It’s easy to see why Google (and some 37,000 people) were tricked — the developer who packaged the adware into an extension used the name of an already popular and legitimate extension, AdBlock Plus.
Additionally, the bogus page in the Chrome store came with reviews. In short, the fraudulent extension looked pretty realistic. Twitter user SwiftOnSecurity, who regularly tweets about web security, posted an image of the devious extension:
Google eventually caught wind of the breach and removed the deceitful adware, but it remains unclear just how harmful the malware is for those who already downloaded the extension. At least one unfortunate user says they’re being hit with ads. In a screenshot of a review, posted by SwiftOnSecurity, the user states that the “instant this was added to Chrome started getting invasive ads with high volume levels opening new tabs.”
Though Google took down the adware, SwiftOnSecurity was unimpressed by Google’s failure to stop this malware from sneaking through and ending up conspicuously displayed in the Chrome store in the first place:
The 37,000 infected users probably hope this public shaming further motivates Google to buffer the Chrome store’s verification process. After all, malicious developers will only get more inventive if the problem isn’t fixed.
Featured Image Credit: Mark Lennihan/AP/REX/Shutterstock
Facebook has introduced Facebook Cross-Platform Brand Lift in the US and UK which along with Nielsen Total Brand Effect with Lift will help advertisers optimize their Facebook and TV campaigns using actionable results according to a blog post.
The platform will see Facebook will match rival Google which launched Brand Lift for TV some years back in order to help marketers understand how YouTube campaigns can impact metrics such as awareness.
Facebook’s advertising partners who are expanding from digital advertising into cross-media campaigns will be able to leverage Facebook Cross-Platform Brand Lift solution.
Margo Arton, senior director of Ad Effectiveness at BuzzFeed said: “Now that Buzzfeed has begun to diversify our media strategies to include both Television and Digital, having the option to leverage solutions such as Facebook’s Cross-Platform Brand Lift and Nielsen Total Brand Effect with Lift presents a great opportunity.”
“We look forward to using cross-platform brand lift measurement to both receive valuable insights about our multi-media campaign performance in a single reporting surface, and also to optimize campaign elements such as spend and creative across both platforms.”
Facebook cited an example of household brand Shark’s campaign which was deemed a success as measured by Nielsen Total Brand Effect with Lift.
Ajay Kapoor, VP, Digital Transformation & Strategy, SharkNinja said: “We proved that Facebook video ads are a natural complement to TV campaigns. We experienced better brand results among people who saw ads on both versus just TV or Facebook alone. We saw the ‘better together’ impact first-hand. Facebook and TV are powerful individually, but deliver a stronger message to our audience when used in tandem.”
Facebook and Google’s advertising platforms are out of control. That used to be a good thing. Now…not so much
Now that’s some damn precise audience targeting! From Buzzfeed.
Facebook and Google’s advertising infrastructure is one of humanity’s most marvelous creations. It’s also one of its most terrifying, because, in truth, pretty much no one really understands how it works. Not Mark Zuckerberg, not Larry Page, and certainly not Russian investigator Robert Mueller, although of the bunch, it seems Mueller is the most interested in changing that fact.
Pro Publica catches Facebook with its algorithmic pants down.
And that’s a massive problem for Facebook and Google, who have been dragged to the stocks over their algorithms’ inability to, well, act like a rational and dignified human being.
So how did the world’s most valuable and ubiquitous companies get here, and what can be done about it?
Well, let’s pull back and consider how these two tech giants execute their core business model, which of course is advertising. You might want to pour yourself an adult beverage and settle in, because by the end of this, the odds of you wanting the cold comfort of a bourbon on ice are pretty high.
In the beginning (OK, let’s just say before the year 2000), advertising was a pretty simple business. You chose your intended audience (the target), you chose your message (the creative), and then you chose your delivery vehicle (the media plan). That media plan involved identifying publications, television programs, and radio stations where your target audience was engaged.
Those media outlets lived in a world regulated by certain hard and fast rules around what constituted appropriate speech. The FCC made sure you couldn’t go full George Carlin in your creative execution, for example. The FTC made sure you couldn’t commit fraud. And the FEC — that’s the regulatory body responsible for insuring fairness and transparency in paid political speech — the FEC made sure that when audiences were targeted with creative that supports one candidate or another, those audiences could know who was behind same-said creative.
But that neat framework has been thoroughly and utterly upended on the Internet, which, as you might recall, has mostly viewed regulation as damage to be routed around.
After all, empowering three major Federal regulatory bodies dedicated to old media advertising practices seems like an awful lot of liberal overkill, n’est ce pas? What waste! And speaking of waste, honestly, if you want to “target” your audience, why bother with “media outlets” anyway?! Everyone knows that Wanamaker was right — in the offline world, half your advertising is wasted, and thanks to offline’s lack of precise targeting, no one has a clue which half that might be.
