End of an era of ad targeting

Publishers will need closer ties to their audiences

 
What we now call the nearly $500 billion digital advertising business started with a humble banner ad on HotWired.com in 1994. From the start, digital advertising was embedded with three original sins:

• There was no identity system to the web, giving rise to the use of tracking cookies as a proxy.
• The audience data was separated from the media impression.
• The success metric was the click.

These three facets took the emerging publishing industry on a path to where it is today: beset with privacy regulations by governments and tech companies that are overturning how digital advertising will work, concentrated power in a handful of sprawling tech companies and a publishing system with misaligned incentives that have led to the rise of the adversarial web and the rise of paywalls.

The industry itself should shoulder much of the blame. User privacy has long been treated as an irritant, left to the last panel of the day at ad tech conferences, the proverbial “last thing standing between you and cocktails.” Privacy advocates were treated as weirdos, not people to be taken seriously. And over the years, the response I most often heard to questions about the use of promiscuous collection and use of data: We don’t use personally identifiable information and besides the direct mail guys are sketchier.”

Συνέχεια εδώ

Πηγή: therebooting.substack.com