Tag Archives: Reality checks

November 13, 2014 · 12:33 pm

We’re Feeling Insecure

The Pew folks are at it again. They just released a study called “Public Perceptions of Privacy and Security in the Post-Snowden Era” and it’s a doozy. Let’s not bury the lede:

Perhaps most striking is Americans’ lack of confidence that they have control over their personal information. That pervasive concern applies to everyday communications channels and to the collectors of their information—both in the government and in corporations.

Big Brother indeed, although Orwell probably didn’t think about it in terms of corporations doing much of the surveillance.  The study makes clear that consumers are skeptical about some of the benefits of personal data sharing, but are willing to make tradeoffs in certain circumstances when their sharing of information provides access to free services. 55% “agree” or “strongly agree” with the statement: “I am willing to share some information about myself with companies in order to use online services for free.” And we know they’re watching:

Across the board, there is a universal lack of confidence among adults in the security of everyday communications channels—particularly when it comes to the use of online tools. Across six different methods of mediated communication, there is not one mode through which a majority of the American public feels “very secure” when sharing private information with another trusted person or organization.

Sad, isn’t it?  More importantly, there seems to be a growing sentiment among consumers to dial back the amount of information they’re making available.  I’ve written before about ad and cookie blocking.  How can the legitimate interests some businesses have for this information – to me that means to make the consumer’s experience better – be served while protecting the consumer’s privacy?  Clearly all of us engaged in data-gathering need to begin to act more responsibly or risk being cut off from the source.  As the report says:

At the same time that Americans express these broad sensitivities toward various kinds of information, they are actively engaged in negotiating the benefits and risks of sharing this data in their daily interactions with friends, family, co-workers, businesses and government.

This is a wake up call.  Are you answering?

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November 3, 2014 · 1:52 pm

The 40% Chance Of Fraud

If there was a 40% chance that when you bought something you weren’t going to get what you thought you were buying, would you take that risk? I wouldn’t, but apparently many advertisers and/or their agencies do so every day. Ghostery, which is a browser extension I use and would heartily endorse, says its research shows 40% of all URLs in automated ad auctions are masked. What is URL masking? As a recent Ad Age article defined it:

URL masking is often used to trick advertisers into running ads on sites with illicit or stolen content, which tend to generate lots of traffic but little ad revenue. URL masking is also used to fool buyers into thinking they’re buying premium inventory when they are instead getting low quality placements.

Ouch.  Then again, this is just one of the issues that have arisen as programmatic ad buying becomes more prevalent.  As a former TV sales guy, I just don’t get it.  Oh sure – the costs of machines that are supervised by a couple of people is far less than the cost of the number of people required to do the equivalent work.  But look what happens when it’s just machines.

Ask anyone connected with the programmatic ad business what the top three issues are and they should answer:

  1. Fraud
  2. Fraud
  3. Fraud

Traffic generated by bots, ads that are run underneath pages to generate impressions when no one is seeing them, fake sites which spoof domain names that clear buyers’ whitelists because they look like they belong to reputable publishers.   That’s just the tip of the iceberg.  Another big issue is how little of what the buyers are paying actually reaches publishers – middleman upon middleman taking their cut drives revenues to the content creators down.

Putting aside the need for transparency, I’m not a Luddite.  I know programmatic ad buying is an advantageous, time and cost-effective process.  But the machines can’t do everything.  In fact, someone has to understand the business well enough (and all of those bad actors who would seek to steal from it) to program the algorithms.  Someone needs to bring the 40% chance down to 0%.  Someone else has to come up with the next brilliant, breakthrough idea.  It won’t be a machine.

You?

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October 22, 2014 · 11:56 am

I Am Not A Crook

Ben Bradlee died yesterday. For anyone who lived through the Watergate era I think it’s impossible not to know how important a figure he was. For those of you who only read about that time in history class (or worse, those of you who haven’t), Mr. Bradlee was the editor of The Washington Post during Watergate and he was the man who allowed the investigation and reporting of a break in at the Democratic headquarters (located in the Watergate complex) to go on even though everyone thought it was, in the words of the White House press secretary, a “third-rate burglary.”

Why should you care?  Let’s begin with something from the obituary his paper ran:

From the moment he took over The Post newsroom in 1965, Mr. Bradlee sought to create an important newspaper that would go far beyond the traditional model of a metropolitan daily. He achieved that goal by combining compelling news stories based on aggressive reporting with engaging feature pieces of a kind previously associated with the best magazines. His charm and gift for leadership helped him hire and inspire a talented staff and eventually made him the most celebrated newspaper editor of his era.

Let me add something to that to put it in perspective.  The August Harris Poll found that 76% of U.S. adults surveyed believe that celebrity gossip and scandal stories receive too much coverage, while 49% believe that entertainment news in general gets too much attention.  The kind of journalism practiced by the Post in the Bradlee era is almost dead, having given way to partisan bickering, “advertorials”, and reprinted press releases.  The real lesson for all of us in business is the last sentence I quoted: leadership.

It is very easy in the realities of business to take the easy road.  It’s easy to let a local robbery story go when the pressures to do so from your management, your advertisers, and the Executive Branch of the government are telling you to do so.  Bradlee didn’t, nor did he when he decided to print stories based on the Pentagon Papers, a secret Pentagon history of the Vietnam War.  That is leadership – doing what is right, setting standards, and inspiring those who work with you to do so as well.

“People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook.”  It might have been at that moment that the notion of trusting one’s president and government fell apart forever.  Ben Bradlee and his commitment to excellence and the truth, even if the face of his own doubts and fears, opened our eyes.  The business standards he lived by are mostly gone now in his field which is a damn shame.  Maybe we can all work a little harder to keep them in our own?

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