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Hello again readers, thanks for dropping in! Today I'm looking at online advertising - what I see in social media, how it compares to traditional advertising, and the granularity (how dialed-in) of the targeting of these advertisements.
When looking for examples of advertising and sponsored posts on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, I encountered some interesting things. First, it’s important to know that my VPN was connected to the Netherlands, which country is under GDPR regulation. So before I could advance to the site, I had to address their PII disclosure page – which gives EU users the option to “reject all” cookies (image above.) Whereas here in the States, our options are “allow all” or “strictly necessary.” I guess our right to privacy only applies when a data broker’s money isn’t involved.
While still on the EU server, and on my Facebook account, I got some pretty basic ads for software and tech products – the calls to action were minimal, and imagery was just like looking at a magazine ad. But mostly, I just saw my friend’s posts! I don’t even know what to do with a Facebook page that isn’t flashing ads at me all the time.
To shorten a short story, I had to switch to a US server in order to get the full array of online advertising creep. And I logged in through Chrome to maximize the invasiveness. On US Facebook, the ads are also boring – not visually attractive or repulsive, but the calls to action were stronger and there was a greater variety of advertisements. One ad, from NVIDIA, offers a book download on Conversational AI…just what I kind of wanted. On Instagram I didn’t see any ads at all. Is this a fluke? On YouTube I got a wide variety of ads at varying intervals.
I think the impact of traditional, paid advertising is lessening significantly, as our worlds get smaller and more driven by technology. From last week, our classmate Masashi pointed out that regarding Tik Tok, the image frame is set in such a way that it forces people to focus on the content, and also makes it hard to distinguish if the minute is from a company or a regular user or influencer. Social media advertising has a strong advantage. Who’s reading magazines or looking at billboards for information anymore? Everyone I know lowers the volume or leaves the room when an ad plays on TV or on the radio.
It might be because of my settings and online habits, but very few things are accurately targeted at me. I do get advertisements about technology and Pride events, but the spread of technology is unfocused, and Pride applies to the entire community, so it’s also unfocused. Even though the ad topics are general, they do fit the profile. So for me, online advertising is a lot more similar to traditional methods. It’s not too intrusive, but it’s also not wrong.
I’m not sure what advertising would look like for a web user who does not actively hide and erase their cookie trail. But if you want to prune your collectible data, this can easily be accomplished by selecting to clear history/cookies upon closing each window; and then closing each window (not just the tabs, the entire window) before going on to the next thing. Another way to stop data collection and target group clustering is by having your activities going in different browsers (cookies can’t jump between browsers such as Firefox, Safari or Chrome, for example, so no correlations can be accurate.) My fake business is working on a better solution, which will probably encapsulate the connection or tag-along a user’s VPN and use a friendly bot to obscure the data.
Readers, thank you again for joining me on this journey! I hope it was a good and mostly light read!
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