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workers into making the business steadily podcast from the bbc will serve as a first. We take a cupful of business needs, naturally than we had a healthy measure of technology, along with a pinch of exciting innovation. Business dating from the BBC world service find out more at the end of this club, cast BBC world service, my name's ed butler, and this is the advertising trail. From the new york times february, sixteenth, twenty twelve how companies learn your secrets, I remember rent that story and feeling fascinated, but secondly, quite disturbed now. I want you to listen to this carefully, if you don't mind because the tale europe, to hear helps to explain much.

Of what we know all think we know about them. digital economy, the writer and technology research, stephanie hair, recalling one speakers story written about a decade ago, so the story that was in the new york times was about the store target, which is a big Can grocery store and so much more. He can get almost anything a target. Very forcibly what target did was it got very big on data analytics and it started profiling, its customers based on their purchasing habits and story was that they started using their pregnancy predictions score mechanism where they could, based on your purchasing choices, rick figure out if you were pregnant or someone in your house is pregnant, possibly before they knew it themselves. And according to story. This infuriated one. American dad in minnesota my dad

I got this in the mail. The man said she still unhappy school and you're, sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs trying to encourage her to get pregnant. The man's outrage was short lived. He liked to checking. His daughter and discovered more details about, was going on behind his back at home. She was in fact pregnant, just as the clever marketing had anticipated fighting for some people. It's a fear story. Oh my god. Corporations know more about me that I know, but myself, I'm being tracked everywhere in the sphere of parents. Are you paranoid, if they're out, to get you to quote woody allen but for other people I think I heard that story and just went catching the money gold mine? Are you

me about. The state is out there and we can be knowing people better than they knew themselves and targeting are advertising at them. A beautiful new gold rush awaits us data, gold rush and the story went viral interesting lee it was all second hand I mean no one has ever ever managed to speak to this alleged dad or his daughter from minnesota. Yet where are they? We need to track them down, and the second point is like: does it matter? If it's true or does it matter? If it's possible, What is possible in this brave new world big data It's this is the question I'm going to be asking looking at what could be the power of myth and legend one particular area of lives, digital advertising

It's an industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars every year. It's one the powers, the modern internet, as we know it, firms like facebook, Google, This have built their empire on ads, which is why uses don't usually pay for their services, but just like the possibly mythical pray, team from Minnesota, in fact being played by the story of a data driven, add economy, other companies that pay for it. being taken for a ride. Advertisers are basically the atm of the internet. this entire internet economy. Entire internet economy is based on advertisers spending more money. every year and most I we are paying for trash all of this hypercard saying all this a I all, this machine learning its total be ass, its total snake oil and its actually causing societal harm.

Well. It's a sunny spring day and I've come now to a place called the brenner museum in west london. It offers, according to his own marketing a nostalgic journey through too years of consumer culture and it seems like there's quite a few pointers here all too happy to take that trip. What are you decide to come to this museum? I've heard about it from chapel work with and all interested. You know the old advertising and had its packaging look two years ago. Oh yes, I say that you, I oh the out sort of stuff be a way to do that again, nostalgic, yet Can you remember a favor add from from your youth smash smashing ashrama is aliens, much smash, mascot smash. It will go and tell him about the honey mommy.

the highly moist sugar path. Since we have raised the gorilla one year, nostalgia. You're, like remember that, back in the day happy memories of all that yeah? My remains more remains too good to her ribbons. Apparently, even the museums found is gripped by the nostalgia. That's robert, opaque he's a former add executive himself. He personally collect Many of the exhibits on show here the shiny, maddening wallpaper, that's decorated are broadcast media. A city centres are lives all the way back to the nineteenth century. He showed me round some of those earliest exhibits dishes.

moment when that ready starts to proliferate with the industrial revolution, it was a consumer revolution which rarely benefited people's lives because of course, but we want constantly is convenience, and that is one of the cornerstones. Promoting it's not only making sure that everybody remembers your brand, but also the benefits of that brian is going to give you and you think, there's no question that the advertising we're looking at here. The early advertising did deliver a benefit. repaper, absolutely, and not only to the everyday middle class person who can afford these in many ways luxuries, but also to the servants who had to clean the homes. But there is a wonderful it mt, jackal, baldwin's, nervous pills and they care nervousness quite obviously irritability of temper, one strength and energy fear dread neuralgia hysteria disturb sleep,

