Fascismi veri e immaginari

Seguo la cosiddetta ‘politica’ dal 1990, quando l’arrivo sulla ribalta dello statista di Cassano Magnago rese i dibattiti politici se non più interessanti, almeno più coloriti.

In questi anni, il PD-e-precedenti-brand ha dato del fascista a chiunque abbia osato mettersi fra loro e il potere. Il che, considerato quanto sono scarsi, non era così difficile.

Prima Bossi, uno che invece di venerare il tricolore come i fascisti, ci si puliva il culo. Poi Berlusconi, uno per il quale lo Stato era solo uno strumento per poter fare soldi. Più di recente, Grillo, un comico. Un comico che era amico di Dario Fo e Sandro Pertini.

Forse ancora più interessante il caso della nuova Lega, dapprima rispettata da Napolitano ai tempi di Maroni e poi ignorata i primi tempi con Salvini. Fino a quando sono cresciuti, al punto di diventare un competitor e di venir chiamati fascisti. Non trovando di meglio da fare, il PD ha addirittura fatto un governo coi fascisti di prima, quelli del comico.

Tutte le stagioni

Gentiloni è l’uomo giusto per tutte le stagioni. Ministro delle Telecomunicazioni, Ministro degli Esteri, possibile candidato sindaco per il Comune di Roma, poi presidente del Consiglio e ora, pare, Garante alla Concorrenza dell’Unione Europea.

I casi sono due e solo due: o è un genio incompreso, il Leonardo da Vinci della politica, oppure è un piacione che non sa un cazzo di niente e che esegue gli ordini giusti.

Pop-up Ads and Banner Ads

About twenty years ago, pop-up ads were all the rage.

Banner ads had failed to deliver clicks. The very first banner ad, placed on HotWired, Wired’s first web magazine, had a staggering click-through rate of 44%.

Everybody was absolutely sure that they had found the right formula. For reasons nobody cared to explain, consumers apparently loved to interact with online ads.

That’s why they had gone online in the first place, wasn’t it? They bought new computers, clunky modems and paid an internet subscription to… see more ads.

It was off to the races. Just about everybody and your uncle crafted business plans centred around showing more banner ads to consumers, also called eyeballs.

As it turned out, the first AT&T banner ad on HotWired was a fluke. People had not changed, like they rarely do. They were clicking just out of mere curiosity.

Pop-up Ads

As curiosity died out, click-through rates plummeted. For a brief season, pop-up ads seemed to be the solution. Click rates were high and everybody got excited.

And why not? Those things were a thing of beauty, weren’t they? ;-)

Once the eyeballs stopped clicking came new ideas, like pop-under ads, fake “close” boxes, or ads that moved around the screen and would not let your mouse close them…

Then came Google

Opera, a small niche browser from Norway, started adding tools to block pop-up ads. But Microsoft’s then dominant Internet Explorer browser would have none of it.

Google had just launched Adwords, their textual ads placed above search engine results. Pop-up ads were in the same market: ugly, no doubt, but they delivered clicks.

In a brilliant move, Google created Google Toolbar, an add-on to IE that blocked pop-up ads. This allowed them to kill off the competition coming from pop-up ads, play nice guy towards users who were sick of the constant interruptions, place their logo in front of millions of users and softly push them to use their search engine more often.

How is this relevant today?

Today, reputable news outlets are seeing marketing budgets move towards small websites that produce questionable content — most of it bullshit — because a set of ad-tech technologies known as programmatic advertising are allowing marketers to target users that read serious newspapers on those websites, at much cheaper prices.

It’s almost 2020, and it’s high time for newspapers to pull a trick like Google did.

[ to be continued… ]

Intent, Context and Identity

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.