An interesting exercise in disaster planning is to imagine what you’d do if all your current sources of revenue disappeared.
Bob Hoffman’s Adscam makes a persuasive case that programmatic advertising might as well have, because it’s mostly garbage. It may have stopped returning results and you didn’t notice.
I often say that every business book I’ve read could easily have been 1/5 as long. That doesn’t apply to the two I’ve read from Hoffman. His books are both short and fun to read, and he boils the topic down to the bone.
Hoffman believes in advertising, but he’s sure the programmatic side is worse than useless. In fact, he blames it for a lot of current social ills.
Adscam claims ad fraud has become pervasive because …
- Advertisers no longer buy ads from the people who display them, and
- The system for buying ads is largely incomprehensible. (Not in the sense that you can’t use it, but in the sense that you can’t understand how it works.)
Hoffman says ad fraud falls into three buckets: fraudulent audiences, fraudulent websites, or fraudulent clicks.
When you put it all together, Hoffman claims that ad fraud is one of the largest frauds in history, and only three percent of programmatic ad purchases result in actual ads seen by people.
Read the book. It’s short, funny, and informative.
As a final note, recent studies show that ads work best when they are next to relevant content. (What a surprise!) Structure your ad spend accordingly.
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