Advertising Groups Ask Apple to 'Rethink' New Cookie Tracking Standards in Safari 11

[bkaus]

This is right up there with the Angie's List SCAM...

They happen to renew accounts automatically. WITHOUT any sort of reminder when the renewal period is coming up, and they have a firm no-refund policy.

Here is what they said when I asked about it.

"Thank you for your feedback. I apologize for any frustration regarding our auto renewal program. This program was implemented as a result of member feedback indicating it would be convenient to renew without being required to call or mail in a request to do so. We know that with every improvement, we run the risk of offending a small portion of our members. Some people, caught off guard when their renewal goes through, clearly do not benefit from this intended convenience. The notification appears on the online “Join” page that potential members see when signing up for an account."

Did I mention Angie's list is a scam? I suggest one star reviews

 

[clauzzz203]

I say twist the knife even harder, let them feel it

 

[IJ Reilly]

Sounds like a poorly setup retargeting program. Like everything, there are smart advertisers and dumb ones. With retargeting, you should only be getting ads for products you viewed but DIDN'T buy. If you're seeing them for the ones you did buy then they didn't setup their conversion tracking correctly.

This is an issue of an advertiser setting up their campaign incorrectly, not the technology not being smart enough. Just look at Amazon. Their retargeting should stop as soon as you buy the product they're pushing (though they may start suggesting a related add-on product instead).

I don't suppose this is up to the advertisers so much as the ad companies who package these targeted programs for the advertisers (all of them not having the control or options available to Amazon). In any case the premise of how this targeting works appears to be flawed. I may have looked at a product and decided not to buy it, or to buy something else instead. I see lots of "targeted" ads for products I've decided against buying. When I was traveling in Europe recently I started getting blasted with ads for products in the Czech Republic. Not only was I probably not going to be buying a Skoda, I know only about three words of Czech. The point being, somebody paid for this rather bizarre effort at targeting. So when I hear the targeted online advertising industry complain that Apple is about to destroy the Internet, I do have to laugh a little.

 

[Boatboy24]

Content on the internet costs money to produce. Advertising pays the bills for site hosting and content creation.

I don't know why people revel in blocking the revenue streams that grant them these things.

Because they have become intrusive, overbearing and obnoxious.

 

[axantas]

...Right now the advertising idiots are just too intrusive and do not deserve to live on my computer. Oh yes and I pay my bandwidth so their use of it is parasitic!

Their greed destroys the base of their own business....

 

[fivetoedbear]

I wonder how advertising is ever successful on TV or in print. Surely corporate America should have gone out of business way before mobile computing happened, for the lack of direct tracking of individuals.

I don't block most ads. I believe in advertising-supported internet. I _do_ block noisemakers, trackers, and malware. You know what I can't block? Text inserted inline in the page. Like Google does on searches. That has actually gotten me to look at things.

Seriously, you advertisers even fail at tracking. I drive a Subaru. I go to forums for Subarus. You have your opportunity to mark me. So why do I go to the Chicago Tribune and get an animated Jeep that's driving in front of the news articles so I can't read them. Seriously? You think this is effective? Targeted? Think I want a Jeep? I want one even less now.

If you want to know why there's blocking, it's because advertisers are disrespectful and annoying. You need to realize that some of us have negative reactions to being annoyed. I really don't think that's what you want. Advertising is about giving a good feeling about a product, right?

So inline some text and a nice graphic. It should come from the same server as the rest of the page. No JavaScript. Drop a hint. Entice me. Don't shove a car in my face in front of the thing I'm trying to read.

And realize, that when Apple does something like this, it's because you brought it on yourselves. At least somebody is looking out for the consumer. For you advertisers, consumers are the people who buy the products from the companies that pay you. Be nice to the consumer.

 

[nsayer]

As someone who works in paid media,

"my username is particularly apt."

 

[ApfelKuchen]

Its not ads that is the issue, it the cross site data gathering that is the issue.

Not that I'm in favor of it, but cross-site data gathering is one of the factors that makes web advertising worth paying for. Block that, and sites will likely see a drop in ad rates.