Oh no pains and disease is just to make sure it's everything all diseases, every single thing, then go to they still cell Baldwin's nervous pills? I could use a pack. Could Well, I'm sorry to say that they went out to business many many years ago. Maybe that product wasn't quarters goes, it promised kidnapped yourself, This time there was the famous quite wasn't there, that by John wanamaker being the american industrialists, one of the great pioneers of american advertising and launch department stores out in the states. He said I know half money I spend on advertising is wasted. I just have no idea which huh how much did advertises know that their ads will work Well, because when they saw the sales figures go skyward, they were reassured when smartest winces had a big campaign about how smart smart is were the sails were doubling

it was just astonishing, so you just saw an instant correlation. It would never be instant, but he'll be a graph that you could track. The tracking of ads has never been a precise science. There it's one thing to correlate a campaign with a surgeon sales, but knowing the added self has made the difference. Well, not always the same thing: he used to maintain sixtys and seventys, will golden age with broad caused advertising the arrival of the internet to deliver a cultural shift for some advertisers. It felt like afresh odd. Essentially we like making funny little films and we hated tv advertising. People were becoming sick about the timing. I think advertising was becoming too pervasive. This one of the pioneers of the digital age. Matt Smith, founder of a now defunct london production company called the viral factory. His teams

lies in creating intriguing Stories meant simply to entertain with little obvious branding adds that weren't tat, if you like, and they were often wildly pop, We thought we could in a very small way, make funny videos send them out, would email them around. They would go viral. That was a term that had already started thanks to Malcolm gladwell in his book. The tipping point. and millions of people see them. It would be great, be cheap and be entertaining described. For me, if you will one or two of your favorites So there's one I really like for a washing machine. The client was samsung, where a how to shoot is taking place in the snowy waste of canada for a washing machine and a bare appears company, with a fair by anemones retreats.

We got arranged with a rifle saying: don't panic? Don't panic just give a bear a minute he's going to move on to slap the bear the bear wanders up to the washing machine sort of sniffs at it stands up and then It's far off, revealing sort of teddy bear character and boxes, shorts underneath and sticks in the washing machine. Thanks to a bit of sensitive sea Zack, thanks with amazing bittacy bollywood level quality cd I, which we paid very little for its initiative, it's funny, but the reason I'm really proud of it is because it was for washing machine, and I honestly honestly hand on out, don't think anyone had ever made an entertaining add for washing machine before that time how many washing machines it sold is a really tricky question and it's something is to bother us a lot which was we never really knew what kind of impact we are having on the bottom line, but it turns out in advertising agencies that that's cool

from a case that old problem again, when do ads, actually help to sell products, it is a constant theme for us sadly format smith and for his funny little films go viral. Wasn't enough, his firm went under the mat. Men of the digital age wanted provable profits, They turned to new fangled data science. Instead, to make it happen, the marketing strategy. Standards here recalls the launch. Google search engine about twenty years ago provided the first glimpse of what was poor This was a revelation. We call it paid such reaches the. Its eyes, and you see at the top of the results page. It was the first wave of diesel advertising that really worked. What this Google paid search does is, when I use it a key word: the ad engine we'll try to look for an advertising that matches the sand. Keyword.

then show the ad. If that advertiser is bidding higher than other advertising? Does an auction muddle and all of this happens in real time, so that was the first, where the second big wave, I count that as when facebook became really big, it's a very different approach. It's based on characteristics of data data that the platform has collected about the user on top of the more sort of general demographic information, and it's this model that is really taken over in recent years: digital targeting or programmatic advertising, as it's known with the likes of facebook and google, increasingly taking the lead in harvesting data about our habits, Tastes weaknesses? It certainly seems to have changed how we feel about advertising. Compare these students, for instance, to the nostril museum goers, who we heard from earlier. I deleted my instagram just because