But as we consider tossing the offline baby out with the bathwater waste, it’s wise to remember a critical element of the offline model that may well save us as we begin to sort through the mess we’re currently in. That element can be understood via a single word: Context. But we’ll get to that in a minute. First, let’s go back to our story of how advertising has shifted in an online world, and the unintended consequences of that shift (if you want a even more thorough take, head over to Rick Webb’s NewCo Shift series: Which Half Is Wasted).
Google: Millions Flock to Self Service, Rise of the Algos
Back in the year 2000, Google rolled out AdWords, a fantastically precise targeting technology that allowed just about anyone to target their advertisements to…just about anyone, as long as that person was typing a search term into Google’s rapidly growing service. (Keep that “anyone” word in mind, it’ll come back to haunt us later.) AdWords worked best when you used it directly on Google’s site — because your ad came up as a search result right next to the “organic” results. If your ad was contextually relevant to a user’s search query, it had a good chance of “winning” — and the prize was a potential customer clicking over to your “landing page.” What you did with them then was your business, not Google’s.
As you can tell from my fetishistic italicization, in this early portion of the digital ad revolution, context still mattered. Google next rolled out “AdSense,” which placed AdWords on publishers’ pages around the Internet. AdSense didn’t work as well as AdWords on Google’s own site, but it still worked pretty well, because it was driven by context — the AdSense system scanned the web pages on which its ads were placed, and attempted to place relevant AdWords in context there. Sometimes it did so clumsily, sometimes it did so with spectacular precision. Net net, it did it well enough to start a revolution.
Within a few years, AdWords and AdSense brought billions of dollars of revenue to Google, and it reshaped the habits of millions of advertisers large and small. In fact, AdWords brought an entirely new class of advertiser into the fold — small time business owners who could compete on a level playing field with massive brands. It also reshaped the efforts of thousands of publishers, many of whom dedicated small armies of humans to game AdWords’ algorithms and fraudulently drink the advertisers’ milk shakes. Google fought back, employing thousands of engineers to ward off spam, fraud, and bad actors.
AdWords didn’t let advertisers target individuals based on their deeply personal information, at least not in its first decade or so of existence. Instead, you targeted based on the expressed intention of individuals — either their search query (if on Google’s own site), or the context of what they were reading on sites all over the web. And over time, Google developed what seemed like insanely smart algorithms which helped advertisers find their audiences, deliver their messaging, and optimize their results.
The government mostly stayed out of Google’s way during this period.
When Google went public in 2004, it was estimated that between 15 to 25 percent of advertising on its platform was fraudulent. But advertisers didn’t care — after all, that’s a lot less waste than over in Wanamaker land, right? Google’s IPO was, for a period of time, the most successful offering in the history of tech.
Facebook: People Based Marketing FTW
Then along came Facebook. Facebook was a social network where legions of users voluntarily offered personally identifying information in exchange for the right to poke each other, like each other, and share their baby pictures with each other.
Facebook’s founders knew their future lay in connecting that trove of user data to a massive ad platform. In 2008, they hired Sheryl Sandberg, who ran Google’s advertising operation, and within a few years, Facebook had built the foundation of what is now the most ruthlessly precise targeting engine on the planet.
Facebook took nearly all the world-beating characteristics of Google’s AdWords and added the crack cocaine of personal data. Its self service platform, which opened for business a year or so after Sandberg joined, was hailed as ‘ridiculously easy to use.’ Facebook began to grow by leaps and bounds. Not only did everyone in the industrialized world get a Facebook account, every advertiser in the industrialized world got themselves a Facebook advertising account. Google had already plowed the field, after all. All Facebook had to do was add the informational seed.
Both Google and Facebook’s systems were essentially open — as we established earlier, just about anyone could sign up and start buying algorithmically generated ads targeted to infinite numbers of “audiences.” By 2013 or so, Google had gotten into the personalization game, albeit most folks would admit it wasn’t nearly as good as Facebook’s, but still, way better than the offline world.
So how does Facebook’s ad system work? Well, just like Google, it’s accessed through a self-service platform that lets you target your audiences using Facebook data. And because Facebook knows an awful lot about its users, you can target those users with astounding precision. You want women, 30–34, with two kids who live in the suburbs? Piece of cake. Men, 18–21 with an interest in acid house music, cosplay, and scientology? Done! And just like Google, Facebook employed legions of algorithms which helped advertisers find their audiences, deliver their messaging, and optimize their results. A massive ecosystem of advertisers flocked to Facebook’s new platform, lured by what appeared to be the Holy Grail of their customer acquisition dreams: People Based Marketing!
The government mostly stayed out of Facebook’s way during this period.
When Facebook went public in 2012, it estimated that only 1.5% of its nearly one billion accounts were fraudulent. A handful of advertisers begged to differ, but they were probably just using the system wrong. Sad!
Facebook’s IPO quickly became the most successful IPO in the history of tech. (Till Alibaba, of course. But that’s another story).
(Meanwhile, Programmatic.)
