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Digital Advertising TechnologyBecause the industry needs another TLA starting with D

Is Programmatic to Blame for Trump & Brexit?

by Gavin Carpenter 0 Comments

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The likes of Google and Facebook have admitted that fake news stories shared and made accessible via their platforms influenced the result of the American Presidential race to at least some extent. Much has been said about what these two companies intend to do to prevent/label/remove such content but not a lot has been said about people’s motives for creating and sharing such things.

Now I’m sure that some content was produced and shared by supporters on one side or another to deliberately deceive others (you only have to look at the tweets that were going around trying to convince people they could vote on Twitter in order to see this) and swing voters opinions directly. However many of the mainstream media stories fail to mention or don’t give a lot of time to the other reason: they can make money from advertising placed on these articles.

The fact that the big media, sorry tech, companies are vowing to help fix this is a little odd given their previous responses to the, technically at least, very similar issue of online music and film piracy. For this issue companies said that actively policing all the links and the content on their site was impossible or impractical. Legal mechanisms like the DMCA Safe Harbour rules (and other similar local versions) were created to try to reach a compromise over who is responsible for managing this. Very basically if notified of infringing content it has to be removed quickly and it can be argued about later (#notalawyer). The way sites that actually host the illegal content are funded is once again through advertising money.

What’s more confusing is that blocking “news” is more likely to be accidentally considered as censorship or infringing on free speech rights than removing a link to Coldplay’s new album.

One of the key ways internet piracy is tackled now is by cutting off the ad money going to the people behind it. Content Verification (CV) is utilised at various points in the adserving chain to prevent ads from appearing and ultimately the website owners getting paid. Many CV providers have a range of content classifications encompassing things like “adult content”, “drugs”, “file sharing”, etc. They utilise blacklists/whitelists along with technology to scan the URL and the page content to label pages and websites. Many also have a classification for “news” sometimes with a breakdown to the type of news such as “Transportation Accidents”. Brands obviously don’t like their ads to appear right next to a news article about their latest misdemeanour…

I’ve yet to see a CV provider talk about trying to classify “Fake News” though. The algorithms required to work out if a news story is entirely factual, hyped up opinion or utterly fabricated would be very difficult to write indeed. I suspect that for social networks they may be able to use the comments posted on their site to detect controversy more easily which could lead to better categorisation.

Maybe we will have to go back to what happened in the early days of content verification which was to have the new team member sift through page after page of questionable content deciding quite how bad it is. I know some people still mentally scared from this exercise!

I can also imagine some cooler brands maybe embracing advertising on such content with copy like “Not everything online is high quality but our sale items sure are!” (#notacopywritereither).

New Buzzwords! Use Sparingly.

by Gavin Carpenter 0 Comments

WARNING: The following post contains some big sciencey words. The author accepts no liability for any headaches or scrabble arguments caused as a result of continued reading.

The current batch of buzzwords are getting a bit old and repetitive (seriously, say “taxonomy” again, I dare you…) so it’s time everyone learnt some new ones:

 

Domain Knowledge

This is a way of describing the information associated with a particular subject or thing. So if someone has good domain knowledge they know a lot about the subject at hand. This could be any subject really, such as how your internal finance processes work, how a website is laid out or how an account’s tagging structure is setup. If someone has a very high amount of domain knowledge they may be the domain expert or subject matter expert.

 

Technical Debt

This is a term normally used in programming. Technical debt is the price you pay for doing something quickly now instead of taking the time and effort to think things out fully. Need a campaign setup quickly? Don’t have time to name it properly or check with others where best to file it under? You’ve accrued some technical debt. Like a student loan, it’s very hard to pay back technical debt, once you have some the compound interest can quickly build up. The main ways to attempt to keep it under control is through documentation and refactoring.

 

Refactoring

This is the process of re-working things so that they make more sense. When applied to code in Computer Science normally the external appearance and functionality of the system remains the same; the code behind it is just cleaned up so that it’s easier to understand and maintain. The term can also be used in adops though to describe doing things like pixel audits, creating new advertisers/campaigns, implementing naming conventions, etc.

 

Setup Entropy

The word “entropy” generally means a lack of order, predictability and structure. A system or setup with high entropy is confusing and hard to work with possibly because it’s old, not following current best practice or has a high amount of technical debt attached to it. To borrow and rework from science: “in a closed system the amount of entropy can only ever increase over time or in ideal circumstances stay the same.” This is the Second Law of Thermodynamics and when applied to adops it means that an account’s systems and setups will only ever get more complex and messy unless some external influence intervenes (such as introducing a new tool, doing some refactoring, etc.). This coincidentally is the Second Law of Adops as well. The first is “the creative will always be late!”

Side Project: ScreenWatcher – Alerts for Anything

by Gavin Carpenter 0 Comments

Bill Gates once said:

“I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”

Ok, now that I’ve fulfilled the vaguely related quote requirement for a blog post we can get down to business.

We’ve all been there, you start a report running, a file downloading or a program installing and you know it’s going to take a while to finish. Some systems have the functionality to send you an email once finished but the vast majority of them don’t plus it’s quite limited.

So what you end up doing is keep looking/walking back over to the screen to check how far it’s got and getting disappointed how far it’s not moved, like the proverbial watched kettle.

To alleviate this first world problem, I’ve built a quick widget to watch the screen for me and to alert me if it changes.

TOOLS: Ghostery

by Gavin Carpenter 0 Comments

WARNING: Knowing about or possessing a tool does not instantly make you an expert in its use. In the same way that buying an axe doesn’t make you a lumberjack or wearing a helmet makes you a racing car driver.

Ghostery is a plugin for all popular browsers that will show you, and also block if you want to, all the various tracking technology on a particular webpage.

The Problem With Grids

by Gavin Carpenter 0 Comments

Ok so you need to choose an adserver/tag manager/analytics tool/DMP/whatever.

But there are just so many, each with their own smarmy sales people, glossy one pagers and confusing feature lists.

In these sorts of situations the usual approach people take is to put together a grid of questions, send them around to potential vendors and then put them side to side before going with the cheapest making a decision.

IDEA: Native Third Party Adservers – Defeat Adblocking in a Pro-Consumer Way

by Gavin Carpenter 1 Comment

Disclaimer – The below are merely thoughts, presented in a haphazard way, I am not saying that the below is necessarily a good idea or even an idea that could ever work. It most certainly won’t be ready by end of play Thursday.

Most adblockers work by blocking certain third party domains from loading content into the browser. Domain blacklists are created and maintained that contain all the known URLs that serve up advertising.

The way around this, as some sites are looking at, is to create entirely native ad units; but these are expensive for clients and creative agencies to work with and don’t work for the wide range of small blogs and websites (that actually make up a great deal of the Internet) trying to make a bit of money from some ads. The other problem with native ad units is that clients need some way to third party track them so they can corroborate how many times they have been loaded and what users who see/click on them do next. It’s no good if the ads visibly appear but the trackers around them are blocked.

What if the third party adserver went entirely native, I know that’s sounds like a contradiction of terms but stay with me. The way this could work would be similar to how many server to server tracking solutions work currently but with a twist that I’ll get on to in a second.