so distracting the abbots. They seemed like my best friends that they knew it What I wanted when I want to do, it was so targeted the way they collect my personal data and then use it to throw products back out at me. It felt a little bit like a invasive like we know something about you, yeah there's a log and that kind of target either. You gonna feel like definitely like, though, What do you mean? on online, so you can ever get away from anything will fall. book and google alone raked in three hundred billion dollars from advertising. In just the last year. Most of that is programmatic. Reaching us through a magical and totally automated sales process So how does it work when it is a truly extraordinary process? Sam Tomlinson, head of marketing and media insight team with a firm price. Waterhouse coopers taught me through one example,

imagine a user clicking on a website, for instance the one for the british newspaper, the guardian? That sets in motion an almost instantaneous chain reaction, while that web pages loading based on your previous browsing history, the guardian were file for signal. Saying hey where to serve a web page to someone who is probably mile, probably affluent, probably basting? Let's say london, probably eighteen, thirty, four, that signal what thing gets sent to a demand side platform there'll, be media agency trading, desks bidding based on precept, algorithms. Whether bids the most wins the ocean? They then far signal to an ad server, saying: hey. We ve just one the right to serve and adds to someone who is probably male, probably affluent, probably london, procreating. Thirty, four, What campaigns are we running that fit that criteria? There will be the decision as well, if it's raining outside, let's have the umbrella around the ad

creative unit is selected and then serve to appear on the web page and, above all that it happening: nanoseconds has that needs to happen, as your web page is so there is an option for my eyeballs as an option for your eyeballs and will end next time that your your web page takes a little longer to load than you would lie. It might be because this or this happening in the background, sam slick. Doesn't it millions of ads delivered infractions of seconds every moment of the day The advertisers usually only pay for these when we click on the ad brands a fucking out some seven hundred billion dollars a year on digital advertising, and why not with all this top level, data unpicking our secrets? Targeting are very souls well, that is the theory said. My name is katharine Elizabeth Tucker and I

professor of management at mit slow for the last ten to twelve years, have as an economist being really trying to investigate what makes advertising work on line on what it doesn't, and it turns out that all too often it's just not working well, as we were led to believe we recruited a panel of thirty thousand people and then saw what happened in terms of what I'd say was shown and whether or not it actually matched what we asked for in know around and the same people even noticed tat said I could idea, the limit of and to begin with, always really entry sing to us. Is that only about two percent of occasions did you see the ad have any effect on what we're gonna call purchasing, in other words, did it actually affect effect? Will people said they might do about? products, let alone actually purchasing, and so

Ninety eight percent of the time consumers. basically not even noticing the had been fired at them. Basically, what we were finding- and that gives you an idea- How difficult it is to get this online medium to work. What about them? much vaunted targeting that we hear so much about with with new advertising. Programatic advertising doesn't help that advertisers canal reach out and tumors tub the people precisely that they wish to to reach with their ads? Well, of course, anything you can do to get your ads in front of more well, people is gonna have a large effect. However, one of the studies I did, we ask how appetizing it works to show our adds to men.

We actually measured, whether or not it was men who saw them, and we found that actually, the ad was shown to man around off the time which, if you think about it, is really quite funny? In other words, she saying these Basically laser targeted adds were actually know better than random and selecting something simple, someone's gender. It is funny perhaps, but is also kind of terrifying if you're in advertising but can you be looking or the implications of this in the second half of the show, but finale here about what this apparently lousy. Targeting feels like for those paying for the ads, Many Jemmy runs the: u s watchdog, trying to support firms online, but she began her career as a digital marketer for more british start up, which is when she discovered that the ads we're going astray,

assumed that we would have her eyes being placed on CNN were in your times or and bc news. And instead, what I found was that my answer appearing on websites had never heard of websites that looks like they had all kinds of. numbers and on one website that that jumped out at me was a conspiracy theories website. So just not the kind of quality or the kind of websites that my demographic would be engaging with. We did the math later. It was very difficult to sort there and figure out, and I think- and I am still not sure we may have gotten to paying customers, we don't even after pain, suite to customers from entire campaign, and that means our campaign cost as fifteen hundred pounds per customer? So that's almost two thousand dollars That sounds like a colossal waste of money. That's right and we hooked up two up stuff

