so darned sick of video ads that they are now willing to pay EXTRA for pop-up blockers, as opposed to having their browsing experience infringed upon.

Okay, yes, they may be apologizing to EACH OTHER, or maybe to new and upstart ad companies out there, but this overreach on their part is going to have broader ramifications.

More than a few science-fiction writers have given us a vision of the future in which branding and advertising pay for everything, where the primary currency becomes, in effect, the user’s attention-span.  Which has, ultimately, been the progression we have seen here on the internet (I happily pay of all kinds of things by letting ads play through).

But what this may herald is a shift in the way advertising handles things and that might mean that, in the future, our eyeballs might not be worth quite so much.

 

Don’t be evil…

 

facebookfollies

Image courtesy: http://rocksimage.com/facebook-logo-wallpaper-47298/

 

Why don’t we trust Facebook to “not be evil” the way we trust (or seem to trust) Google?  Is it an outreach thing?  Is the faceless wall of Google less intimidating than the faceless wall of Facebook?

And now, we have the breaking (or broken) news emerging that Facebook has been experimenting on it’s users by hilighting posts in a specific stripe (depressing or uplifting, shall we generously say) to see how the readers will react.  But this kind of data collection is not new.  Not really.  Advertising agencies have spent decades testing out how their ads make people feel, they test  to see if the picture with the guy in the blue short sells more cookies than the picture of the guy in the red short (if you get deep into ad-psych you’ll find they’ve tested race, hairstyle, clothing style, background, should the person own a dog or a cat, etc. etc).

We do this kind of A/B testing in mobile apps all the time.  Know why so many icons on your phone have smiley, happy bobbleheads on them, even if they’re not in the game?  Yep.  We tested for that.  You like faces.  Go figure.

So I am given to wonder how deep this kerfluffle with Facebook goes.  Is this just a spin tactic layered over some garden-variety testing to see how users react to ad placements?  Or is it genuinely the kind of emotional manipulation that the headlines are touting?