One way or the other, if we find the web to be valuable, we have to be willing to pay for it - whether indirectly via advertising, promotional/marketing budgets, and institutional support (university and government budgets, etc), or directly (subscriptions, donations, retail purchases, etc.). If our ISPs paid a portion of our monthly fees to the content providers (as they do for cable TV), we might be able to wean ourselves off the notion that all that content is free. It's either worth paying for, or not. As it is, we pay ISPs for the pipes, but not the water that flows through those pipes.

 

[nsayer]

The fact that Google is contemplating doing something like this in Chrome should be regarded not as a move to help Chrome users, but a move to squelch their competition. After all, what business is Google in if not selling ads.
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Not that I'm in favor of it, but cross-site data gathering is one of the factors that makes web advertising worth paying for. Block that, and sites will likely see a drop in ad rates.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

 

[sos47]

Safari 11? The 11 version of Internet Explorer is already crap.

 

[lifeinhd]

the problem is that they still work a bajillion times better than random untargeted ads.

That's not a problem from where I'm sitting. I see that as a feature. I don't want an ad that gives me relevant content; irrelevant ads are easier to ignore, which in turn saves me money.

 

[OldSchoolMacGuy]

I don't suppose this is up to the advertisers so much as the ad companies who package these targeted programs for the advertisers (all of them not having the control or options available to Amazon). In any case the premise of how this targeting works appears to be flawed. I may have looked at a product and decided not to buy it, or to buy something else instead. I see lots of "targeted" ads for products I've decided against buying. When I was traveling in Europe recently I started getting blasted with ads for products in the Czech Republic. Not only was I probably not going to be buying a Skoda, I know only about three words of Czech. The point being, somebody paid for this rather bizarre effort at targeting. So when I hear the targeted online advertising industry complain that Apple is about to destroy the Internet, I do have to laugh a little.

The fact is that retargeting has a MUCH higher ROI than traditional digital advertising. There's a reason marketers are so invested in it. If it didn't work, they wouldn't do it.

You might not believe it works on you but piles of data says otherwise and billions of dollars in sales thanks to retargeting backs up that data.

Again, your example shows a poor execution by an advertiser, not by the ad network itself. Ad networks don't setup the ads. They provide a platform and advertisers setup their own ads and targeting. Very few setup the ads for brands themselves. Sounds like Skoda didn't set up their campaign correctly. That's their fault, not that of the advertising network.

 

[HBX]

Meh, I use PiHole installed on a Raspberry Pi ....network wide ad/tracker blocking. *yawn* Still great Apple is taking this move.

 

[Coldsmoke55]

I love that these advertisers are upset. Their quote, “...bad for consumer choice and bad for the ad-supported online content and services consumers love.” is hysterical. Who in the hell are these so called consumers who love being inundated with garbage ads? I don’t know of one person, not one anywhere, no one who is living and breathing who ever said, “hey, I like these ads I didn’t ask for”. So, I’d challenge those advertisers to produce a list of people who asked for and want their advertising crap. Of course, they must be alive and living in this country, and not in the advertising industry. Come on advertisers, tell us who these knuckleheads, err people are...... I’m betting they come up with zilch, zero, Naha.

 

[EdT]

Who the **** loves ads!?

Very few like ads. Even fewer want to pay a site for content. Ads have been the pact enough people have made with the devil to not have paywalls everywhere. A few people have the knowledge to block/protect themselves from tracking cookies but it's far from common knowledge. Now Apple is providing it to the masses (I'm including myself among the masses) and currently free websites will lose revenue. Big name sites will adapt, small sites may disappear.

 

[OldSchoolMacGuy]

Can these ad agencies listen to what we are saying and instead of getting on Apple's case for trying to help beleaguered consumers? Can they be made to see and acknowledge the error of their ways and work up some unified standards for non-crippling levels of ad implementation and also educate their clients on how to make ads appealing or at least tolerable as opposed to wanting customers to put up even more barriers. Right now it's like we are at war.

It could be a happy synergy if businesses would practice some restraint. They'd get some rejection from people who are stubbornly going to reject advertising anyway. But they'd win over customers like me who don't mind ads if they don't break my browsing experience. Or get too creepy stalkerish with my data.

Sadly I don't see them doing that. In this online world, there's no time to stop. If one advertising network tried to do this, the others are going to blow right by them and eat their lunch. It sucks but it's business.
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If that route is to violate the consumer's trust, I think most of us with brains will say no thanks to those products.