that allows us to actually see Users are doing wendy log onto our landing page. That is that the paper you got to when you click on the ad and we found these arrows like just got kind of going dead ones to the page. Loading- and I was like now is- is my car That is a landing page that bad that people just left. And I did actually really affected me emotionally. I was like a knife and my nodded good about copyright or, as I thought and later I realized tat. It was bought. What is actually happening is about was clicking on the odd and then because the money you know the transactions with complete, so some kind of computerized machine was accessing your add clicking on it for what purpose for money, because We're ties are basically the atm of the internet the atm of this Tire internet economy,

and the entire internet economy is based on advertisers spending a lot of money more money every year and not knowing where that money is going and need Jemmy is certainly not the only advertise are experiencing. This bought traffic as its name, fake computerized humans or, in some cases, real humans pay for by criminals, harvesting money. Of advertisers. Remember the deal is the advertiser pays out every time, someone On the add his ass a tale told by a small business owner andrew, listen, more, who runs a firm selling high end headphones, have to vancouver canada or adds were showing up in latin america, and we don't be business there and we ended up with hundreds of thousands of clicks with no purchases. Again, had, I think, a hundred first time, visitors from Guatemala, for example, but then

many thousands subsequent clicks. So it meant that there was a hundred people basically clicking two thousand times each which didn't make any sense or sites really great. No one's from your eyesight two thousand times, especially in a month, so certainly look like fraud to me. I dont really your house to discredit. Do you feel like the programme tax system of advertising has been good for your customer base. No, no! I don't However, I think that for really small companies, it's really attractive sounding took up here, without a ton of resources we ve quadrupled or business standin in no small part, because we ve been able to invest that my elsewhere, andrew listen, more has gone back. Happily, he says to more conventional methods of promoting his business

Can it really be that this entire system is fundamentally flawed and the question will be asking over the next half hour plus we'll have a bit of this? What is a region? Where would we find hosting configuration know landowner since a nightmare, my produce adjoining setting up our own who take experiment to see how easy it might be for us to extract money from the aid system. Stay with us maybe see well service. I made butler and welcome back to the second part of the advertising trap. The show exploring claims that the digital add market may be fundamentally flawed. hi. My name is steve to Dallas in twenty two, I was on? Leave from you see, berkeley working at ebay or where was task to apply it

mc reasoning to how much Ebay really getting for the dollars they spend on advertising professor to Dallas, was about to embark on what you might call a gotcha moment for digital advertising. What he'd noticed that the people around him at ebay and those of other firms too, for that matter, we're looking simply crude correlations to prove that their ads were working. What people do they I try to see if those people who came and bought from them and they were exposed to ads, bought more than people who didn't seem to be exposed to ads. The problem is: if people who are searching for goods get ads and they would go to ebay any way then, by presenting the ads Ebay, is just giving them yet another door to come to the store, so that be the analogy of digital advertising. A bit like handing out a pizza flyer to some,

whose already come into a pizza restaurant. It's a total waste of time and money, to assess the real effect of ebay's adds professor to Dallas, decided to adopt a randomize control experiment. He persuaded the company to and of all its ads in one large region of america, to see how that, compared with the other, areas where the as was still on display. Surprisingly, it made no difference at all. What we found was quite striking. Ebay believed that the advertising on paid search, which is one of the channels, was responsible for about five percent of sales, and that was a lot of money. What we showed is that it was an order of magnitude smaller. It was literally about half a percent of sales. rather than gaining, Ebay was losing many many billions of dollars a year

I was losing millions of dollars yet. So what did the bosses say when you showed them this research, for they were in rigged and that, of course, led to a lot of soul searching within four hours. The present slash the paid search budget by around a hundred million dollars started doing things differently. This was back in twenty twelve and it took a few years but gradually other major firms have begun to follow. Ebay's lead, we're all wasting way too much time and money on immediately jane with poor standards. Adoption too many here's grating their own homework. behold to allow criminals to rip off saying it like it is to a roomful of ad executives. That's mark, pritchard chief brand office the consumer goods giant procter and gamble very publicly. I'm seeing the bold move to withdraw close to two

