Hungry for revenue, technology platforms race to insert junk ads, forcing users to watch

Consumers used to mistakenly believe that social networks “eavesdropped” on them to produce terrifyingly accurate and coincidental online ads. But this is slowly disappearing.

Portia Kapraun, a librarian in Indiana-USA, told the New York Times (NYT) that recently online ads on social networks are getting worse and worse. A series of marketing pieces about luxury jewelry or cars that she can’t afford to buy appear every time the librarian scrolls through Twitter.

The situation was getting worse lately, when ads about gold investment also appeared, and then marketing information about a type of video game with bad design also caught her eyes every time she surfed the web.

Miss Kapraun herself was not interested in the above advertisements, but they kept appearing as if to tease the librarian. This is a rare occurrence with the online advertising engine before, when the marketing bulletin board was more or less related to interests, shopping history or issues of interest to viewers.

“I don’t understand who advertisers think I am to put products like that, but it’s not cool that they keep popping up like that. This type of advertising is like the old style of begging the audience. Every time you watch TV in the evening, there’s that kind of smack in the face ,” Kapraun said.

Heap of garbage

According to the NYT, many Twitter users now perceive the social network’s advertising platform as a mess with countless unrelated products appearing before users’ eyes.

The same goes for ads on Instgram, Amazon or Youtube. Even products and services with signs of illegality such as gambling, multi-level or fraud appear.

The development of technology should have made the online advertising industry smarter. People with an interest in footwear will receive advertising for shoes, not enrichment courses. The increasingly perfect algorithms and artificial intelligence technology should filter out spam ads that have nothing to do with the user’s shopping or surfing habits.

However, the opposite is happening for many reasons. The biggest reason is the slowdown in online advertising revenue growth. The fact that businesses cut marketing budgets causes many platforms to lower costs, thereby enabling countless spam ads to reach the market.

“ Whenever you lower the market barrier, the quality goes down ,” says marketing expert Jessica Fong of the University of Michigan.

Previously, buying newspaper or television ads would require an agent to review and book. But today more than 90% of that work is done automatically through software as social networking platforms want to speed up efficiency as well as cut costs.

The social network now allows ads to appear in a variety of formats, from lowercase fonts, videos, photos to designs like a mini-game to attract viewers. At the same time, it is easier to buy ads when it is their main monetization tool after all.

Many advertising agencies today can go online, set an advertising budget to bid for a place on social platforms.

The story of social networks selling users’ information to 3rd parties to best navigate advertising is nothing new. So in the past, even though ads were easy, they were at least relevant to the viewer.

But since countries tightened regulations on user information security, especially when Apple updated this new regulation, the story has been different. The advertising is easy without capturing user information, causing the ads to become disconnected and even annoy the viewers.

Out of money

In addition to tightening management of personal information, the withdrawal of advertising giants is also a factor that makes this segment gradually become a mess.

A survey by the International Advertising Association (WFA) with 43 corporations representing more than $44 billion in advertising spending shows that nearly 30% of businesses want to reduce their budget for this segment in 2023.

For example, Clorox, a company that spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year advertising its consumer products, recently announced a budget cut for this segment because of concerns about the difficult economic situation.

Research by Insider Intelligence shows that ad spend, although still growing, has slowed down recently.

For example, Twitter, this social network has been struggling to stay attractive with both users and advertising businesses since Elon Musk bought it. Data from research firm Sensor Tower shows that the budget spending of the top 10 advertising businesses on Twitter has decreased by 55% compared to the beginning of 2022. Even 6 out of 10 of those businesses have never spent a penny on advertising. any reports for Twitter since the beginning of the year.

As a result, Elon Musk is having to use all means to increase revenue, from reducing prices to buying 1 get 1 free for advertising agencies and of course, the quality goes down is not something to discuss.

Not only Twitter, a series of companies making money from advertising are also struggling. Snapchat’s parent company recently posted its lowest quarterly growth results in history and forecast sales to decline this quarter.

Alphabet (Google) said that YouTube’s ad sales fell nearly 8% in the last quarter.

Facebook and Instagram owner Meta also posted the first quarterly decline in revenue in history at the end of 2022. As a result, according to Piper Sandler hedge fund data, advertising prices on both platforms. fell 24% in the fourth quarter of 2022 year-on-year to try to attract more customers.

Despite

According to the NYT, pressure from shareholders and the need for profitable growth has forced platforms to accept both cheap advertising, lower costs and allow the quality of the user’s marketing experience to deteriorate.

Corey Richardson, vice president of advertising agency Fluent360 in Chicago, said he is seeing more and more ads that have nothing to do with himself, and this is due to the profit pressure of the platforms.

” Technology platforms are doing everything to make money regardless, money-hungry people begging for advertising revenue have no choice ,” Mr. Richarson said.

Even platforms are withdrawing services to help users have a better advertising experience. Twitter has removed free access to third-party apps like Tweetbot and Twitterific, which are used to help users block spam ads. Instead, Elon Musk launched a paid version of Twitter with fewer ads.

In March 2022, Youtube shut down one of their spam ad blocking projects. Next, the platform announced it would experiment with increasing the number of non-skippable ads (skip) to 10 clips on users’ watching videos.

Similarly, an Insider Intelligence survey found that 52% of Facebook users admit they’re seeing more ads than before on the platform.

According to expert David A Broniatowski of George Washington University, although the platforms all claim to be doing their best to eliminate spam ads, in the face of profit problems, they will have countless ways to circumvent the law and people users will have to accept living with it.

*Source: NYT