Comment by soared
3 years ago
I work at a DSP and directly manage a few million a month in ad spend. I talk to digital marketing managers, vps of marketing, heads of analytics, etc of household e-commerce and cpg brands weekly. All of them have extremely strict vetting practices to ensure their vendors are not fingerprinting or using any mildly questionable tactics. Literally all of them want privacy focused advertising, some of them are even requesting audits of environmental impacts of our server usage/etc.
Their is a world that is privacy focused and gives advertisers what they need - that’s what the privacy sandbox is trying to achieve. My employer works with Google directly on topics and other solutions to achieve what we want and create privacy.
Do their vendors, or your DSP, even have the information of where user profile data originally came from? If it was exchanged on multiple data brokers and part of 2nd or 3rd party data, is the original source even known? And if so, does your platform give advertisers the filters to exclude profile data based on method of acquisition?
And you're saying that all of those big brands refuse to use profile data acquired by fingerprinting, even if it would allow them to microtarget their campaigns? So they're essentially valuing people's privacy over their own profits? Somehow I highly doubt that.
I'm not saying that what you're saying is false. I just think that in an industry with highly shady and consumer hostile practices, built on the core ideas of psychological manipulation, that needs to be regulated to stop violating people's right to privacy, and even then finds ways to tip toe around regulations, it's quite unbelievable that all of a sudden they have a change of heart and actually claim to care about consumers. I mean, you're a part of it, so forgive me if I instinctively distrust your claims, and the claims of your clients.
> Literally all of them want privacy focused advertising
So they're running ad campaigns without targeting user profiles at all, in the same way advertising is done on traditional media? Because that's the only "privacy focused advertising". I highly doubt this as well.
Again, privacy and advertising are part of a zero-sum game. Advertising profits increase at the expense of user privacy, and the more targeted campaigns are, the more profitable they are. It would be foolish to think advertisers and adtech companies would be willing to sacrifice their profits out of the goodness of their hearts. This is why we need regulation in the first place, because they're not capable of self-regulation, and will pursue profits at all costs. But this is nothing new, and big business has been exploiting people since the dawn of industry. So please don't try to frame advertisers and adtech as some kind of benevolent actor.