Hundred million dollars from his firms, digital at budget and several other major companies abbey and be chase manhattan, huber among them. been raining back. Their add, spend complaining about losing millions of dollars a year to bots those software applications widely deployed by fraudsters. By I'm estimates bob's, naturally deliver three quarters of all the traffic online. my name is my jones, I'm a former activists, india was in pre. Deep with anything I could get my hands on as far as technology goes MIKE knows a lot about bots today he helps to protect agencies and firms from hackers and fraudsters, but back then was one of them. Many of his friends, he says what cashing in on the digital add market I mean you could do A website with random ip address

and next thing you know, you're off to the races were aiming click bots towards us adverts. In order to generate the clicks that you need to to roll the the money into the door, it's a business. You know they have call centers built around us. They have a support line. You can actually call to get assistance. This is a full blown engine, it's it's a money making industry and the shady industry. That's believed to be worth at least tens of billions of dollars a year. but even the legitimate add market seems murky and complex. Remember, affirm, creates the ad, often with the help of an ad, see it sent off to an array of ad tech firms or exchanges, and then they plus the likes of google and facebook. Place the atom a variety of website, just as we click on them lots of people in that process. Taking a cot and lots of up unity for miss selling misdirection an outright fraud.

Ripping it off is as easy as MIKE says it is. We wondered shouldn't we be able to test that okay, so the first thing I need is a website name or what is a widget? Where would I and hosting configuration. This is Johnny my producer and he's not attacking he really isn't, but today, is creating a website to see if advertisers can be persuaded to offer us money as well? So what we really want to do at a's test his theory that it's fairly simple to set up a website, which we can then register with the bigger take firms who will send a load of adverts our way who, if we were the bad guys in theory, we could effectively start clicking on ourselves and get pay for right. So we are creating the scalp news website. Now it looks it looks. You know almost always good here.

I mean look, I can hear the surprising your voice said because I most definitely he no mark Zuckerberg, but yet you know, because there were so many places on line that effectively have all these. The a very smart, impressive, looking premade templates, you just have to kind of put in a few of the basic details and they'll do the rest for you and that the most difficult bit will certainly in those time consuming, but it's getting the content now. Obviously, if I were a bad guy, I could just play, derive it from everywhere else. We haven't done that we've taken it from various bbc sites to make it look as legitimate as possible, but it is fairly easy to Do this with absolutely no skill or knowledge whatsoever? Ok, so we ripped off the bbc. We stolen their content for the purposes of this exercise are we sending this to? Who who decides whether it can attract ads? So this is where the ad tech firms come in effectively. It's all the middle men who look at our website and say

right, ok, you're, a legitimate site, you ve got lots of visitors coming each month. You looked like the kind of people we want to send adverts too. Obviously we don't have any of those things. My theory is, though there will be some firm out there. The aren't exactly the most scrupulous. Let's say who will say: yeah fine will look the other way you can have some adverts. That's my fears whether one oil happen- I guess we'll have to see well- will return to that. But there is The question here too, as we surf the web, how many of us are really, noticing any of this advertising anyway, TIM. as a former Google executive who worked in ay, I and machine learning he's no written look exposing what he calls an attention deficit disorder within programmatic advertise, a kind of shit delusion that big data is brilliant,

drilling into our enemies psyches. It really isn't. He says you know when the first banner ads came out in the mid nineties, the click through rate of those address about fifty percent as a one in two people write that saw the add, you know engaged with it now. It is your very surprised to see click, your rates that are higher than point four percent rad. We see a hundredfold decrease in the effectiveness of these ads in just a few decades. Re actually turns out that, in practice, this system is is faulty full of fraud and his excellent, even question about whether or not it shapes behaviour at all these companies, the big companies, the Google's of an facebooks, they definitely say done they that they offer metrics to advertise. Two brands saying look. This is who your reaching. This is how your reaching them. You think that data is fundamentally inaccurate. A lot of it is accurate right, but about twenty percent may be inaccurate. So let me

Maybe one in four adds being delivered using this data. Re are ending up now where they intended, and I think that you can say: ok, well, you know, there's a little bit of noise in any data set like what about that other seventy five percent and that action that the algorithms are so good at using the stated to figure out who would buy a product that these people actually would have bought the products any ways. In the absence of the add there, it is some studies, it's just that. Actually, that accounts for should have a huge amount of the so called sort of causal effect that we see on advertising. tim used to work in a machine learning a google. How come this system so rubbish? Well, I mean actually ultimately, machine learning is a kind of correlation finding machine right. It's one of the reasons it so powerful is theirs. Promise that it can identify patterns that humans haven't been able to identify before, but one of the interest. things is a machine learning.

