Is there anybody out there? How adtech ruined the internet
In this newsletter:
Who’s There? Episode 3 of our series on fans: the race to find, measure and understand them.
How adtech ruined the internet
The Long Tail and two other digital marketing myths
The Unofficial Listicle: Gary Linke’s top 10 deals of 2020
SportsBiz Objects: The Tacchini logo
NEW POD ALERT
Click the link to listen to my conversation with Dr Augustine Fou about how adtech ruined the internet. It’s about more than sports marketing, but it is also about sports marketing.
For episodes 1 & 2 in the Who’s There? series, we spoke to Matt Locke (Pod #78) about ‘How to measure ghosts’ and Lesa Ukman on ‘How to measure purpose’.
Both are among our most downloaded podcasts of 2020.
‘You’re fucking with the magic’
The initial promise of digital marketing was that you only paid for what works, and so seemed to solve the classic advertising problem of wastage.
See the exchange below taken: The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising.
The Google guys told Karmazin that the search engine’s earnings came from selling advertisements. Companies could buy paid links to websites that would appear at the top of users’ search results. And Google worked as a middleman, connecting websites with ad space to advertisers eager to get their banners seen.
Schmidt continued: "Our business is highly measurable. We know that if you spend X dollars on ads, you’ll get Y dollars in revenues." At Google, Schmidt maintained, you pay only for what works.
Karmazin was horrified. He was an old fashioned advertising man, and where he came from, a Super Bowl ad cost three million dollars. Why? Because that’s how much it cost. What does it yield? Who knows.
"I’m selling $25bn of advertising a year," Karmazin said. "Why would I want anyone to know what works and what doesn’t?"
Leaning on the table, hands folded, he gazed at his hosts and told them: "You’re fucking with the magic."
That was then.
‘Marketers wanted scale, and are now addicted to it’
Ad fraud is about incentives, both corporate and personal.
A whole generation of marketers has been tricked to expect absurdly massive audiences for their digital campaigns. And like a drug free sprinter, one day you turn around to find that if you’re not cheating you’re losing.
Fou’s work reveals why ad fraud has been allowed to flourish: there are just so many people in the marketing value chain whose jobs rely on a bigger number.
Some will point to the history of measuring television audiences as proof that sports rights holders, media partners and their measurement agencies have always exaggerated the number of people watching. It’s all part of the game.
And of course they’d be right.
But an hour in Dr Augustine Fou’s company leaves you questioning some of the big underlying theories of the digital era.
Digital marketing as we know it today can be traced all the way back to Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail, published in 2006. Before that, digital media was primarily purchased from large sites that had large human audiences. The Long Tail promulgated the idea that collectively a large number of small sites could rival the scale of a small number of large sites. This simple premise alone led digital marketing down a dark and dangerous path to the hell we now know is surveillance marketing. But most marketers don’t even know they are in this hell. They were looking for scale in digital—and they got it. They were looking for data in digital—and they got it. And, they were looking for more granular targeting in digital—and they got it. But how?
Herein lies the three myths: 1) the long tail, 2) behavioral targeting and 3) hypertargeting.
Read the three myths of digital marketing by Dr Augustine Fou here.
New! From the people who brought you internet ad fraud…
What worked with web video and display ads, now works with streaming services according to the WSJ: Oracle’s data cloud and measurement business said it detected a new instance of fraud in streaming television that likely impacted millions of dollars in advertising spending, signaling a growing problem for advertisers as they move more dollars into the medium.
Based on an estimated average cost of $20 to deliver a thousand consumer impressions in connected TV viewing, the swindlers likely stole $14.5 million over the last four months, according to Derek Wise, chief product officer of Oracle Data Cloud. The scam, which was first uncovered by Oracle over the summer before the fraudsters accelerated their operation in September by faking more devices and apps, is still ongoing, the company said….The operation, which Oracle Data Cloud has dubbed “StreamScam,” took advantage of flaws in streaming-TV ad-serving technology and the supply chain to fool marketers into paying for ads that were never actually seen by viewers on real devices and apps, the company said.
