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ng content experience has taught the algorithms that the more juicy the material the more likely they are to retain the visitor consequently the algorithms feed us incrementally more lurid notions of our own predispositions and connect us ever more closely with others who share them in may 2020 the wall street journal reported that after the presidential election of 2016 a team of facebook executives undertook an internal study to understand how its policies shaped the behaviour of its users the study concluded that algorithms they use to gain user attention and increase time on the platform were driving people apart according to the report 64 of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools our recommendation systems grow the problem a slide from the presentation said our algorithms exploit the human brain s attraction to divisiveness if left unchecked it warned facebook would feed users more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention and increase time on the platform according to the wsj story facebook is under fire for making the world more divided many of its own experts appeared to agree and to believe facebook could mitigate many of the problems the company chose not to this report revealed the truth that facebook and friends are more than a bulletin board where people express their opinions it unambiguously describes the way these platforms actively direct people into extremist groups whose purpose is to divide us but there s more to this story we need to be honest with ourselves for years we have been hiding behind the skirts of facebook and other online platforms while these companies have taken the heat it has been largely unrecognised by the public that it is for the sole benefit of the advertising and marketing industry that facebook and others do their squalid work we are the hidden hand that guides and finances these dangerous practices in light of the murder and mayhem at the capitol in washington on 6 january it has been suggested that some in the republican party need to stop pretending they didn t understand the consequences of standing by quietly while dangerous irresponsible lies were being promulgated by members of their party i would like to suggest that we in the advertising industry are no less guilty of standing by quietly and pretending we don t understand the consequences in our case of our dangerous addiction to adtech and the concomitant destruction it engenders for years many of us have described adtech as dangerous it is now time to upgrade that description to disastrous the leaders of our industry the ana the 4as iab and the chief marketing officers of our biggest advertisers must face up to what adtech is doing to our society and act immediately and decisively to reform it no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest january 04 2021 the inescapable logic of ad fraud the recent alarming revelations of russian hacking of 250 us government agencies which went undetected by our most sophisticated cybersecurity defenses including the military s cyber command the national security agency and the department of homeland security must lead us in the marketing business to reevaluate our thinking about ad fraud the scope of online ad fraud has been argued about for years by computer scientists software engineers cybersecurity analysts advertising media specialists and independent researchers on one side we have advertising and marketing trade organizations agencies and their security consultants who tell us that ad fraud is a minor problem that is being well defended and in fact is shrinking annually on the other side we have independent researchers who tell us that ad fraud is a massive problem recently estimated at over 60 billion that is becoming harder to identify and is growing dangerously both sides provide metrics and data that purport to prove their point who should we believe i would like to argue this proposition from a new point of view from the point of view of those of us who are not computer scientists and cannot interpret the impenetrable computer code that underlies cyber theft and with the added knowledge of the recent shocking revelations about undetected hacking rather than a mathematical or data driven argument i will present a theoretical argument instead of data i will provide logic let s start with indisputable facts the online advertising marketplace trades over 300 billion annually via computer systems hackers in particular state sponsored hackers have recently been shown to have the ability to penetrate some of the most secure systems in the world undetected every person business or government agency that has ever been hacked had authoritative assurances that it was secure until it turned out it wasn t there are a multitude of ways that criminal actors have discovered for extracting money from the adtech ecosystem gaming the programmatic ecosystem which transacts about 80 of online ad activity has been shown to be astoundingly simple there is no international governing authority and consequently there are no cross border penalties for committing online ad fraud now some assertions on my part it is folly to believe that hackers who can penetrate systems protected by the us military s cyber command the national security agency and the department of homeland security without detection could not easily penetrate adtech systems without detection there are governments in the world with both very sophisticated technology operations and economies that would massively benefit from the addition of billions of dollars now some logic if the cyber command the nsa and the department of homeland security can be fooled i don t think it s a stretch to assume that fraud detection software can also be fooled consequently if state sponsored hackers are fiddling the adtech ecosystem it s likely that ad fraud detection systems aren t seeing it it would be amazing if state sponsored cyber criminals didn t view the adtech marketplace as ridiculously easy pickings and even more delicious since there are no consequences for being discovered some conclusions if state sponsored penetration of adtech systems exist the commercial fraud detection companies should be considered seriously overmatched and of course the bold assertions of trade organizations agencies or marketers are no more reliable than those of the fraud detection companies they rely on while we know that criminals and criminal organizations are active in stealing money from the adtech systems we don t know if governments are in light of recent revelations however it seems highly likely that state sponsored cyber operations would be powerfully attracted to the tens of billions of dollars that the adtech ecosystem is unwittingly dangling in front of them if so ad fraud is probably a lot harder to detect and a lot larger than anyone thinks it is let s boil this down to two simple questions if you were a bad guy and you could easily steal billions of dollars with a tiny possibility of detection and no possibility of consequences even if you were detected why wouldn t you if you are a marketer spending substantially on digital advertising what reason do you have for believing the metrics you re getting no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest december 21 2020 part 2 is creative advertising really more effective last week i wrote a post that posed the question