Has no sense of context. Data predicts whose good likely to buy, but there are unable to actually answer. The question is my ad having a causal effect on causing people to buy. Now we did all the big tech firms, both Google and facebook, to comment on the questions raised in these pro. I am neither wanted to give us an interview, but regarding the accuracy of the targeting google to give us. This comment are added as a business model, is designed to show helpful relevant adds to people the meteor rating council certifies that Google's click measurement technology adheres to industry standards for counting clicks and that this technology is accurate. Finally, we have robust advertising policies that protect users, advertisers and publishers from bad actors to fight against advertising fraud. Real. I spoke to representatives of the wider, add industry, so Martin sorrel, for instance, is one of its biggest names he fancied double. P pay the world's largest, add firm and he's now leading s for capital. A new car.

When he aimed primarily at programmatic advertising. He says most The criticisms of the industry are exaggerated or out of date digital will continue to grow its share of media like it. What and consumers do like it at the end of the day I mean they, they wouldn't be responding in the way they are. I mean our cons are not fools. They track and measure where their advertising spending is gaining the greatest returns, and they can measure it much more easily on digital media. They can do an analog media that has been waste over the years and that has been fought over the years which people have looked at, but that isn't our rapidly diminishing and with with technological advantages of advances, really gives you the opportunity to

emanate friction the system. You made a claim that fraud is on the decrease in the market, since this expressing its on is on the increase had the opposite direction it might be under The billions of dollars by twenty twenty five years see. This is my feelings are hundreds of billions of dollars, but as an extreme comment, there are still people who exploit the system. As I said to you, but being weeded out and it's in the interests of the big platforms, the three big ones and the others twitter, snap and pinterest to eradicate it slowly. And you have no doubt that they are time, independent serious about isolated, because if, if what you say is true. If it works against

some out in sorrow, we ve got two or three show that we provide a full tree environment for buyers and publish, as you know, we utilise their party technology to flag fraudulent infantry anything discovered. We take action against it in this vigilance has actually resulted in a hit. Low showed level across our platform, the words there of Emma newman, she represents problematic one of the dozen. Of usually unseen firms that connect websites with ad exchanges and run those instant auctions forever nice. But despite her assertion that third parties, software is weeding out the box and the fraudsters add tech experts, we spoke to say it's ineffective. It still only catching a small fraction of the bad stuff and in any case argue, does no less skirt a bigger question with the targeting actually works in the first place, We would have to see the advertisers naive or stupid that they would invest in something that just

isn't working or only yielding a very small amount. This is, was chandler chief marketing officer, the trade body, the internet advertising bureau in the uk but to him one study suggesting that brands were making just a four per cent return on their ads. In other words, they was scarcely breaking even what the full per cent yield doesn't account, for is the people that might have seen the ad and taken an action a month on, for example, we don't expect people to watch something on tv and then go out the next day and buy a car, because they've seen it not process much. in three months in is it's no different for digital advertising, but there's no way to test that. Is there so the appetizers are just going to have to guess whether their ads are working long term know there's lots of different ways in which you can do. Of course you got all the things like econometrics and market mix modeling which look at the exposure of different ads and then able to link that with, I was data at the other end, so the measurement is very advanced as well. How come so may large companies we ve heard about in the last few years have seen

to let the market a maneuver alone last year was they may at last to a hundred men million dollars in a year to fraud and it was pulling out well. I think that for every story you get there you get others a mean. Someone like paean J, probably the biggest advertising spend around the world, have said that they marketing If the role is more effective, the more money they spend in digital's when they upped their digital spend, they felt that their whole marketing effectiveness overall went up procter and gamble. Europe, Yes, I mean they left. Digital advertising, Well, in their day, they complained and moved out by your saying they ve moved back in yeah it. It was a great thing because, sudden The whole industry was alive to the fact that the biggest spender in digitally saying look. We need to clean this thing up, and lots has happened since he made that speech for five years ago well at times that he is right, procter and gamble, annette back into digital advertising. Having were told optimized their own algorithms sober