The programmatic Lumascape. Seems uncomplicated, right?
Stunned by the rise of the Google/Facebook duopoly, the tech industry responded with an open web answer: Programmatic advertising. Using cookies, mobile IDs, and tons of related data gathered from users as they surfed the web, hundreds of startups built an open-source version of Facebook and Google’s walled gardens. Programmatic was driven almost entirely by the concept of “audience buying” — the purchase of a specific audience segment regardless of the context in which that audience resided. The programmatic industry quickly scaled to billions of dollars — advertisers loved its price tag (open web ads were far cheaper), and its seemingly amazing return on investment (driven in large part by fraud and bad KPIs, but that’s yet another post).
Facebook and Google were unfazed by the rise of programmatic. In fact, they bought the best companies in the field, and incorporated their technologies into their ever advancing platforms.
The Storm Clouds Gather
But a funny thing happened as Google, Facebook and the programmatic industry rewrote advertising history. Now that advertisers could precisely identify and target audiences on Facebook, Google and across the web, they no longer needed to use media outlets as a proxy for those audiences. Media companies began to fall out of favor with advertisers and subsequently fail in large numbers. Google and Facebook became advertisers’ primary audience acquisition machines. Marketers poured the majority of their budgets into the duopoly — 70–85% of all digital advertising dollars go to the one or the other of them, and nearly all growth in digital marketing spend is attributable to them as well.
By 2011, regulators began to wrap their heads around this burgeoning field. Up till then, Internet ads were exempt from political regulations governing television, print, and other non digital outlets. In fact, both Facebook and Google have both lobbied the FEC, at various times over the past decade or so, to exclude their platforms from the vagaries of regulatory oversight based on an exemption for, and I am not making this up, “bumper stickers, pins, buttons, pens and similar small items” where posting a disclaimer is impracticable (sky writing is also mentioned). AdWords and mobile feed ads were small, after all. And everyone knows the Internet has limited space for disclaimers, right?
Anyway, that was the state of play up until 2011, when Facebook submitted a request to the FEC to clear the issue up once and for all. With a huge election coming in 2012, it was both wise and proactive of Facebook to want to clarify the matter, lest they find themselves on the wrong end of a regulatory ruling with hundreds of millions of dollars on the line. (Of course, they favored exemption over actual regulation).
The FEC failed to clarify its position, but did request comment from industry and the public on the issue (PDF). In essence, things remained status quo, and nothing happened for several years.
That set the table for the election of 2016. In October of that year, perhaps realizing it had done nothing for half a decade while the most powerful advertising machine in the history of ever slowly marched toward its seemingly inevitable date with emergent super intelligence, the FEC re-opened its request for comments on the whether or not political advertising on the Internet should have some trace of transparency. But that was far too late for the 2016 election.
Most everyone I speak to tells me that last week’s revelations about Facebook, Russia, and political advertising is, in the words of Senator Mark Warner, “the tip of the iceberg.” Whether or not that’s true (and I for one am quite certain it is), it’s plenty enough to bring the issue directly to the forefront of our political and regulatory debate.
Now the news is coming fast and furious: At what was supposed to be a relatively quotidian regular meeting of the FEC this week, the commissioners voted unanimously to re-open (again) the comment period on Internet transparency. The Campaign Legal Center, launched in 2002 by a Republican ally of Senator John McCain (co-sponsor of the McCain Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002), this week issued a release calling for Facebook to disclose any and all ads purchased by foreign agents. (Would that it were that simple, but we’ll get to that in the next installment.) One of the six FEC commissioners, a Democrat, subsequently penned an impassioned Op Ed in the Washington Post, calling for a new regulatory framework that would protect American democracy from foreign meddling. The catch? The Republicans on the commission refuse to consider any regulations unless the commission receives “enough substantive written comments.”
Once the link for comments goes up in a week or two, I’m pretty sure they will.
But in the meantime, there’s plenty of chin stroking to be done over this issue. While this may seem like a dust up limited to the transparency of political advertising on the internet, the real story is vastly larger and more complicated. The wheels of western capitalism are greased by paid speech, and online, much of that speech is protected by the first amendment to our constitution, as well as established policies enshrined in contract law between Facebook, Google, and their clients. There are innumerable scenarios where a company or organization demands opacity around its advertising efforts. So many, in fact, that if I were to go into them now, I’d extend this piece by another 2,500 words.
And given I’m now close to 3,000 words in what was supposed to be a 600-word column, I’m going to leave exploring those scenarios, and their impact, to next week’s columns. In the meantime, I’ll be speaking with as many experts and policy folks from tech, Washington, and media as I can find. Suffice to say, big regulation is coming for big tech. Never in the history of the tech industry has the 1996 CDMA ruling granting tech platforms immunity from the consequences of speech on their own platforms been more germane. Whether it’s in jeopardy or not remains to be seen.
