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Courtesy of BoSacks & The Precision Media Group
America's Oldest e-newsletter est.1993
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BoSacks Speaks Out: On a day when we read that digital advertising is to surpass print and TV for the first time, it boggles the mind how much known fraud there is in anything digital. Why does the advertising community "trust" what is obviously a global confidence game?
Fake humans, click fraud, fake ad placement, paying for ads never seen, fake web sites that look real but aren't grabbing an obvious overabundance of loot. Not to mention the theft of our very selves. Our whole lives and families' interests bundled for sale not to the highest bidder, but to any bidder.
The online advertising ecosystem is impossible to understand much less control under the current conditions we find ourselves in. Despite what we hear from the lofty P&G, there is no competent leadership anywhere, and I'm compelled to add the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is nothing but a joke.
Where is the industry leadership? I used to think the US government could be the answer to regulate this problem. Forget that pipe dream. Too many senators have demonstrated clear stupidity about the Internet. It's ridiculous, but the lawmakers who have the power to regulate technology have absolutely no idea how technology works.
Do you remember when Sen. Orrin Hatch asked Mark Zuckerberg how Facebook is able to sustain a business model while running as a free service. I'm sure Zuck stifled an internal chuckle and was barely able to keep a straight face when he responded, "Senator, we run ads." "I see, that's great," Hatch replied. No, there will be no shining knight from the Capitol to save the day.
Part and parcel with the fraud, how is it that we all ignore the privacy rights of hundreds of millions of people? Not
their rights,
our rights. Facebook's lies, duplicity and personal intrusion by hidden surveillance systems all go unchecked. Do you know that Facebook tracks you through third parties whether or not you are logged into Facebook? As Bob Hoffman
pointed out a few weeks ago "And the pièce de résistance -- Facebook's new data policy asserts that they track you even if you don't have a Facebook account."
This is not a rant about Facebook. They are just a single example of the on-going digital depravity.
It's an old stat, but did you know that for every $3 spent on digital ads, fraud takes $1 (Adage.com, 2015)
Did you know that US brands would lose $6.5 billion to ad fraud in 2017. (Marketing Week, 2017)
Here is a
2018 stat - How much have you spent on fraudulent ads today? How much have your fellow advertisers? Try $51 million. Research estimated that digital advertisers wasted
$51 million on ad fraud every single day in 2018. That's a massive $19 billion over the year.
There is an abundance of data that shows that magazines are more trusted than any other delivery vehicle. It is rated and respected by readers for top quality and accuracy in reporting.
Yet, in review, print which is trusted by all parties loses market share every year, while obviously fraudulent digital advertising is to surpass print and TV for the first time.
Advertising is the Big Brother we were warned about. Its mission is nothing short of surveillance for a profit. The information on us is stored, sorted and turned against us as an algorithm. And if the algorithm is good, we will march to it.
Now is the time where I should make some sort of demand or plea for us band together and transform the system. Nope, that isn't going to happen. There is too much greed and too much money for this to change any time soon. How does this rectify? Is there hope in this digital morass?
I have hope, but no ideas.
Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters
cannot be trusted with important matters.
Albert Einstein
Dateline: Charlottesville, Va
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By Bob Hoffman
There is a cute little research trick that semi-clever operators use to con gullible rubes. I will give you a small, silly example of it which I hope will make it more understandable on a large, global scale. It goes like this.
Let's say you want to open a strip club in a residential neighborhood. Obviously, no one in the community in their right mind wants a strip club in their neighborhood. But as the potential owner of the strip club you have to make a case to the city council to try to get your permit.
You do a survey in your community. What you
don't ask is a clear, direct question,
"Do you want a strip club in your community?" because you'll get a resounding no and a few solid blows to the golden globes.
Instead, you ask a question that sounds kinda like a suitable question:
"Do you think the residents of Smallville would benefit from more recreational and entertainment opportunities?" This question has a lot of benefits.
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- Who is going to say no to the vague notion of "more recreational and entertainment opportunities?"
- The so-called "recreational and entertainment opportunities" are not defined
- The social ramifications (cost/benefit relationship) of the so-called "recreational and entertainment opportunities" are not described
Once the survey is completed you go to the city council and show them your pitch slides:
- 88% of people in our community are in favor of "more recreational and entertainment opportunities." That's what we provide!
- If approved, revenue from our company will contribute over $1 million annually to the tax base in the community.
- We understand that not everyone will be in favor of our business, but enjoying our shows is entirely voluntary and no one is forced to patronize our establishment.
Even a city council isn't dumb enough to swallow this bullshit. Even a city council isn't dumb enough to not understand when they're being conned. That's how they're different from us.
I would submit to you that this is exactly the type of specious rationale that underpins the entire online ad industry. The con goes like this: the reason that tracking and spyware are necessary is that consumers want "
more relevant advertising." This claim is put forth virtually every time the spy masters are asked to justify their practices.
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To quote a semi-clever operator named Zuckerberg
, "People consistently tell us that if they're going to see ads, they want them to be relevant."