the move to slash their ad budget was just a warning intended to press the ad world to do better. Anyway, day, the problems are being addressed, industry people say and is the responsibility of advertisers, as well as exchanges to check the results But how easy is it to do that, especially for the smaller firms. I asked the digital to end this here, whose job it is to analyze returns on ads for companies, but you have very little. of action measuring the impact so to try to measure then is, is engaged in an I should going back to, and this is what the bigger platforms are doing. You try to go back, two posts campaigns of it, so you don't know about engagement, your guessing and you do this days after the event which hopefully people respond to, but, let's be honest, most of us ignore service when they come to us. After after after we broadly,

I'm just wondering how how much do we really know about engagement and how much, as you say, is it just like? Advertising has always been a bit of a guess, now you know, a lot of things are the first, the first solid metrics that we use. This is because you are the ones that are showing. What clicks or no signs of engagement you remove them, but the click through can be bought. The click through could be bought. The click through could be bots. You can't always know every I think this is one of the reasons why people are so demanding is that we ve been some kind of expectation that measure everything you can't really measure everything in, and you can't always know that this wouldn't have happened anyway. Well, google and facebook do say they have made a lot of changes to improve transparency for advertisers, and it's true have. In fact, even I can go on to google now and precisely what it thinks it knows about me, some of which, by the way is weirdly off beat. I have

sleep, never liked country, music, Google, if you listening, but anyway, let's get back to that experiment. We were running you remember that dodgy website that these johnny. Yes, I have something interesting to tell you about. My website. Call me back my producer johnny again, so I did So you will remember that we were trying to get adverts on our website and to do that, we had to get in touch with all these at tech companies. I must, in touch with more than a dozen on all of them said no, I didn't suit the criteria because We are a website with no traffic. We don't have any of this search engine optimization nobody's. Looking at what we do. I was fast leading hope I was then website form somewhere in the deepest dark has passed the web, where I came across one firm I hadn't heard of before, and

and behold within probably half a day. I started getting adverts on our web page right, so they are offering us ads and we're not going to name them. But what are these adds worth? How much would we get for them if we made them active and took payments at what it looks like a huge amount and I'll be honest. The adverts their appearing are certainly not premium content. However, you can imagine once you start getting a few thousand clicks it just a couple of cents each it starts to rack up fairly considerably. so our many experiment has shown that the big players and fooled all at easily but also that even the most basic attempts at scamming, like oz, can have some. Success. We did ask me: exchanging question here to speak to us for this programme. They didn't respond. Its total be ass, its total snake oil and I would like the third party attack economy

two mostly die and go away and implored the veteran had frozen Data augustine food is among those hoping for change, people the fraud and blatant shortcomings of this industry. finally leading some of his clients. Regular advertisers, terrific Their approach. Marketers are starting to realize that their spending in digital is not actually producing the results that they thought. It was because they're finally willing to ask they had been suffering from photo before fear of finding out. They didn't want to find out, because it was more convenient to believe that everything worked, but now there's been cracks in this damn and it's starting to get larger and larger, and that's why I see advertisers actually starting to move Way from fraud, detection, they're, moving more towards audits to say, am I getting what I paid for, and most of them are finding out that there are not

when you're, using out in your iphone. You may start to see this. It's the new treaty, There is a wider question here. Of course, should these firms even be allowed to track us as they are and trade opera? The data data like your age, location, health, information spending habits and your browsing history to name a few bad from apple last year, approach in software, changes meant to limit the spread of so called third party cookies or trackers google introducing similar measures next year, although some critics argue, the moves are just gonna provide big tech firms with an even tighter monopoly on who knows what about Does new regulation coming in all the time as well like the data protection rules being applied by the EU? All of that is good, but is not on according to current of release, she's an associate professor of philosophy at oxford institute for ethics in I- and she reckons that

