advertising
Heinz running Don Draper’s ‘Pass the Heinz’ ads
Heinz running Don Draper’s ‘Pass the Heinz’ ads
Tim Nudd at Adweek:
In a meta union of advertising’s real and fictional worlds, Heinz just greenlighted the ads—and will run them almost exactly as Draper intended, beginning today, in print and out-of-home executions in New York City.
This is awesome, not just because it’s a marriage of television and the real world, but because the ads themselves are actually brilliant.
The how and why of sneaky ultrasonic ad tracking
Dan Goodin reports over at Ars Technica on the development of technology which can use inaudible frequencies to tie together multiple unconnected devices. He explains:
The ultrasonic pitches are embedded into TV commercials or are played when a user encounters an ad displayed in a computer browser. While the sound can't be heard by the human ear, nearby tablets and smartphones can detect it. When they do, browser cookies can now pair a single user to multiple devices and keep track of what TV commercials the person sees, how long the person watches the ads, and whether the person acts on the ads by doing a Web search or buying a product.
Goodin cites a letter from the Center for Democracy and Technology to the Federal Trade Commission [PDF] describing the technical aspects of the practice and the privacy implications. I won’t repeat what Goodin or CDT have already explained with clarity. Instead, I wanted to talk about the inability of users like us to opt out of cross-device tracking.
Why don’t the companies developing and using these tracking technologies just tell us what they’re doing and give us the option to opt out? Obviously, requiring us to opt in would be the most honorable and least user-hostile approach. But I’ll concede that as being firmly in the “never gonna happen” column.
I am open to the possibility that I set up a straw man in the next section of this article, so feel free to point it out to me if that’s what you think. Just be constructive.
Concerns about using a straw man aside, the only logic I can see undergirding the failure to offer an opt-out mechanism is a concern that a large number of users would in fact opt out. That would obviously reduce or, in a worst-case scenario for tracking companies, eliminate the population of tracked individuals.
The only problem with that is that it’s bullshit.
We opt in to terms of service and privacy policy all over the web every day without reading a word of them. Projects like ToS;DR and TOSback aim to make us better informed about what we’re agreeing to and how those agreements change over time. They are fascinating and important projects but primarily the domain of geeks like me (and, since you’re reading this, possibly you, as well).
The truth is the overwhelming majority of people click “Yes” or “Agree” or “Continue” or whatever other button or link gets them to the web content or software they want to use. Here’s a quote from an AdWeek article published in May 2015, citing a survey done by photography website ScoopShot:
More than 30 percent of the 1,270 survey respondents said they never read the ToS when signing up to a social network. 49.53 percent only read the ToS ‘sometimes,’ and only 17.56 percent of people ‘always’ read the ToS.
Yes, that’s only one study, and yes, it was conducted on SurveyMonkey, but it’s a decent sample size. And can you honestly tell me that you or anyone else you know read the terms and policies of the sites and software you use? Probably not.
Is there any other reason, then, that creepy advertising tracking technology doesn’t offer an opt-out, just like the ones we never actually make use of throughout the rest of the web? Yes, I think there is.
Most websites have terms of service and privacy policies, although they are usually relegated to miniscule links at the very bottom of the website’s footer section. The European Union requires cookie notifications. But when is the last time you decided not to use a website like Facebook or the BBC website because you read their policies and didn’t consent to them? I’ll answer for the overwhelming majority of us: never, ever.
It’s their ubiquity coupled with the dominant user response of wildly clicking “Yes” until you get what you came for that makes website policies such a compelling topic of discussion. The companies building the technology that uses inaudible sound to tell advertisers that your phone, computer, television and tablet all belong to the same person can minimize conversation about their products by refusing to present you with an opt-out mechanism.
It’s that desire to remain invisible and as uncontroversial as possible for as long as possible that motivates them to be so sneaky. One commenter on Goodin’s Ars article puts it very well:
that advertisers keep basing their technological "progress" off of malware research and techniques is very telling.
It sure is. The reality is that I am one of those weirdos who doesn’t care if I’m tracked, but I do care when I’m not asked to consent to it. I propose that some privacy-minded geeks more intelligent than I develop some sort of ultrasonic ad-cancelling noise generation software for us to use in our homes and offices to thwart secret ultrasonic cross-device ad tracking. You have to take that one and run with it, I’m just an ideas man.
Axel Springer bans adblock users from Bild online
Axel Springer bans adblock users from Bild online
According to the report by Reuters at The Guardian:
More than 30% of Germans online use such software, many more than the 5% of internet users globally in 2014, according to Dublin-based analytics and advisory firm PageFair, which develops “ad blocker-friendly” advertising.
