Duty of care and cross-context behavioral advertising

Cross-context behavioral advertising (CCBA) is one of those inventions that people back in the 1990s hypothesized was going to be a good thing about the Internet. That turns out to have been wrong.

And the proponents of CCBA must basically agree with me about that. If CCBA were beneficial, the companies that put so much effort into lobbying for it would have been able to publish some research, including studies on behavioral advertising that probably already exist. Instead, companies setting out to argue in favor of CCBA are more likely to tell on themselves for monopoly or duopoly control of a small business ad medium.

So it’s pretty clear that CCBA is, at least, something that people should be able to turn on or off.

Paul Budde, in Australia’s Digital Duty of Care: reclaiming control from the platforms suggests that online platforms should be required to make design decisions to benefit the users.

Unfortunately, permission-based systems never became the foundation of the digital economy. The advertising model was too profitable. Personal information became an enormously valuable commercial asset, while the platforms accumulated ever-greater power over users’ data, attention and participation.

What the 1990s Internet optimists didn’t predict was the rapid collapse of business norms in the age of network effects. Today’s CCBA is a duopoly: one company that started as transgressive hackers and never had to go legit, and one that started off respectable and did a heel turn at some point. Both Meta and Google have deliberately designed their advertising systems to deliver deceptive advertising, because allowing extra, fake bidders into an auction-based ad system drives up the ad rates for everyone.

Offering a simple CCBA on/off control would still leave both the “on” and “off” people a little dissatisfied, though.

On: A CCBA service that works for the user

People who benefit from CCBA should be able to get it. But there’s no legit reason for the identifiers used to place CCBA to be under the control of anyone except some service provider that works for the user, and tries to get them the best deal. This is where Rewarded Interest has the right idea. People can sign up to use their identifier, which works like the digital version of scanning your badge at a trade show booth. It’s seamless and—implementation win—plugs into the existing Prebid stack.

Off(ish): Aspirational ads

It’s easy to suggest that big online services should enable a user control for personalized or de-personalized ads. But the problem with that is that people who get the good ads will probably be more likely to leave the personalization turned on. That means (checks notes) pretty much the same situation as today. Good ads for the more fortunate, as long as they don’t flip the personalization switch, crappy and scammy ads for everyone else.

Instead, make it possible to pick some other user and get their ads.

For example, I know that Meta makes an effort to hide scam ads from people who might report them, so I would just say give me whatever ads you’re showing to the head of some regulatory agency.

Yes, people should be able to opt our of sharing their ads, you don’t want some eager beaver intern choosing their boss’s ads and then getting a bunch of, well, best case there’s a romantic comedy plot in this somewhere.

More later.

Bonus links

Our Age of Silicon is Collapsing The opposition to the tech industry injecting itself into our daily lives is perhaps the strongest bipartisan issue we’ve seen in decades, and for good reason.

U.S. debt is even worse than it seems, and rising Treasury yields are now an ‘all-hands-on-deck situation,’ top economist warns by Jason Ma. (Historically, our national debt has had a low interest rates because investors expect that we, in the future, will pay our damn taxes. The more we empower people who don’t, the worse those rates are going to get.)

Digital marketing’s endgame was always automation. Strategy matters again by Mark Ritson. One analysis of more than 250 retail campaigns found AI Max conversions delivering roughly 35% lower ROAS than traditional match types. Lunio found 72% more invalid traffic on AI Max campaigns. It’s all about client averages. So the truth is that automation wins for most and loses for the select few who actually know what they’re doing. (But how can you tell? Serious question for marketers considering this stuff: what makes you so damn special that you’re the one group of people that these transnational criminal organizations are going to be honest with?)