tire programatic ad system should never have been allowed to exist in the first place. It's risking our democracy is eroding equality, because if you and I are being shown different ads and different opportunities, for instance, because you're a man you're likely seeing ads for higher paying jobs than I am, and that means we don't have equality of opportunity. It's risking citizens, because all these personal data not only ends up with marketing people but also gets sold onto data brokers, who then sell it on to insurance companies and bang. Some prospective employers and governments is risking nice national security. It has all these kinds of very negative externalities that it's simply not worth it. There is a deal here. Isn't though, there has been a bargain. Some would say you give us your data for free. We give you free services like

search engine, social media platforms and so on, if targeted advertising is inefficient and economic as you're arguing, is not going to throw everything in the air. I mean. What are the implications for the way in which the modern digital economy works, the implications are not as radical as you might expect, and we have to remember that twenty years ago we did just fine without programmatic adds, but those others like eggs, Google, TIM Wang have to concede. We are talking about the future of a trillion, dollar global industry here, if this is all a huge bubble. How scared should we be, I think, fairly scare, because you know this is more than just mark Zuckerberg having a few less billion dollars in his pocket. There, so much on the internet that relies on this marketplace. So much of the modern sort of media ecosystem actually relies on the continued robustness, problematic advertised.

we might worry about a world, particularly in questions of certain equity, a world in which everything is pay walt. Are there other forms of funding the web right subscription, or otherwise, that can fund the web at the speed and scale that advertising has been able to achieve. When we switch out the kind of horror, fundamental funding, mechanics of the web, things will change and there may be very hard tradeoffs an internet. The largely runs on subscription looks very different from an internet runs on advertising. Ok, perhaps we're getting ahead of ourselves here. The industry is still booming. After all, and despite some key reason results for facebook. It continues to grow at breakneck speed, J Chancellor of the internet, advertising bureau says it's delivering all kinds of economic benefits to us all as well, and the reports of its demise. Well that greatly exaggerated.

I remember lots of conversations about half block his years ago when, in a block has referred to be going to kill this dish. Laboratories model they ve actually gone down since arrogant, very excited by them. Just at the pace of change, television is becoming programme. Attic out of home ads are being born in mated way, radio things like spotify a cast a room in both pragmatically. So the term did you we're gonna become quite redundant because that's the way and the means by which all advertising is gonna be bold. and an with air already. I have to level with you. I have no idea whether the digital advertising economy is at risk. It may have problems, of course, but then that just be the usual bleeding edge of a new technological frontier, a market that's coming.

understand its limitations. Professor Catherine Tucker may have helped to expose many of those flaws, but even she thinks this new data driven technology is here to stay. Advertising has always been unsatisfactory. Think about newspaper A testing is always been the case that people may not see the odd they may for afraid away. They may not look at it. They may spill coffee over it. We just never been absent, measure that before now we can actually mentioned this and we see is huge surprising what I would call o moments in terms of how off we offer my expectations- and I think that's was the wonderful things

digital media. We can at least sought to measure where we're going wrong. That's a wonderful outcome and something we ve never been able to do before, so that more advertising can move to actually measuring how well the ads are performing rather than something else. We're gonna be able to do a lot better. I began these programmes with the story of how an advertising knew a teenager was pregnant. Before she did was a true, maybe is probably the case that targeted digital adds do hit their target more often than all those billboards or tv commercials did back in the day still a pretty low bar? Isn't it doesn't necessarily mean that they match up to. The bold claims The idea of all no all seeing firms tracking every detail of our daily lives. Of course, for some of us will be a good thing, but the growth

This murky, seemingly unregulated corporate world. As us, accelerated a deep, a kind of unease and mistrust uncertainty point exactly We have all signed up for this has been the advertising trap with production from Johnny? I answer it was edited by you levinson in the studio production was by neil churchill. It was some presented by me, I made butler, and you know what I still in my country, music. The documentary is just one of our bbc world service podcast. There are many others too cheese from business daily is the place to find out about all sorts of exciting thing. Affecting our lives in the world of business and beyond, there's no greater power than an idea whose time has come and the time had come. I think business

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