This is not a simple issue, and resolving it will require a level of rational discourse and debate that’s been starkly absent from our national dialog these past few years. At stake is not only the fundamental advertising models that built our most valuable tech companies, but also the essential forces and presumptions driving our system of democratic capitalism*. Not to mention the nascent but utterly critical debate around the role of algorithms in civil society. And as we explore solutions to what increasingly feels like an intractable set of questions, we’d do well to keep one word in mind: Context.
Over the last few days, a slew of reporting, inspired by ProPublica, has revealed that it’s actually quite easy, through the programmatic structure of most online advertising, to create ads meant to target those who have espoused racist, antisemitic, or other hateful ideas.
Here’s a quick rundown of the major internet companies, and what has been discovered about their advertising platforms:
Facebook
On Sept. 14, ProPublica reported that Facebook allowed advertisers to target categories and ideas such as “Jew hater,” “How to burn jews,” and “History of ‘why jews ruin the world,’” based on interest Facebook users had expressed on the social network and terms with which they had used to describe themselves.
While Facebook removed those categories after ProPublica’s investigation, Slate then discovered that there are dozens of other racist, sexist, and xenophobic categories which advertisers could potentially target. It took Facebook less than a minute to approve ads against phrases like “Kill Muslimic Radicals”and “Ku-Klux-Klan,” and Slate found myriad other options, like “Killing Bitches,” “Killing Hajis,” and “Nazi Party (Canada).”
Facebook released a statement yesterday after ProPublica’s report, saying in part:
Keeping our community safe is critical to our mission. And to help ensure that targeting is not used for discriminatory purposes, we are removing these self-reported targeting fields until we have the right processes in place to help prevent this issue. We want Facebook to be a safe place for people and businesses, and we’ll continue to do everything we can to keep hate off Facebook.
Google
BuzzFeed discovered similar targeting issues on Google’s AdWords platform, which runs the advertisements you see on Google search results pages. Typing in keyword suggestions (which advertisers use to build their ads and figure out who to target) like “why do jews ruin everything” led to the system generating more keyword suggestions like “jews ruin the world” and “jewish parasites.” Buzzfeed was also able to build and launch a campaign around the phrase “black people ruin neighborhoods.”
When Quartz attempted to recreate BuzzFeed’s efforts using similar terms, or terms like those used by ProPublica and Slate, no keyword suggestions were returned. Google has since disabled many of the keywords that BuzzFeed tested.
Sridhar Ramaswamy, Google’s senior vice president in charge of ads, told Quartz in a statement:
Our goal is to prevent our keyword suggestions tool from making offensive suggestions, and to stop any offensive ads appearing. We have language that informs advertisers when their ads are offensive and therefore rejected. In this instance, ads didn’t run against the vast majority of these keywords, but we didn’t catch all these offensive suggestions. That’s not good enough and we’re not making excuses. We’ve already turned off these suggestions, and any ads that made it through, and will work harder to stop this from happening again.
Twitter
The Daily Beast was able to target similarly derogatory demographics on Twitter. It reported:
Twitter’s advertising platform tells prospective marketers it has 26.3 million users interested in the derogatory term “wetback,” 18.6 million accounts that are likely to engage with the word “Nazi,” and 14.5 million users who might be drawn to “n**ger.”
A Twitter representative told Quartz about the Daily Beast’s report:
The terms cited in this story have been blacklisted for several years and we are looking into why the campaign cited in this story were able to run for a very short period of time. Twitter actively prohibits and prevents any offensive ads from appearing on our platform, and we are committed to understanding 1) why this happened, and 2) how to keep it from happening again.
Snapchat
Quartz checked on Snapchat’s advertising platform to see if we were able to target using similar terms used on the other platforms. We were not able to: It seems that Snapchat’s demography isn’t quite as granular as the other platforms, which are far more text-based than Snapchat, and so it’s likely easier for them to glean what sorts of things its users are sharing than through all the videos and images posted to Snapchat.
Bing
Microsoft’s second-placed search network seems to have a similar problem to its other platforms. When Quartz created a test advertising campaign on Bing Ads, we weren’t able to directly target specifically loaded terms, but searching for just about any phrase in Bing’s “keyword suggestions” generator will generate specific keywords that you might want to try to target instead. Here’s one example, using “Hitler” as the search term:
(Screenshot/Bing Ads)
A representative for Bing told Quartz:
We take steps to ensure our Bing Ads always meet reasonable standards. We are committed to working with partners who share our vision for relevant, impactful brand interaction and respect the integrity of consumer choice.
Yahoo
Quartz attempted to create an ad campaign on Yahoo, but it seems there’s no simple way to create one online without speaking to a representative from Oath (Yahoo’s parent company) first. And presumably fewer people would feel comfortable telling a sales rep the sorts of things they’re targeting than they would inputting them into a computer system. Hopefully.