The potential scale of the operation, and its direction of travel, is there for all to see.
Although still only a fraction of the $60-$70 billion spent on traditional TV in the U.S. every year, ad spending on internet-connected TV sets, where most of streaming TV happens, will reach almost $8 billion in the U.S. this year and likely total $15.6 billion in 2023, according to research firm eMarketer.
And the ad technology infrastructure underpinning streaming TV remains nascent compared with online and mobile advertising, giving swindlers an opening, Mr. Wise said. “This is escalating significantly,” he said.
With StreamScam, swindlers used a practice known as “spoofing” to trick advertisers into believing their ads were running on legitimate apps and devices, according to Oracle. They used thousands of servers to impersonate “server-side ad insertion” technology, which are systems that stitch ads directly into programming to prevent issues such as buffering during an ad break. These fake SSAI servers then sent falsified ad requests masquerading as legitimate IP addresses, devices and apps.
And so it goes on. Don’t forget to check those sport streaming numbers.
Words matter when it comes to vaccine messaging
So Geoff Shackelford is right to pick out PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan’s use of ‘choice’.
His comments came just hours before Moderna’s vaccine received a 20-0 approval vote, seemingly more positive news given another influx of vaccine supply into the marketplace.
"I think vaccination is a choice, and I would apply the same logic and the same amount of care to that subject as we have to every other subject, and that is to try and do our best to educate our members on vaccination and the pros and cons associated with it,'' Monahan said during a conference call with reporters. "But ultimately it's an individual decision.''
I could think of 15 things an $8 million-a-year executive eager to get his business back to normal might have said instead of that. But hey, he speaks for his players and we have to assume this is the pulse of the PGA Tour.
Here’s some afters on Twitter to the same story.
In April, world No 1 Novak Djokovic said that he does not believe in vaccines, and would be reluctant to take one for Covid-19.
And Marat Safin, the former world No 1 and two-time major winner, told Sports.RU that the disease is part of a global conspiracy, with the end goal of controlling people via implanted microchips.
“I think they are preparing people for ‘chipization’,” Safin said, before claiming that Bill Gates was among the powerful insiders who had known what was coming. “Why would they also launch the 5G network? Then the nanochips will be introduced. Look what is happening around us. People are in a panic, everything is as it should.
Words matter.
The Unofficial Listicle
Gary Linke’s Top Ten deals of 2020. We let him do it on the condition he only included one of his own. A prize for spotting which one it was. (It wasn’t Cazoo btw, that’s just a nice pic).
SportsBiz Objects
1. The Tacchini logo
#Sportswear #Brand #FanCulture
The first and hopefully last time I was chased down a street by a group of angry men, the one at the front had a blonde wedge, mad drinker’s eyes and wore a blue and red Tacchini tracksuit top, like the one John McEnroe had on at Wimbledon.
‘North Hill’ were a bunch of local hard nuts. Their full kennel name was North Hillingdon Casuals but nobody called them that. Like any terrorist group worth their salt, they wore a uniform: Tacchini tops, Sky blue jumbo Lois cords, with the seam split at the ankle as not to obstruct the view of the white and gold Diadoras.
The distance of nearly 40 years has softened the fear, but it’s dormant, not extinguished.
Some of the brands from that era have been gentrified or reinvented by the style police: Lyle and Scott has gone upmarket, and Lacoste polo shirts remain relevant despite the fact I wear one on the beach. By contrast, Fila and Ellesse have fallen on hard times, otherwise known as the brand value graveyard of Sports Direct.
But there’s no reclaiming Sergio Tacchini. I just won’t allow it. The first cut is the deepest, and all that.
Deep dive:
Emotional Hooligan: Post-Subcultural Research and the Histories of Britain’s Football Gangs.
It includes a surprisingly nostalgic list of regional gangs of casuals.
SportsBiz Objects is an attempt to tell the story of the sports business via the medium of things, and is an obvious rip off of this.
Number 2 in the series will be in the next newsletter.
If you’ve got an idea for a relevant object and want to contribute to the list, head to UnofficialPartner.com and get in touch.