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I found this interesting article by Don Marti about privacy and what would happen to marketing budgets the day users’ privacy were respected at long last.

I like how Don classifies ads in three groups: ads against search results, based on intent; contextual ads based on content, which can be thought of as similar to ads on magazines; and ads based on identity, on who the user is. These ads are bought wherever it is cheaper to buy them, and they are indeed very similar to direct mail spam.

All fine, except that there’s a missing variable: the format of the ads.

Ads on search engines are textual. They were presented as a form of direct marketing based on intent from the very start, as the yellow pages of the Internet, if you wish, and they perform very well for both those who sell them and those who buy them.

Banners

Banner ads, on the other hand, have been a mess for a quarter of a century.

They were never presented as the new form of magazines ads, and for good reason. The format is small and terrible, and it is very hard to use banner ads to get a message through. To make things worse, creativity has always been an afterthought at best.

Click rates were very high on the very first banner ads, starting with the one that appeared on Wired in 1994. This led to the very wrong idea that Internet users were so interested in companies and their offers that they would want to interact with these ads.

Hence, the IAB.

No, not the Internet Advertising Bureau, but the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

Too bad that today that interaction can be measured in little more than a click every thousand impressions, or about 1/50th of what the click rate for search engine ads is.

Ad-tech

Banner ads are the biggest failure of the Internet, ever. This is why ad-tech companies have been able to sneak in and track our every move to try to sell a terrible format.

Privacy-enabling tools are a great step forward to limit the data collection abuse and the flight of marketing budgets from legitimate websites to nobody knows where.

But I doubt we will be able to win this battle unless we undo the mistake that opened the way for ad-tech companies. The banner ad format is a failure and it must go.

Now, what in the world do targeting and food labels have in common?

They both lie.

Have you ever met someone who managed to get healthy thanks to food labels?

The kind of people who count their calories and take notes about what they eat.

Often the same people who eat fatless cheese and drink diet soda.

Neither have I.

Somehow, it doesn’t work for them. It doesn’t work for anybody.

Because, very simply, that’s not the way it works.

It’s either simpler than that, or a lot more complicated.

So complicated, in fact, that the only way to crack it is to keep it simple.

Instead of counting calories, just stop eating fried, salty or sugary processed shit.

And drink nothing but water.

Then it’s likely that not getting some exercise will feel worse than working out.

Not the other way around.

No matter what Michelle Obama or the Coca-Cola Company tell you, if you eat — and drink — garbage food, there’s simply no way you can burn off all that shit by working out.

You’re welcome.

A cover-up

The labels are merely a cover-up.

You know what you’re eating, so if you over eat, it’s your fault.

No, it’s not.

The labels give you information, but not the information that matters.

Why should an average Joe be able to read them and make a sound choice?

Those who are to blame are those who produce, market and push garbage food.

And those in government who allow this scam to go on.

Say, have you ever seen a food label on an apple?

Have you ever met someone who got obese by over-eating salad?

Fine, Doctor

Fine, Doctor, but what the hell does this have to do with advertising?

Say you need to sell the worst advertising format ever, the banner ad.

And people in charge of buying this shit don’t have a fucking clue.

It’s a marriage made in heaven, isn’t it?

You misdirect their attention towards what doesn’t matter and you win.

Hey, look at the food label!

No fat in there.

What could go wrong if I ate a whole bag of cookies?

The more ignorant or desperate people are, the easier it is to screw them.

And few people in the world are as clueless as the average marketing manager.

The format sucks? Nobody ever pays any attention?

One person in five is trying to block these ads altogether?

There’s not one single banner ad that was a smash in 25 years?

Worry not.

Look at the food label.

I mean, at how precisely (or not) we can target consumers for you.

And you’re fucked.

As said, The Internet Is For Porn and Direct Marketing.

And for upstarts.

Internet advertising has been around for a quarter of a century and it has created no discernible brands in any category, as Bob Hoffman rightly pointed out.

That’s hardly surprising. The banner ad is the worst advertising format ever.