My basic position on ad blocking is that it’s a permissible response to shitty or intrusive advertising but whatever tool you use should have a whitelisting feature. I don’t know what the ultimate solution to this debate will be but I know that Bild.de publisher Axel Springer’s approach is unwise.
It’s so easy to find well-done news on the internet these days that Axel Springer is only hurting itself with the new policy. Instead of focusing on taking only high-quality advertisements that aren’t obnoxious or classless and minimizing the concomitant tracking, Bild.de is walling itself off from 30 percent of its native-language audience.
In short, someone at Axel Springer should be fired.

Thoughts on ad blockers
The ethics of modern web ad-blocking
The ethics of modern web ad-blocking
Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper and, more recently, Overcast:
This won’t be a clean, easy transition. Blocking pop-ups was much more incisive: it was easy for legitimate publishers to avoid one narrowly-useful Javascript function to open new windows. But it’s completely reasonable for today’s web readers to be so fed up that they disable all ads, or even all Javascript. Web developers and standards bodies couldn’t be more out of touch with this issue, racing ahead to give browsers and Javascript even more capabilities without adequately addressing the fundamental problems that will drive many people to disable huge chunks of their browser’s functionality.
I vascillate between Ghostery and uBlock, but they do the same thing: disable the scripts that power advertisements and tracking on the web. Some sites respect their visitors and present unobtrusive, high-quality advertisements. I whitelist those because, even if I’m unlikely to look at the ads and far less likely to actually click on them, the respect the publisher showed me deserves reciprocation.
But Arment is right. There’s no nice way to say it: publishers with shitty ads won’t remain viable much longer in the face of increased user awareness and response. The ability to use ad blockers in iOS 9 will only accelerate the downfall of sites with shitty ads.

Avoid Facebook's all-seeing eye
Avoid Facebook’s all-seeing eye
Violet Blue, reporting at ZDNet:
Facebook also announced Thursday it will begin tracking its users’ browsing and activities on websites and apps outside Facebook, starting within a few weeks
Her article is full of great advice for people who want to minimize Facebook’s tracking ability across desktop and mobile browsers. Be sure to have a look if the recent changes freak you out.
Om Malik on digital advertising
Om Malik on digital advertising
Is a page being auto-refreshed on an open tab in your browser really useful “attention?” I don’t think so.
I saw this first-hand in a previous job. Here is a pro tip: You can be sure much of your traffic is open-and-forget (and therefore useless to advertisers) if you have an auto-refresh (as many news sites do) and your average session duration is equal or nearly equal to that refresh interval.
Anyway, Mr. Malik always has safe advice for business owners and writers alike, so go read the rest of his article.
Listen: 99% Invisible
This week’s featured podcast is 99% Invisible is “a tiny radio show about design,” by Roman Mars.
If you think often about design, you’ll love every episode of this one. If you don’t think often about design, 99% Invisible will make you think often about design. Mars doesn’t just talk about graphic design every week. He finds design everywhere.
This week’s episode is Call Now! and it is all about that magnificent corner of the advertising industry that is lawyer marketing. Whether you’re a law student lawyer, or client, it’s a must-listen. I’ve embedded it below the subscription links.
Subscribe to 99% Invisible:
iTunes | Pocket Casts | RSS
Listen:
Tumblr, Yahoo, and Ads That Don't Suck
Here’s a semi-article, in that it’s more like a rant, but certainly not a link post. If you’ve seen similar stuff in your dashboard, feel free to let me know.
Dear Marissa and David,
Joe here. I’ve used all of Tumblr’s competitors extensively and I settled on Tumblr because it’s mindfully-designed, community-focused, and dead simple. The lack of ads helped, but more important to me than services with no ads are services that do have ads at least respecting their users enough to have decent ads.
So.
Keep ads for The Bachelorette out of my dashboard feed. Please consider presenting users with relevant ads. Scan my blog, the tags i use, the words I like, the stuff I link to. After all, you own it. So look at it. Run it through an algorithm and spit out some sort of value which you can key to a set of sponsored posts that, based on their weighted relevance to my interests and the things I cover on my blog, may actually be interesting to me. This is more palatable to users and more valuable to advertisers than showing me some random woman running around on the beach.
Over and over again.
Despite my never clicking it or reblogging it or seeing it without making an angry face and swearing never to watch that goddamn show. This dashboard spam does not bode well for Tumblr’s future at Yahoo, and that makes me sad, because I like Tumblr, and I rather like both of your styles, to the extent I can know anything about them from reading things on the Internet or watching you do interviews.
You said you wouldn’t fuck this up, but the glut of sponsored posts in my feed tonight about something I’ve never given any corner of the web any reason to think I care about suggests otherwise. Turn it around while you still can.
Change Yahoo, change Tumblr a bit if you must, but why not change advertising and the typically adversarial relationship between advertisers and target audiences while you’re at it?
in other words, don’t shove bad ads in our faces. If we wanted that we would turn on the TV or some other medium that can only collect data in really clumsy inaccurate old ways.