LinkedIn
Microsoft’s professional social network doesn’t seem to let users target based on arbitrary phrases or demographics. Other than geography, these are the only things you can target against on LinkedIn:
(Screenshot/LinkedIn)
The only section that might have the potential for hateful terms would be in “Member groups”—but a cursory search of terms like those used above didn’t reveal many professional hate groups to target on the platform. We did, however, come across this group:
(Screenshot/LinkedIn)
Upon further inspection, however, it seems that this group was set up by a LinkedIn employee trying to see whether they could set up a group with a title like this. Obviously, it worked:
(Screenshot/LinkedIn)
LinkedIn sent Quartz the following statement:
Hate has no place on LinkedIn and will not be tolerated. When we are made aware of such content, we act swiftly to enforce our policy and remove said content. On Friday, a member of our team created a group solely for internal testing purposes and after a brief testing period, we took the group down.
They’re called the “duopoly” of online advertising. Facebook and Google account for 75% of the U.S. digital ad spend — and almost all of its growth, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau.
Facebook reported 45% growth in the last quarter and Google’s parent company Alphabet posted earnings of $26 billion, 87% coming from advertising revenue.
But are these behemoths about to be blindsided by a fierce competitor with a better ROI?
A consumer research study for a beverage manufacturer uncovered an interesting trend, one that might tip the scale for advertisers. Consumers who had an Amazon Prime account started their search for a purchase at Amazon 100% of the time. If they knew what they wanted to buy, they went directly to Amazon to search for different brands with the best price and delivery options.
With 85 million Amazon Prime members as of June 2017, it’s not going to take long for consumer brands to discover that if you want to invest ad dollars in finding buyers with high purchase intent and conversion rates, Amazon is going to be hard to ignore.
Although its ad business is small in comparison to Google and Facebook, with only 1% of global ads, it actually is one of Amazon’s fastest growing areas, now on track to generate close to $2 billion this year.
Amazon also offers organizations a broad spectrum of advertising products, ranging from its ad platform offering mobile and desktop display and banner ads, to dynamic and coupon ads. Customer campaign pages allow advertisers to create immersive cross-platform landing pages that can display more than one product.
With the digital ad market predicted to grow at 16% this year to $83 billion according to eMarketer, the Facebook-Google duopoly will get its fair share, and almost all of the attention, especially considering the growth of Facebook’s Snapchat ad revenue, up 158% in the past year. And that may be just how Amazon likes it. It has a history of sneaking up on competitors. Just ask Microsoft and IBM about Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Andy Jassy, the AWS CEO, said that in some ways the growth of his business was a classic case of disruption dynamics. “The competition simply didn’t believe there was enough of a market to worry about it. The dominant players don’t have any reason to worry about someone attacking the bottom of the market.” AWS now owns a third of the cloud infrastructure services market, more than three times that of its next closest competitors.
Amazon seems to follow Al Pacino’s “never let them see you coming” advice from “The Devil’s Advocate.” But one ad executive — Sir Martin Sorrell, WPP’s CEO — has noticed. In a recent interview with Bloomberg said, Sorrell said, “The company that would worry me if I was a client — or I think worries our clients, more than Google and Facebook — is Amazon.”
Smart ad dollars follow consumer behavior — and, as we just learned, those consumers are headed to Amazon.
Google has announced its AdWords ads will undergo one of the most significant makeovers in recent memory later this month.
The forthcoming updates will apply to mobile ads only, and will change how sitelinks, callouts, and structured snippets are displayed.
Sitelinks Carousel
Google will be introducing a sitelinks carousel to AdWords ads, which resembles the sitelinks that currently appear for organic listings.
“Going forward, we’re simplifying how mobile sitelinks will show by using both horizontal buttons and larger vertical links.”
The company says searchers are two times as likely to interact with sitelinks when they appear in this new format.
Callouts and Snippets
When this AdWords update rolls out, callouts and structured snippets will blend in with the ad copy. Instead of appearing in separate lines below the ad, they will appear in paragraph form.
With this change to callouts and structured snippets, more of them will be eligible to show up with AdWords ads going forward.
Google says user studies have found this new format to be “more informative and engaging.”
Changes on the Advertisers’ End
It doesn’t sound like there will be any changes on the end of the advertiser. The new formatting will take place on Google’s end, while advertisers can continue to run their campaigns as they usually would.
Apple and Google could be the biggest frenemies in tech. While they both compete like there’s no tomorrow, they also partner on some very specific deals. For instance, Google is paying a ton of money to remain the default search engine on iOS.
As CNBC first reported, according to a Bernstein analyst, Google could pay as much as $3 billion a year just to remain the default option in Safari.
Business Insider also obtained that Bernstein report and shared the thinking behind this number. Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi starts from a previous court document from 2014 that stated that Google had to pay $1 billion every year to remain the default search engine on iOS back in 2014.
But mobile traffic as well as iPhone sales have been growing steadily since then. If you look at Apple’s services revenue, and in particular licensing revenue, as well as Google’s traffic acquisition costs, that number could be around $3 billion right now.