Those who like to blame Ad Tech for everything say that, if only banner ads were not targeted, they would carry a signal, and could contribute to the emergence of brands.

Not so.

The format sucks. You can’t tell a story. It’s the same format on The New York Times and on your cousin’s website. Internet users are flooded with way too many banner ads.

There are more problems that need to be solved than some would like to think.

Away

On the other hand, to say that the Internet has created no brands is not true.

Away, Glossier and Warby Parker are huge hits.

I’m sure there a quite a few more mid-level brands that made it.

This is what the Internet is for, apart from porn and direct marketing.

It’s a shitty, distributed, low-cost Kickstarter to help small companies emerge.

Then, if they ever make it, they will start doing real advertising.

Offline

Real advertising means offline.

Like the Big FANG. Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google.

Do the big brand you work for a favour: act like a grown-up.

Like the Big FANG, not like some small company operating in a basement.

Do real advertising, not the tricks the small guys do to get noticed.

Don’t make your brand look dumb just because you want to look cool.

I know, I know…

I know, we were all hoping for better things for this child of ours, the Internet.

Some hoped it would spread knowledge. Not fake news.

Somebody else said it was “unconceivable that we should allow so great a possibility for service… to be drowned in advertising chatter”. No, that was not Tim Berners-Lee.*

But porn, direct marketing and helping upstarts get a breakthrough is not too bad.

—

* It was Herbert Hoover, then US Secretary of Commerce, speaking about radio, in 1922.

I am troubled by posts like the latest one from Doc Searls that praise the advertising of olden days and seem to imply that advertising on the Internet was hacked.

The Old Days

The good ol’ days were actually terrible. Advertising has always been a borderline and devious field. Advertising did create great brands, but for what kind of products?

Snake oil remedies. Booze. “The best sigarettes for your health”. And take two tablets of Alka-Seltzer after you ate more than you should have in the first place.

Mass-produced orange juice. Because, you know, squeezing the damn oranges yourself was too much of a hassle. And frozen mass-produced orange juice.

Tropicana. Or Minute Maid. Stuff that tastes exactly the same if you’re in Boston or Buenos Aires, Barcelona or Beijing. Ever wondered how that is possible?

What about margarine? Processed food? Frozen food? Frozen processed food. Refined everything. Diet soda, fat-free cheese and decaf coffee.

After WW2 a lot of shit was sold to consumers. Advertising certainly played a large role in making it possible, but I’m not sure there’s much to celebrate.

And last but not least: it’s true, advertising helped pay the bills. But not just for the New York Times. It also gave us the New York Post. And The Sun.

Then Ad Tech

Ad Tech did not come out of nowhere. Contrary to what Doc Searls seems to imply, advertising on the web was not hacked while it was sleeping.

The web was oversold to companies on the promise of interactive advertising and a one-to-one future. It didn’t work and we ended up where we are now.

Why was it assumed that consumers who were dodging advertising on television would want to interact with companies and their ads on the web?

The dotcom bubble burst, ad space on the web wildly outgrew demand and prices tanked. It was off to the races to see who could squeeze something out of the wasteland.

First it was affiliate marketing programmes and guaranteed results schemes such as Advertising.com. Then come Adsense. Finally, Google acquired DoubleClick.

Interactive advertising, then online advertising, then display advertising were rebranded as programmatic advertising. But they are still selling the same dumb banner ads.

Only, targeted. More targeted than ever. Targeting, in fact, is the only thing they are selling. Hey, we know this shit ain’t working, but at least you’re hitting the right target.

Except when your ads end up on videos of Neo-Nazis or Jihadists, that is.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I certainly dislike Ad Tech, and I have a lot of respect for people like Doc Searls who are looking for an alternative way to sell ads at Linux Journal.

But I’m not sure it’s going to work, and I am especially doubtful that it’s going to work for larger publishers. I have the feeling that there’s probably no going back.

No going back to a world — one of normal advertising on the Internet — that never was and probably never will be. Repeat with me: The Internet is for porn and direct marketing.