You’ve disrupted plenty of things, why not this?
If you ever want more advice, get in touch. I’ve got lots of ideas.
Sincerely, Joe Ross
Facebook is buying your loyalty card history
Facebook is buying your loyalty card history
Cotton Delo of Ad Age:
The targeting would hypothetically enable Coca-Cola to target to teenagers who’ve bought soda in the last month, or Pampers to show ads to North Carolina residents who’ve recently bought baby products, since Facebook’s own array of demographic and interest-based targeting options can be added to further refine audience segments. But adoption will be contingent on acceptance by corporate legal departments wary of becoming embroiled in a consumer privacy scare.
It’s not something I would rush into if I was one of those “corporate legal departments.” It’s not that I have some conspiracy theory about Facebook, or those data banks. I don’t. We give data to those data banks willingly when we use those discount cards. Shame on us for not reading the fine print.
And Facebook? They’re the same: the fact that nothing private is guaranteed to stay that way on the internet is common knowledge these days, and those who don’t know should know.
What would worry me as in-house counsel is what hackers will find when they inevitably get their hands on some of this data. In other words, Facebook and data banks are the devils we know. I would keep clients out of this plan because of the devils we don’t know.
Flipboard, Condé Nast, and the Mobile Advertising Problem (Updated)
Howard Mittman, VP and publisher at Condé Nast property Wired Magazine, told Ad Age's Nat Ives:
I’m interested in ways to bring advertisers in front of our community. When Flipboard becomes that, I would love to reengage and reinvigorate our product. Until then, we have to wait and see and not allow intermediaries to build their own platforms without direct monetizable benefit back to us.
This is somewhere between a rock and a hard place. People who consume solely through Flipboard — a group I suspect is growing all the time — might not bother clicking through. The friction meant to induce users to view Wired.com might end up dramatically cutting the number of folks reading Wired’s content. I don’t know what the right answer is, but I don’t think it’s “teaser” sentences.
The ad experience on mobile is already dismal for the user — I only interact with mobile ads by accident. There must be a better way. I know Wired and other content creators need viable revenue streams, and that traditionally the primary stream has been advertising.
But the web, particularly the mobile web, doesn’t even allow for the glossy full-pagers that magazines do. Those full-pagers can be compelling, and what’s more, they can be blended with the magazine itself.
A glossy full-page ad about the newest gaming laptop would be well-received in an issue focusing on gaming hardware, consoles, and next-generation systems. The same connection is much harder to make on mobile, where space is as precious to the publisher selling the ads as it is to the reader teaching himself how to visually avoid them. Flipboard is so popular because it involves us in the content consumption beyond merely staring at a screen. It’s subtle, but that flip is oddly engaging.
If the platform won’t accomodate your advertising, it’s time for your advertising to accomodate the platform. A headline and a single teaser sentence make for bad user experience: either find a way to participate in full, or get out altogether. Half-measures suggest a lack of innovation and a willingness to make user experience secondary to revenue, when user experience is what brings (and keeps) the eyeballs that bring (and keep) the advertising dollars.
Why can’t an advertisement be “Flipboard-ized?” Why not include in Wired's Flipboard stream an article entitled “Ad: Alienware M18x Moves Gaming Laptops into the 21st Century,” accompanied by stunning images of the inner workings and outer design of the machine? This offers the same “unified experience” of which a full-page print magazine ad is capable, but maintains the user experience that makes Flipboard so popular.
Updated 8:30pm: Alexia Tsotsis briefly interviewed Flipboard CEO Mike McCue about the New York Times’ integration into Flipboard. All digital subscribers to the Times can access the newspaper’s full array of online content via Flipboard. More interesting is the fact that the paper’s Flipboard content will also include advertisements described by McCue as “full page, print style advertising.” I respectfully request some credit for at least independently coming up with the model used by the Flipboard/NYT partnership (I somehow missed Tsotsis’ headline while writing this post), but I’m happy to see someone is at least trying it out.
Something like this seems to be working for Facebook on mobile, according a story by Josh Constine at TechCrunch. Facebook’s formidable data farm social network struggled to find a viable advertising solution to massive uptake in mobile use, and they appear to be on to something.
Maybe organic inline advertising isn’t the solution for every mobile advertising problem, but it’s an example of the fact that this problem is solvable. My Flipboard/Wired suggestion probably has weaknesses, but let’s have that conversation. Let’s argue about how the interests of publishers, users, and adverstisers, for all of their apparent conflict, often converge on great value propositions: content and ads that are well-built, well-tailored, and complimentary to one another, rather than shoe-horned next to one another in a way that damages the user experience and decreases all forms of value for everyone.