It shows that Google is still highly dependent from Apple. The vast majority of Google’s revenue comes from ads on search result pages. And Apple controls roughly 18 percent of the smartphone market.
As most users update to the latest version of iOS in just a few months, it doesn’t take long to change the default setting on hundreds of millions of iPhones. Google has no choice but to spend a ton of money to acquire this traffic
A few years ago, the iPhone shipped with a built-in YouTube app and Google Maps. When Apple realized that Google was becoming a serious competitor with Android, the company removed the YouTube app from iOS and worked on Apple Maps. Apple isn’t afraid of saying no to Google when it comes to iOS features.
Apple could probably not get as much money from Microsoft Bing, Yahoo Search or DuckDuckGo, but Apple doesn’t really need it anyway as it brings more than $45 billion in revenue per quarter now. It’s all about hurting Google’s bottom line.
As John Gruber noted, Apple is in a strong position in this negotiation. While it’s true that DuckDuckGo and Bing have gotten better over the years, it still lags behind when you’re using those search engines in non-English languages.
This incongruous situation is a great example of asynchronous competition. Apple and Google keep innovating and competing as hard as they can on the smartphone front. But they also partner on other aspects and even pay each other. Business schools will turn this situation into a great case study.
Google is to take direct action against approximately 1,000 online publishers which it has identified as being responsible for the use of ‘highly annoying, misleading or harmful’ ads as it steps up efforts to protect its reputation.
Google is taking a lead role in the campaign having already pledged to bar bad ads from its Chrome browser from early next year, meaning browsers can use the web without fear of stumbling upon irksome popups, autoplay videos with sound and too many simultaneous adverts.
Google’s director of product management, Scott Spencer said: “We are doing this so they have ample time to change their ad experiences so there are no violations or concerns about anything. We provide the tool that’s just telling people what’s happening on their site and many publishers want to do the right thing, but some might not even know that there are annoying ads on their site.”
The ad industry is trying to root out fraudulent digital ads.
Google has quietly been running tests with media companies such as CBS to gauge how bad the problem is.
Industry leaders are banking on a new technical solution, ads.txt, to tackle the issue.
The digital-advertising industry is looking to stamp out bogus ad inventory, like websites that claim to be premium brands but are actually sites the average person hardly ever visits.
Google, with help from some media giants, is taking the lead. The company is pushing an industry initiative called ads.txt that’s aimed at wiping out fraud that’s dubbed ‘spoofing’ by the industry. Spoofing encompasses the variety of ways ad buyers can be tricked into paying for space they’re not getting. For example, spoofers can buy cheap ad space, from a low-quality site, on an exchange and then falsely list it as space on a premium site — like, say, CNN.com— at a higher price. The ad in question will never run on CNN.com, though.
It’s all enabled by the prevalence of programmatic ads, which are placed by algorithms and purchased on exchanges, rather than through direct negotiation with a publisher.
Yet spoofing is even starting to affect publishers that don’t even sell ads via programmatic channels. Several publishers say they’ve been hearing from ad buyers that their ads are for sale on various ad exchanges, even though these companies didn’t work with any ad exchanges to sell advertising.
The Google tests
To get a sense of the scope of this problem, Google has been quietly conducting tests with a handful of major media properties, including NBCU, CBS, and The New York Times, people familiar with the matter told Business Insider.
During these tests, Google and the partners shut off all of their programmatic ad inventory for brief periods, say, 10 to 15 minutes, and then scour the ad exchanges to see what’s listed. Google and its partners found thousands if not millions of video and display ad spots still available on multiple ad exchanges, despite no ads actually being for sale at that time, the people said, asking not to be identified because the results haven’t been publicly released.
These include Google’s own AdEx exchange, as well as AppNexus, Oath’s BrightRoll, and PubMatic. Google also discovered fraudsters claiming to be able to sell YouTube ad inventory on various exchanges, one of the people said.
Google’s not alone in these findings. An ad-tech executive from a different company went looking for some spoofed ads on exchanges and said they easily found thousands of such misrepresented ads for sale. And below are the results of another search by the Marketing Science Consulting Group, a company that specializes in researching ad fraud, which found a significant amount of inventory available on a given day last April from an unnamed publisher. That publisher does not actually sell ads on any exchanges.
Business Insider reached out to all the exchanges mentioned and included their comments below, if they responded.
There is lots of bogus ad inventory available on ad exchanges.Marketing Science Consulting Group
The ad exchanges responded to details of the results by pointing to their efforts to stamp out the kind of fraud Google found.
“We’re unaware of major publishers running such tests and finding problematic selling on our marketplace,” a representative for AppNexus said. “We do work proactively to avoid this type of problem. We are strong proponents of ads.txt, which we view as reinforcement of our longstanding policies and practices. We’ve created strong domain detection technology.”
