Broken by Design - Ad Tech and What We Can Do About It
This is the first banner ad. Created for an AT&T advertising campaign in 1994 by Wired Magazine it is perhaps the most influential thing to ever happen to the internet. No single thing has done more to change, deform, alter, or make sustainable the web. When it launched, it had a 44% CTR - that’s...
What Were We Thinking? The Top 10 Most Dangerous Ads
Often the criticism of vintage ads focuses on their inherent sexism, racism, or other displays of social prejudices, which we find laughable today, despit...
How we fought bad ads in 2015
Here are some of the top areas we focused on in our fight against bad ads in 2015.
Bait and Switch: The Failure of Facebook Advertising - An OSINT Investigation - bellingcat
Translations:English (UK)This article was originally posted on the Hunchly blog on Medium. This story starts with Sidney Crosby. A professional hockey player and Canadian icon. I can neither confirm nor deny that I welled up like a small child at the Hockey Hall of Fame’s “Golden Goal” display (I will never forget that moment). So […]
Debunking the science of advertising
We delve into the world of advertising, worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually, to find out if it's really even that effective. A collection with 3 stories from The Correspondent.
Is the online advertising bubble finally starting to pop?
I started calling online advertising a bubble in 2008. I made “The Advertising Bubble” a chapter in The Intention Economy in 2012. I’ve been unpacking what I figure ought to be ob…
What If We Made Advertising Illegal?
What if we banned all advertising? Not regulate it—abolish it. This proposal would transform manipulation machines, and maybe save democracy itself. A thought experiment worth considering.
Ads and Ad blockers
Last time, we shared how ethical advertising works to keep Read the Docs sustainable without creepy ad targeting. This time, we will share about one of our biggest challenges with advertising. At the beginning of April, Read the Docs was added to one of the most popular ad block lists: the Easyli...
My leaflets now show on my personal blog - Paul's Leaflets
Publish On PDS, Syndicate To Any Reader
facebook-ads-we-burned-20k
We've also tried Facebook marketing. In this blog post we describe our successes and failures with the marketing channel Facebook.
Google subsidizing hate group’s anti-trans and anti-diversity ads
Google’s Ad Grants program subsidizes advertisements by the anti-LGBTQ+ hate group Do No Harm, including sponsored search results for the group’s so-called “Detransitioner Bill of Rights,” according to a search of Google’s ad transparency data.1 Do No Harm’s model policy, the “Detransitioner Bill of Rights,” wrongly suggests that gender-affirming healthcare can “contribute” to distress among […]
South Burlington bagel shop faces backlash over AI-generated advertisement
A South Burlington bagel shop is facing a backlash after posting an advertisement that mixed real photos with AI.
Fix Victoria’s ads have made a big splash. So why are they about to disappear?
Fix Victoria’s founder says it is an advocacy group. Labor suspects it is a Liberal Party front. The Victorian Electoral Commission will have the final say.
Why Stack Overflow Doesn’t Care About Ad Blockers - Stack Overflow
Hi! I’m Steve Feldman, Senior Ad Ops Manager at Stack Overflow. My whole life I’ve been fascinated by advertising. Even as a kid, I wondered what a company was trying to tell me by using one word instead of another in an ad. Over time, I developed a strong (read: subjective) opinion of what makes an ad ’good,’ and what makes an ad ’bad.’ It took me many years-- in fact, it wasn’t until joining the Ad Sales team at Stack Overflow-- to finally figure out that the common thread shared by the best ads is relevance. Maintaining that relevance is how we’ve managed to avoid one of the biggest issues facing publishers today: ad blocking.
