For a good few years there’s been this idea floating around that we’re going to see another great dot com crash because the advertising ecosystem that so many revenues rely on is broken. I don’t know if the argument originates with Tim Hwang, but his book Subprime Attention Crisis appears to encapsulate it. With this in mind I was interested to see this story in Techcrunch. The headline says it all: “Facebook knew for years ad reach estimates were based on ‘wrong data’ but blocked fixes over revenue impact, per court filing”. I haven’t got to the bottom of this yet, but something is up:
- Everyone claims that online ads do not cause them to purchase, even if they don’t deny being influenced (which is much much harder to monetise).
- Targeted ads are very often terribly targeted. They can’t even work out which football team I support.
- Programmatic advertising, with automated auctions for online ad serving, is a black box ripe for manipulation. Platform Pravileges.
- Anti-trust wars are heating up, and EU ePrivacy legislation is imminent.
- There will be fall out from Google’s end of support for third-party cookies, and from Apple’s IDFA changes.
- The Customer Data Platform industry is emerging (and just might end up being something more than simply CRM rebranded).
- And, of course, the vast potential to nudge behaviours when machine learning is applied to the vast and ever-growing inventory of data on our online activity coupled with almost infinite A/B testing.
The winners in the new world may not be who we expect, and the losses may be catastrophic to shareholders.