“Oath has invested in proprietary technology on our buying platforms, including BrightRoll and ONE by AOL, that aims to enforce supply transparency and prevent domain spoofing across the majority of supply partners,” said a representative for Oath, which is owned by Verizon. “In fact, our technology blocks hundreds of millions of spoofed bid requests on a daily basis. Combined with our longtime partnership with the IAB, industry-leading third-party fraud measurement across our platforms and human review safeguards, we’re fully committed to a safe, transparent supply chain for our advertiser partners.”
“At PubMatic we work directly with our publisher clients to help them manage their digital inventory, and, as such, we are not aware of the issues,” said PubMatic’s chief marketing officer Jeff Hirsch.
“We take quality very seriously and view it as an issue for the entire ad tech industry,” said Smart AdServer chief marketing officer Michael Nevins. “We’re also enthusiastic supporters of the Ads.txt initiative and are actively working with our publishers to help them implement it. Our Chief Quality Officer, Gorka Zarauz, leads a dedicated department that works closely with leading external brand-safety firms such as Integral Ad Science and FraudLogix both pre-and post-auction to detect, block and remove bot-generated traffic and spoofed domains. We continue to commit permanent R&D in this area for the benefit of our partners and the ecosystem as a whole.”
There are lots of ways that ad fraud can happen. Often hackers from outside the US sell ads on fake websites using computer programs called “bots” that can mimic human behavior — making it look as though real people are visiting websites or clicking on ads.
Then, there’s spoofing, which has been around for years. Companies like ESPN have frequently encountered people claiming to have their right to sell their ads when they don’t. But as more big marketers push for better transparency in their digital-ad buying, following a string of recent reports of ads ending up in dicey corners of the web, there’s more awareness of how common spoofing is.
“There’s quite a bit of mislabeling of traffic,” said Mike Baker, CEO of the ad-tech firm DataXu. “It’s become somewhat pervasive over the last few years. It could account for 20 to 30% of the traffic on some secondary and tertiary [ad exchanges].”
Digital ad spending is growing, as is fraud.eMarketer
Ads.txt solution
Google has also hosted CEOs of several top ad-buying tech companies — “demand-side platforms” that act as major buyers on ad exchanges — including MediaMath CEO Joe Zawadzki, DataXu’s Baker, and Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green. The meetings were said to be constructive as the industry looks to embrace ads.txt as a solution.
Ads.txt was borne out of the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Tech Lab with support from the trade group TAG (Trustworthy Accountability Group). It’s a technical solution designed to protect web publishers from any unauthorized companies selling their ads via programmatic ad exchanges.
Here’s how it works. By inserting a text file on their sites, web publishers can make it clear who is allowed to sell their ad space and who isn’t. Assuming enough publishers implement the ads.txt solution — and enough ad buyers make an effort to purchase ads only from authorized sellers — this could go a long way toward weeding out spoofing.
“There’s always been spoofing in the market, and with video it is [more prevalent],” said Alanna Gombert, general manager of the IAB Tech Lab. “Now there is more scrutiny in the market. It wasn’t top of mind before. Now, everyone understands it; it’s mainstream. And fraudsters are looking for known names that are on ‘white lists’ for advertisers. So this has opened up a conversation where ad buyers are telling sellers, ‘I’m seeing you here,’ and they are digging down and saying ‘Oh crap.'”
Brands get woke
A number of major developments have combined to dial up the scrutiny on the online-advertising business, causing marketers to scrutinize where their ads run to how they pay for them and who gets a piece of every dollar they spend on the web. First, about a year ago, the Association of National Advertisers released a damning report detailing a glaring lack of transparency in the ad-buying world.
Over the past six months, Facebook has revealed a string of measurement screw-ups, while Google has faced multiple advertisers pulling out of YouTube after ads were found alongside hate videos.
Procter and Gamble Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard.Getty/Phil Cole
And since the start of this year, Procter and Gamble’s chief brand officer, Marc Pritchard, has been on a crusade, delivering a series of speeches in which he clamored for the ad industry to demand more clarity from digital media and the need to clean up the “crappy media supply chain,” as CNBC reported.
All of this has brought the issue of ad fraud to the forefront. “Brands are woke,” joked one ad-tech executive. “There’s suddenly a lot of attention on supply-chain hygiene,” he said. And hopefully ads.txt is the soap.
Some see the initiative as part of a larger set of antifraud tactics. Others are more bullish. “This will wipe spoofing out,” said Andrew Casale, CEO of the ad-tech firm Index Exchange.
Who’s responsible?
When it comes to supply-chain hygiene, there’s plenty of blame laid on the ad-tech companies — especially since so many programmatic exchanges have made big public pledges to keep out bad sellers. But as one ad-tech insider said, big media companies often don’t even know who is and isn’t allowed to sell their ads on the web.
‘They should take responsibility,” he said. For example, one publisher said it was working with just three exchanges, but they were really running ads on 17.
So it’s up to media companies to make the most out of ads.txt.
“Initially, this is putting the first implementation requirements on publishers,” said Art Muldoon, co-CEO of the programmatic ad buying firm Amnet. “It’s a burden and an opportunity.”