Yeah, right. People are out in the streets marching for more relevant advertising.
A
recent New York Times piece by a communications professor and a law professor exposed this bullshit for what it is. They reported on two large studies they did. Here are some of the results...
"Sixty-one percent of respondents said no, they did not want tailored ads for products and services, 56 percent said no to tailored news, 86 percent said no to tailored political ads, and 46 percent said no to tailored discounts. But when we added in the results of the second set of questions about tracking people (emphasis mine - BH) on that firm's website, other websites and offline, the percentage that in the end decided they didn't want tailoring ranged from 89 percent to 93 percent with political ads, 68 percent to 84 percent for commercial ads, 53 percent to 77 percent for discounts, and 64 percent to 83 percent for news."
By posing questions in manipulative ways that don't actually describe the issues in question, it is possible to use research to distort the truth. If you ask someone "do you prefer ads that are relevant?" of course they're going to say yes. Just like if you ask if they want more entertainment opportunities.
But if you're asking the appropriate question --
"Are you willing to trade private, personal information about yourself and your family, and have your movements tracked and catalogued both online and offline, and have your emails and texts read and archived, and have files about you sold to anyone who wants to buy them, in order to get more relevant advertising?"-- I don't think you need to be a Harvard-billionaire-semi-clever-operator to know that you better be wearing a cup.
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Is your phone always low on battery and chewing through data? The 'DrainerBot' could be to blame.
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A sneaky piece of advertising software may be responsible for driving up millions of Android users' mobile data usage and wasting their device's battery life, according to researchers at the technology company Oracle.
The code, which Oracle said Wednesday is at the heart of a massive ad fraud operation it's calling "DrainerBot," works by quietly downloading gigabytes of video ads to a consumer's smartphone and then displaying them - invisibly - to users of apps that have been infected by the bot.
The software affects hundreds of Android apps that have been downloaded collectively more than 10 million times, the researchers said.
Because the invisible advertisements rely on the phone's mobile data connection and processing power, the bot can lead to more than 10 GBs of extra data usage per month, Oracle said, exposing some cellphone users to possible data overage fees.
Consumers aren't the only ones potentially harmed by the bot, said Eric Roza, senior vice president at Oracle. The bot wastes marketers' money by selling ads that nobody sees, and it tarnishes the app developers who were probably unaware of its existence, he said.
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"This is a crime with three layers of victims," he said in an interview. "I hadn't seen anything like this before."
Oracle's researchers first stumbled across DrainerBot last summer, when network analysts flagged a suspicious spike in data traffic from some Android devices. Soon the company traced the bot's code to a Dutch firm that specializes in combating app piracy.
The Dutch company, Tapcore, released a statement Wednesday saying it had no involvement in the scheme. Tapcore's main business aims to help app developers get paid, through advertising, when software pirates use their apps illegally.
"Tapcore strongly denies any intentional involvement in this supposed ad fraud scheme and are extremely surprised by the Oracle findings. We've already launched a full scale internal investigation to get to the bottom of it and will be providing updates as they become available."
Tapcore's software is ordinarily integrated into other apps before they're published, and only serves ads to users who acquired the apps illegitimately, according to its website. Downloading an app with Tapcore's code in it from the Google Play Store, for example, is not supposed to trigger the advertising.
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In a statement Wednesday, Google said it has blacklisted all of the infected apps identified by Oracle and is investigating the two remaining apps cited by Oracle that were still active on the Google Play Store. The other apps on Oracle's list either never appeared on Google's app store or were removed previously for other reasons.
"Google Play Developer policies prohibit deceptive and malicious behavior on our platform. If an app violates our policies, we take action," Google said.
There is little reason to expect that app developers or app store operators would have detected DrainerBot during the normal development process, Oracle said.
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After lying dormant for a period of time within an infected app, the infected software kit distributed by Tapcore was programmed to reach out to a server and download additional code that ultimately activated DrainerBot. Oracle said the intentional delay probably made it harder to detect the plot. Oracle said it was notifying the public of the ad fraud operation to protect the value of legitimate advertising.
Ad industry groups are expected to brief marketers on DrainerBot later this week.
"We are delighted to work with Oracle to educate and inform TAG's membership about this emerging threat," said Mike Zaneis, chief executive of the Trustworthy Accountability Group, which is led by companies such as Disney, Google and Facebook.
A list of affected apps and instructions for deleting them can be found
on the website of Oracle's advertising analytics subsidiary, Moat.
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"The Industry that Vents Together Stays Together"
Responses to all Articles and Bo-Rants are greatly encouraged
and may be included in " BoSacks Readers Speak Out"
All news items and the various opinions expressed in this newsletter are not necessarily the opinion of, nor in agreement with the opinions of BoSacks. They are just interesting thoughts and other opinions that BoSacks thinks you should know about.
After all, as the Japanese proverb goes:
"If you believe everything you read, perhaps you better not read."
"Heard on the Web" Media Intelligence:
Courtesy of The Precision Media Group.
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