is creative advertising really more effective as someone who has been a lifelong advocate for the power of creativity in advertising i admitted that while i believe the answer is a resounding yes i don t know of any rigorous studies that could prove it to a scrupulously scientific skeptic the post elicited a healthy conversation on twitter and linkedin here is a recap of some of the comments and my reaction to them several people pointed me to studies that they believe prove the case the ironic thing is that these are studies i myself have used to argue in favor of the proposition but in trying to be intellectually honest with myself while i personally believe the findings of the studies i see imperfections in the methodologies that in my opinion would disqualify these studies as rigorous science to a meticulous researcher principal among the imperfections is the assessment of creativity in order to get a scientifically valid understanding of the effect of creativity on effectiveness we need to start with a pure assessment of creativity awards or other forms of industry recognition do not meet my standard of scientific validity here s why let s assume as the awards shows do for the sake of argument that it is possible for experts to competently assign assessments of creativity in many if not most cases the people involved in evaluating creativity may have been exposed to the advertising and directly or indirectly to commentary about the advertising for a year or more they also may have knowledge of the agencies or individuals who are responsible for the advertising and the creative reputations of these agencies or individuals if this is the case their evaluation of creativity may have been contaminated by cultural expectations or knowledge of or inferences about the effectiveness of the advertising if we are to be rigorous in our assessment of creativity our methodology needs to adhere to the accepted standards for all other types of rigorous research in which case the experts assigned to assessing creativity should be required to do so blind they should do so without knowing the following who created the advertising any commentary on the advertising any knowledge of the success or failure of the brand in question this is the only way we can get a pure assessment of creativity without the unconscious contamination of outside influences or a priori inferences of success by the judges once we have a rigorous uncontaminated assessment of creativity we can compare that to business results and get an unambiguous answer to our question at least in my opinion several people commented that the only criterion for creativity in advertising is sales success i reject this out of hand without getting into a deep philosophical discussion let me give three simple reasons why this is not acceptable to me first i would point to the argument made by byron sharp in how brands grow that one of advertising s primary functions is not necessarily to grow sales but to maintain sales and market share or as he says keep the airplane at 35 000 feet in a highly competitive world it can take an effective advertising effort just to keep many high flying brands aloft this is rarely taken into account in most analyses of ad effectiveness second i would argue that the long term effect of advertising on brand success is very hard to tease out of sales results that are calculated on shorter time scales sales effectiveness over the course of the time periods taken into account by awards shows is not necessarily indicative of the big picture effectiveness of the advertising in question i will once again defer to prof sharp as well as mark ritson and binet and field who all make a compelling case for assessing the effectiveness of advertising over years by the way if you want to hear a so called marketing expert who seems to be completely ignorant of these effects listen to this idiot explain why tv advertising doesn t work third one of the things that makes advertising a fascinating subject and a frustrating one to practitioners is the role of probability while i firmly believe that creativity in advertising is a massive advantage over banality i also recognize that advertising i deem highly creative has an inconvenient record of failure in advertising there are no alwayses or nevers only likelihoods and probabilities i think i can safely predict that when the day comes that i am satisfied i have seen a scientifically valid description of the relationship between creativity and effectiveness creativity will be found to be not a guarantee of advertising success just a more likely outcome furthermore and perhaps most important of all if you assert that the only criterion for creativity is effectiveness then you are trapped in a tautology creative advertising is more effective because effective advertising is by definition more creative inevitably there were the dreary semantic arguments what do we mean by creative what do we mean by effective i don t want to go down that rabbit hole because there is no way out let me just assert without an ounce of proof that competent ad people know what we mean by creative and competent business people know what we mean by effective let s leave it at that just as in any form of art or craft creativity is often experienced subjectively but that doesn t mean it has no objective reality to define creativity strictly as a function of sales success is to reject creativity as an objective reality to do so in advertising is no different from repudiating it in all forms of art music and literature advertising may not have the same goals or gravitas as art music or literature but it can still be measured by the same standards of excellence it also can be subject to the same pitfalls creativity without purpose can soon become indistinguishable from self indulgence let me repeat what i said last week i am not a scholar on the subject of advertising research and i am not aware of all the literature on it maybe there exists a study i am not aware of that proves the case and would meet my personal standard of scientific rigor in fact i hope that somewhere there is until then i will be stuck in my personal predicament do i believe creative advertising is really more effective than mundane advertising without question can i prove it to you not exactly no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels baseball older posts home subscribe to posts atom click here for the ad contrarian newsletters one of our truly great marketing iconoclasts prof mark ritson an amazon 1 best seller nominated for marketing book of the year the best speaker we ve ever had time inc uk click here important links bob s website newsletters speaking contact i wish i d been brave enough to be this rude prof byron sharp author how brands grow caustic yet truthful the wall street journal warning this book will make you laugh out loud time inc the most provocative man in advertising fuel lines savage critiques of digital hype the financial times fabulously irreverent time inc ad contrarian says social media tens of millions of disagreeable people looking to make trouble creative people make the ads everyone else makes the arrangements delusional thinking isn t just acceptable in marketing today it s mandatory shakespeare was a storyteller you re a copywriter good ads appeal to us as consumers great ads appeal to us as humans as an ad medium the web is a much better yellow pages and a ...