Media sellers “are being directly harmed,” said Mike Zaneis, president and CEO for TAG, the Trustworthy Accountability Group, an organization that was put together to tackle the ad-fraud problem.
“When there is twice as much inventory being sold out there than actually exists, that leads to deals you never get, bad prices, and the watering down of your brand,” Zaneis said. “That has a direct financial impact.”
he mobile search landscape has changed immensely in recent years, transforming how consumers engage with brands and discover new products. But the change of pace has left some brands struggling to keep up, wondering just how hard mobile is working for them, and whether their brand proposition is really translating to the small screen.
It has led to many making what are, in 2017, some fundamental mistakes with mobile strategy. Here are six of the biggest:
The ‘m-dot’ site
When the ‘mobilegeddon’ update first reared its head in 2015, it unsurprisingly caused panic in the digital ecommerce sector. This was an update that threatened to dramatically harm the web visibility of those brands that weren’t delivering a mobile-friendly experience, and it was an update that would kick-in not very long after it was first announced – certainly not long enough to align all of the necessary stakeholders and plan, build, test and launch a completely new site.
Many brands responded by launching what became known as m-dot websites – essentially copies of a desktop website that were tweaked for mobile and appear on an m.website.com or mobile.website.com sub-domain. It was a quick-fix solution, allowing brands to meet the criteria that would see them becoming a ‘mobilegeddon’ victim, but avoided the need to go through a lengthy web redesign and build.
But now Google is warning brands that it wants to see the end of the m-dot, claiming that the mobile-first index may not index m-dot sites effectively. Throw in the increased risk of broken redirects and duplicate content that come with an m-dot, and the time really has come for you call in the designers and go responsive.
Being deaf to voice search
In June 2017, a Think with Google survey found that 57% of people would use voice search more if it recognised more complex commands, and 58% of respondents said they would like more detailed results when using search.
Think about how you can make your existing keyword strategy more conversational, to reflect the way in which your audiences are going to interact verbally with their mobile or smart devices – particularly if your site features a lot of ‘how to’ content on its site. A desktop search for ‘flights to London’ could very easily become ‘when is the next flight to London?’ or ‘what is the cheapest way to get to London tomorrow morning’. Could your current content answer that query?
Not thinking about your long-term app strategy
A survey by Localytics found that 60% of people who download an application become inactive within 30 days, whilst data from Quattra shows that the daily active user rate drops 77% the first three days after an app is installed on a device.
Mobile apps are not, in themselves, a flawed marketing channel but if you are going to invest in developing and maintaining one, think carefully about how you are going to avoid the graveyard of unused apps that lies on practically every smartphone in existence.
Is your app simply an extension of your mobile site? If so, then think about why you actually need one. What does your app offer that your users can’t get or would find more difficult to get elsewhere?
Think about how you would use your app to re-engage and reconnect with your audiences throughout the customer journey, using your data to provide personalised messages and push notifications that will resonate with them. Just remember not to over-use tactics like push notifications as they can get irritating (particularly if you are just pushing offers and sales messages).
Bombarding users with ads
Speaking of things that are irritating, ads on mobile. Obtrusive adverts are annoying on any platform, but on the small screen of mobile, they are even more of a user experience faux-pas.
If you are advertising to consumers on mobile, make sure that it isn’t your brand that is frustrating what should be a seamless and enjoyable user experience with an intrusive and impossible to dismiss pop-up or interstitial. Not only does it frustrate users and harm the brand, it can also harm your organic search visibility.
Ignoring your audiences’ neighbourhood
So-called ‘near me’ searches are growing at a rate of 130% per year, and 88% of these searches are made using a mobile device, claims Google.
This trend is being driven by the way in which the customer journey is becoming much more integrated between desktop, mobile and offline. Consumers are turning to their devices for ‘quick reference’ queries – local shops and restaurants for example – and then making purchasing decisions across any number of channels based on that information.
It means that brands, particularly those with an offline presence, need to really think about how they are optimising their online presence for ‘near me’ searches, and thinking about the content that they serve to these audiences that works on a localised level, and could drive an in-store visit.
Consider the importance of implicit search variables, such as location, time, device, transport and previous search history, and ensure that you have content that can serve as many combinations of those searches as possible.
Failing to close the loop
Cross-device tracking remains one of the biggest challenges for marketers, as multiple devices and multiple communications channels converge to create a much more complicated customer journey.
Google is working hard to close this loop as much as possible, with Google Attribution rolling out to provide much better integration between AdWords and Analytics, and it is continuing to use user data and search history to ‘join up the dots’ as much as possible.
Different organisations will have different approaches and different models to understand how different devices and channels contribute to the overall buying journey, and the model that you adopt will ultimately depend on your brand objectives for your mobile strategy. However, if you are using a last click model of attribution, then it is highly likely that you are either under or over-estimating the value of mobile, depending on the nature of the brand and the product.
