Case against behavioral advertising is stacking up (opens in new tab)

Sorry to tell you it won’t be.

For context, I worked in the ad tech industry for almost five years, and my wife is a marketer.

The article’s author wants it to be true, so the content is bent to try to paint a picture of how success can happen without behavioral ads. And, that’s true; however, they’re citing edge cases a lot and neglecting to talk about funnel metrics in others.

Duck duck go doesn’t need behavioral targeting because the keyword IS the behavior. Keyword targeting is all about intent, which is the dream of any digital advertiser. That’s why google didn’t even have to offer behavioral targeting for such a long time.

NYTimes still making revenue growth is not a surprise. They’re a big brand on their own, and the advertising industry is seeing a lean back towards individual buys with publishers (NYTimes) and away from programmatic, because they don’t trust where their ads will be shown. This makes placements on the NYT more premium, thus prices are going to go up.

As for advertisers “over spending”, that certainly happens all the time, but their example isn’t meaningful. Someone paying 5x more for a behavior targeted individual isn’t uncommon, because the down stream conversion is likely to be so much better. They’d really need to compare CPA not CPM to get a real sense for what’s up.

There is one hitch and it’s a doozy. This invasive targeting may be neutralized by market forces when it comes to buying dish soap but it’s proven frighteningly effective in swaying voters even before the internet. Politicians conduct expensive in depth polling and it’s because it works. The move to using data collected online isn’t going anywhere and the normalization of this in advertising helps them.