The data shows most users don't know the difference and it very frequently leads to purchase. Again, if it didn't work, advertisers wouldn't do it. You might see through it but most don't and it leads to lots of sales, so the cycle continues.

 

[jhfenton]

18 trackers on the macrumors front page. EIGHTEEN

I see the same thing in Ghostery: 16 advertising trackers, 1 site analytics tracker (Google Analytics), and 1 "essential" tracker (Google Tag Manager). I'd be happy to white list MacRumors if the resulting ads and trackers were simple, efficient, and understandable. As it is, I block them all in self defense, not knowing whether Neodata, NetShelter, OpenX, Purch, Quantcast, Rubicon, and the other dozen are trustworthy and resource efficient.

 

[applesith]

"my username is particularly apt."

You don't think I work in paid media?

 

[ZZ9pluralZalpha]

ha, this is one really nice thing about brick and mortar retail stores. If I look at a pair of pants in the store, every billboard on the way home isn't showing me those pants.

...yet. They’re working on that.

 

[Swift]

Like hell. Advertising money is having its own way on the Internet. It’s like the early days of TV and worse. Advertisers named the program, (“GE Theater,” etc.) the stars read the commercials, and they edited and controlled the content. The upshot was the quiz show scandals. On the Internet, advertising junks up the experience. Ever clicked “You’ll never believe what she looks like to today?” So many ads you can’t breathe without getting trapped by one. Big source of malware. In fact, that’s what supports “fake news” in all its manifestations. We need a law about this, and we need regulations, maybe international regulations.

 

[jhfenton]

You don't think I work in paid media?

I took it as suggesting that "sith" was an appropriate moniker for someone working in paid media.

 

[Swift]

That sounds like it could make a great TV series: a lawless advertising exec attempts to take over the Internet with subversive content. "Breaking Ads"

That’s what happened in 2016.

 

[OldSchoolMacGuy]

Amazon's system doesn't work that well either. They've been suggesting the same 'buy it again' items to me for years - items that *nobody* would buy again in less than about 10 years. Plus a number of very expensive items that I *returned*.

They set these ads in bulk and auto insert the product. Amazon simply sells far too many products for someone to go through and say "This one is a one time purchase while this is an every month buy..." Sure they have some cases where the ads don't fit (like your case) but the other 99% of the time they're accurate and result in a sale.

Remember that ads are all a numbers game. Sure ideally everyone they reached would be the perfect customer and buy but we all know that's not the case. Instead they hope that just a small portion of the thousands who see their ad end up buying. This is why a successful ad campaign generally has a click-through rate only in the single digits (percentage of people who saw the ad and clicked it). If you pay $100 to have your ad seen by 10,000 people and just 10 buy your at $50 each, you've still made a nice return.

 

[TheColtr]

As someone who works in paid media, this is going to be a pain in the butt. Retargeted marketing is very effective. Plus if you're going to get ads, do you want them to be for stuff you actually like? A lot of the time special deals are offered to people with targeted marketing.

EDIT: For all those quoting and saying targeting ads don't work...

Ad suppression is vital to effective retargeting ads; picking when and what to show ads for and turning them off after purchase or when no interest is shown. Simply showing ads for anything and everything someone looks at forever is lazy marketing that does not work as well.

General ads are fine, but I hate targeted ads. I don’t want advertisers knowing what I’m doing. Idgaf if I get “special deals” or whatever. When I want to buy something, and my wallet says I can, then I go buy it. I have never once thought “huh this ad is pretty cool and I’m going to buy this”. This is one of the reasons I use Adblock. Honestly I only browse about five sites religiously. I would much rather pay a small amount each month to the site and get no ads, and then get general ads on the rest of the random pages on the internet.

 

[5105973]

Sadly I don't see them doing that. In this online world, there's no time to stop. If one advertising network tried to do this, the others are going to blow right by them and eat their lunch. It sucks but it's business.
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The data shows most users don't know the difference and it very frequently leads to purchase. Again, if it didn't work, advertisers wouldn't do it. You might see through it but most don't and it leads to lots of sales, so the cycle continues.

Bummer. Well thank you for answering my question. Meanwhile I see MacRumors has declared war on ad blockers. Interesting. I've had mine up and running only about two weeks.