Don Marti
Concepts
With a peer or two, find answers to what is:
- asymmetric information and responses
- signaling
- “Banner blindness”
- retargeting
Concepts
- asymmetric information
- one party knows more than other (e.g., used car is a lemon); responses include licensing, guarantee/warranties, brand trademarks & ads
- signaling
- “… shows that a seller has the money to advertise … and believes that the product will earn enough repeat sales to justify the ad spending” (Marti 2017).
- “Banner blindness”
- users disregard visual noise (i.e., ads)
“Targeted Advertising Considered Harmful”
Why?
Broad, un-targeted, ads are signals of quality
Targeting: A cycle
Statistics about performance of individual ads feeds into dangerous self-deception about the industry-wide effects of targeting. However, as the audience begins to understand targeting, the rate of ad blocking increases, the value of web ads decreases, and increasingly crappy ads drive more user demand for ad blocking. (Marti 2017)
in 2015 print “pulls in 3/4 of the web’s revenue in 1/6th the time”
Privacy: Quality
Fortunately, better privacy tech, such as stricter treatment of third-party cookies, makes targeting more difficult and less accurate. The value of advertising across the entire medium rises, it’s harder for ad networks to “snatch” audience from high-reputation sites, and those sites will be able to get more ad revenue and control, at the expense of middlemen. (Marti 2017)
Paradox?
- An individual ad will have a higher click-through rate if we personalize it to the user, and
- Online advertising as a whole will be less profitable if we personalize ads to users.
What dilemma did we learn about that describes these situations?
Tragedy of Commons or Prisoners’ Dilemma
On the Media
Let’s listen to the clip and take note of pros vs. cons on ad blocking; you will be participating in your own debate.