The advertising industry lives in La La Land

A group of leading advertising agencies have published an open letter to Apple asking it to reconsider changes to cookie management on Safari 11, accusing the company of sabotage and provoking a fight between the advertising industry and technology companies with users in the middle, that will end badly for all concerned.

The advertising industry’s antics in recent years has robbed it of all credibilty. Let’s try to make a minimally objective analysis of the situation: a number of agencies protest because Apple, on its own Safari, intends to carry out a proactive management of cookies that have been called “intelligent tracking prevention”, which involves the development of a series of machine learning algorithms to identify if a cookie comes from a specific decision, such as using a Facebook, Google or Twitter account to identify itself, or comes from a system such companies use to track users’ browsing activities and send them advertising. In the first cases, the use of cookies will be allowed, but in the case of those cookies that do not represent an option chosen by the user, but instead are intended for the benefit of third parties, blocking or deletion will occur after a certain time.

What does Apple want? Simply to provide a better experience to people who are fed up with seeing how agencies and advertisers are chasing them all over the web. Having a look on TripAdvisor to see hotels in Rome may mean fifteen days of ads for in Rome, even after you’ve booked the hotel during that first visit. This obsessive approach can also leave you feeling spied on: there have even been cases of couples discovering that their partner has booked a surprise holiday or gift after their shared computer was suddenly awash with advertisements.

Google is also trying to improve user experience of its products. In the case of its ad blocker for Chrome, this has proved controversial: for a company that makes a lot of its money from advertising to decide what advertising is acceptable and which is not, with the obvious immediate consequence that all the publicity that comes from Google will bypass its filters. Even so, most users are happy with the blocker if it stops the incessant bombardment of intrusive formats, interstitials, drop-downs, preactivated sound and video, or even late 1990s style pop-ups or pop-unders. Even understanding the conflict of interest, most users are looking forward to using Google’s ad blocker. 

But Apple doesn’t make its money from advertising and instead advocates policies that respect privacy and user information that most users applaud.

What is going on, then? The interests of technology companies are now perfectly aligned with those of their users, and both are on the same side to fight against the “bad guys”, agencies and advertisers committed to torturing people and thinking that building viable business models on the internet justifies all means. Note this paragraph in the advertising companies’ letter:

“The infrastructure of the modern internet depends on consistent and generally applicable standards for cookies, so digital companies can innovate to build content, services and advertising that are personalized for users and remember their visits. Apple’s Safari move breaks those standards and replaces them with an amorphous set of shifting rules that will hurt the user experience and sabotage the economic model for the internet.”

Excuse me? “Hurt the user experience”, you say? Advertising has been the thing that has ruined user experience the most since the internet is the internet! 

Apple’s response is also worth noting:

“Ad tracking technology has become so pervasive that it is possible for ad tracking companies to recreate the majority of a person’s web browsing history. This information is collected without permission and is used for ad re-targeting, which is how ads follow-up people around the internet.”

The message is simple: even if advertisers can do it, we don’t want you to, because it’s an intrusion of people’s privacy, and we will do everything in our power to stop you. You are the ones abusing the system to the limit and causing the trouble, and we all know that. What’s more, we know most people will thank us for that.

The advertising industry has been living in La La Land for many years: it really believes its products are beneficial, that we love being hounded by an ad, we can only marvel at its technological ability, and of course, those intrusive formats not only do not bother us, but we celebrate their creativity. If they see a high click through coming from a campaign with drop-down formats or videos with pre-activated sound, they will obviously think that their dumb ideas have generated great interest in the brand, rather than desperate users have been trying to close the damn advertisement or interrupting the sound while heaping curses on the idiots responsible. Seriously, these guys believe their own publicity.

It is possible to be that stupid. You can get your users to hate you, guarantee that the metrics they generate are a disaster that you misunderstand, convince your customers to waste their money on absurd campaigns inflated with hundreds of thousands of robotic clicks, build an industry so complex that nobody knows anymore what they are paying for, while even technology companies are developing ways to protect the public. And when all this happens, you do not think about changing your approach or wonder if you may not have gone about developing your industry in completely the wrong way. Instead, you think there is a conspiracy out there to deprive the public of your advertisements.

So many years of being bombarded with dumb ads have alienated users to the point where advertising has become a plague. We hate advertising, plain and simple. While in the industry, installed in their alternative reality, executives believe they are driving the growth of the internet, while the public sees them as a pain in the proverbial.

The growing use of ad blockers is not some passing fad: it is justice, the greatest boycott ever seen. Some people in the advertising industry need a reality check, let’s hope they finally get the message.

(En espa?ol, aquí)