Weeknotes 3
In which I travel to London to meet my team, and ask about the real cost of “cheap” Ad Tech.
My week:
This week I got to spend 3 whole days in a room with my team; with our “out of offices” on, our Post-Its piled high, and an unholy amount of snacks. Being an international team — we are in Ireland, the UK and Lebanon — is excellent for snack diversity, but means that our time together is so, so precious.
We focused mostly on our campaign planning (more on that in a minute), though we took time to process our regular “Pulse” survey. The survey asks the team to rank , with the option to add comment, statements like “I feel supported by the team”, “I have what I need to do effectively fulfil my role” and “It is clear who is deciding what at DA”. The pulse surveys are such a valuable tool for me — both to raise issues before the become crises, but also to facilitate ongoing discussion as a group. These discussions feed so many decisions — resourcing, workload, the cadence of our team meetings, recruitment etc.
Campaign planning though, took up most of our time . If only you could bottle the energy you get from having brilliant, creative, committed campaigners in a room together sparking off each other and building together. That energy doesn’t happen by accident — it takes a lot of preparation, foundations of trust, and excellent (in this case, external) facilitation to make it work, but Alex, our Head of Campaigns was on it.
It will take us at least a month to untangle it all, research lots of questions that came up, and start to talk to partners to test our ideas, but I want to share one — tangental! — snippet of the conversation that preoccupied my mind as I traveled back to Dublin.
Question on my mind: the cost of cheap ads
How did Ad Tech produce some of the most valuable companies in the world? Or; how did serving ads for cars and flights and shoes become a more valuable business proposition than actually making and supplying those things?
I have a theory, that because Ad Tech companies revolutionised two things at a time — the whole Web 2.0 / social media thing, and the advertising industry — we often forget the latter. We talk about algorithms, freedom of expression, surveillance capitalism, “hellsites”, but what if we just look at these as companies who sell (mostly) advertising products?
Meta and Google are wildly successful advertising companies. Their advertising products have revolutionised that industry. They outcompete. Their pitch is that they 1) allow access to lots of people, 2) are very easy to use, and, crucially, 3) can be really, really cheap.
Now there are all sorts of questions and caveats to the first of these — like how reliable are the metrics? How much advertising fraud happens? Does this advertising sell stuff? — and not all products deliver equally. But those are well trodden paths. I want to look at the second two.
Easy to use: to run an ad on an ad tech platform you just need 3 things: an internet enabled device, a credit card, and 5 minutes of your time. There are no checks, no safeguards, few rules, limited oversight, no humans (if there is, something has gone wrong)— expensive things, and things that put barriers between advertisers wallets and companies bank accounts.
Does this go wrong? Why yes. I won’t even go there on political ads. But also, a low-to-no barrier approach means that Facebook found itself advertising to young men across the Western world to join militia groups 2 weeks ago (see Weeknote 1).
Here is the thing that bothers me; having no checks, safeguards etc. might mean no cost to the business, but it doesn’t mean that costs don’t exist. This approach does generate costs, it is just that someone else picks up the tab. Economists call these “externalities”, and an externality, in the case of the Ukrainian militia ad, was my Monday, plus that of the three journalists who notified the company about the militia ads. The company, alerted by people whose time it does not have to pay for, took it down and changed nothing.
The costs can be much, much greater. As I have mentioned before, a group of Rohingya refugees are fighting for Meta to fund education programmes for young people forced out of their homes by a genocide that the UN says that company played a role in.
Which brings us to the idea that ad tech is cheap. You can run an ad on a platform like Facebook for as little as the price of a pint. As noted above, the costs of even sophisticated Ad Tech become negligible when deployed at mass scale, and when they remove the overheads that traditional advertising companies might need, including people costs.
It is well documented that compared to other companies that rely on advertising — like traditional media companies — there are little to no costs associated with the generation of content, editorial etc. There is also the added cost saving of 1990s legacy legal protections from things like SLAPPS that drain media companies incomes.
But on top of this, Ad Tech largely ignores negative externalities, especially beyond the US. It ignores the societal costs that have become evident in the past decade. There are two parts to this; the redress for past harms piece that those refugees are bravely (and at great emotional cost) pursuing.
But there are also costs associated with preventing harm. This bothers me most when we look at the massive expansion that Ad Tech companies made globally in the mid to late naughties, including into incredibly vulnerable contexts. I have never seen any evidence that the kind of due diligence, local expertise, human rights assessments, adequately staffed content moderation etc. that you might expect a company to undertake when entering a new market might have undertaken. Expensive things.
And before anyone comments that it is not a wesbite’s responsibility if people use their services, let me correct the record. Expansion was deliberate. Even some of my team weren’t aware of Facebook Zero and ‘Intenet dot org”, telecommunications company deals that made access to Facebook free in countries like Iraq, El Salvador, Angola, Colombia, Nigeria, Myanmar, Palestine, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and scores of other countries — to the *exclusion* of people’s access to other website or online service.
All this as recent as 2017, a time when the company was very aware that its platform actually requires billions of dollars of investment in platform safety measures to reduce harm in the US alone. As we learnt in the Haugen papers:
87% of Facebook’s global budget for time spent on classifying misinformation goes towards the United States, while 13% is set aside for the rest of the world — despite the fact that North American users make up just 10% of its daily users.
So if this deliberate expansion was done without proper human rights assessments, or the deployment of mitigation measures, or even in more recent times, equal investment in protections — as all of the evidence suggests — then the only word I can think of is reckless.
But hey, at least the ads are cheap, amiright?
