Inspiration

“A 2019 study showed that a single targeting parameter, gender, derived from anonymous website visitation patterns was only 42% accurate, worse than random. If you did no targeting at all, and just did "spray and pray" with your digital ads, you'd at least hit one of the genders 50% of the time. When two parameters were taken into account -- age and gender -- the accuracy dropped as low as 12%. That’s like 9 times out of 10, those targeting parameters were wrong.”

In the first quarter of 2022, Apple's internal data shows that Search Ads had a 62.1% average conversion rate for iOS 15 users with Personalized Ads turned on versus 62.5% for iOS 15 users with Personalized Ads turned off across all countries and regions where Search Ads are available.

The adtech industry claims this “significant” increase of opt-in is a big win for the industry, but any increase would be deemed significant after the dismal single-figure percentages initially reported. But there’s no two-ways about it: 3 out of 4 users still choose to opt-out of tracking when they’re given a clear yes/no option.

The project shows that 39,400 cookies per month are served from the sites in the top one million websites to the average user. This enormous population of cookies breaks down to 23,133,620 distinct sorts. Taken together, this means that approximately 11,558 tonnes of CO2 is generated by browser-based cookies every month.

“All of a sudden you realize, oh my god, so much of my business is dependent on Instagram because I've put so much time here because this is where brands are spending their money.”

Starling Bank’s December boycott of Facebook and Instagram caused ‘no noticeable decline’ in marketing performance. The bank has said it will not return until Meta cracks down on financial fraudsters using its platforms.

In his typical style, Bob Hoffman highlights how much of a $1 programmatic ad spend gets viewed by actual humans. Spoiler alert, it’s about three cents.

“We will only be partnering with a select few brands we truly love this year, and eventually phasing out of ads altogether.”

The Austrian Data Protection Authority has decided on a model case by noyb that the continuous use of Google Analytics violates the GDPR. Similar decisions are expected in other EU member states.

“I made a change in trajectory and in the way I approached IG.”

For example, how many of us open an email we’re subscribed to just to find the unsubscribe button? Yet brands and businesses count that as a win.

“I found myself more anxious, more depressed and more on edge when I would come back from a month long hiatus from Instagram.”

“I just thought ‘That’s their own research and they’re ignoring it and we are attracting people to their platform.’ We had no choice whatsoever. Lush attracts an awful lot of girls of that age.” – Lush’s CEO.

“...because they spread hate speech and misinformation about climate change and our democracy. We continue to stand by that boycott 16 months later.”

When compared to tracking-based ads over a 12 month period.

Demonstrating that their switch from behavioural ads as a publisher remains good for business.

They may be a little less profitable. But you know, it’s like—is that extra profit worth all this societal impact and problems? We don’t think so.

– Gabriel Weinberg, DuckDuckGo’s founder and CEO

What the pandemic showed is we can take marketing down to zero and still have 95% of the same traffic as the year before. So we’re not going to forget that lesson.

Scruples Studio won’t take out behavioural ads, include spy pixels in emails or use Facebook, WhatsApp or Instagram for any part of their business.

A real alternative in search needs it’s own index and crawler, and autonomy over ranking.

In March 2019, following the terror attack at a mosque in Christchurch that was live-streamed on Facebook, Stuff felt the response from the platform was deeply unsatisfactory. Sinead and her colleagues stopped boosting their content because they did not want to support a company that had facilitated this happening. “That action had zero effect on our traffic.”

“It started with just a weekend off and it was such a breath of fresh air, so I decided to wait a week longer, and then figured why not add another week onto my break because honestly I was so much happier and more relaxed without it.”

The company found that ads served to users who opted out of cookies were bringing in as much or more money as ads served to users who opted in. The results were so strong that as of January 2020, NPO simply got rid of advertising cookies altogether.

“The desirability of a brand may be stronger than the targeting capabilities. We have not been impacted from a revenue standpoint, and, on the contrary, our digital advertising business continues to grow nicely.”

What was the effect of pulling the ads? Almost none. For every dollar eBay spent on search advertising, they lost roughly 63 cents, according to Tadelis’s calculations.

All social movements have their innovators, early adopters, late adopters, early majority, and late majority. It’s up to each business to decide where on the adoption curve they could possible fit in. Or, of course, whether they’re fine funding Facebook’s continued operations with their patronage forever.

And found that for every £1 spent it received as little as 30p in revenue, meaning upto 70% is funnelled back to ad tech.

“Facebook disclosed in a post on its ‘Advertiser Help Center’ that its metric for the average time users spent watching videos was artificially inflated because it was only factoring in video views of more than three seconds...[overestimating] average time spent watching videos by between 60% and 80%.”