TechStuff Classic: The Problem with Ads Part One

published on May eighteen, twenty sixteen. It is a fun two part episode, so we'll get part two next week. And Ben joined the show. Ben Bolan of Stuff They Don't Want You To Know and Ridiculous History fame, as well as a phenomenal writer on some of our narrative fictional podcast episodes. He joined the show to talk about the problem with ads. So this one is part one.

Next week we'll get part two, and yeah, man, we could probably do a full mini series about the problem with ads and the balance between commerce and content or art if you will not for me to assume that tech Stuff is art, but rather how do you balance the desire to create valuable informative content or entertaining content against commerce. There have been a lot of missteps in that path, and we're going to listen to this episode and learn about some of those. So sit back and

enjoy this classic episode from twenty sixteen. Have you ever seen and advertisement and thought, yes, absolutely, this is for me rarely, but it has been known to happen, I can tell you right now. I can tell you too, right off the top of my head, and it's largely because of the tone of the advertising campaign. Old spicy odorant, right right? Dollar shave Club? Okay, what about Dollar shave Club? Guy?

The commercials for a dollar shave Club are kind of in that same tongue in cheek, snarky sort of approach, a little not so in your face as to be truly obnoxious, but just barely straddling that line between being charming and being arrogant. And I find it entertaining. And I thought, well, I shave quite a bit actually, because because I got the head that I have to shave because nature has deprived me of some of my hair but not all of it, so I have to get rid of the rest. And I decided to try it

out because I thought the ads were really entertaining. The idea of the subscription model was much more attractive to me than having to go to the store and ask to unlock the vault of razors. Yeah, and it turned out that I loved the products. So the ad did exactly what it was supposed to do. It got my attention, it made me remember the brand, and its ultimately got me to act, which are That's exactly what ads are supposed to do. Let me tell you what ads are

not supposed to do. Whatsosed to do. They're not supposed to irritate the audience to the point where they no longer ever want to buy anything ever again, and then they rage quit the Internet. So today we're going to talk about ads and ad blockers and to kind of go into the discussion that's been kind of going around recently about ad blockers, including some of the stuff that's going on in Europe, some of the stuff that you might have heard about as far as ads and their

relationship to malware. What exactly is going on and where

do we stand on this? And then you know, you do a lot of stuff here at how stuff works, but I specifically ask you, in your capacity as one of the hosts of stuff they don't want you to know because as the host of that show, you've covered the topics surrounding privacy pretty extensively, right, and privacy is one of the factors that comes into play when you're talking about advertising, particularly today when targeted advertising has become

such a huge part of strategies. Now, to start this off, before we jump into all of that, I thought I would give kind of a really high level explanation of what is going on behind the scenes technically with ads on web pages and thus how ad blockers are able to work at all. You might think, well, how can an ad blocker recognize and block and add but not the content I'm trying to see? So, Ben Jonathan, you work, You work on the web. Yes, you you've visited a

website or two. You probably know that you do so through something called a browser. Yes, yes, for you know, something like a Chrome, Firefox, Edge Edge. Yeah. And if you are using Internet Explorer, I hope it is only because some outside authority is making you do so, right, Like, there's an intranet that you can only access with Internet Explorer. Do you remember those days? I remember, Yeah, there was

that was the only reason. I had Internet Explorer installed on my old computers so that I could access our company's former intrnet, which is ridiculous. But here we are nonetheless on a browser. Yeah. So when you are visiting a website using your browser, you type in the r L type of deep deep, and you put it in

the address bar and you hit that inter button. What is happening is your browser is sending out a request over the Internet, and it's essentially saying, Hey, the jerk on the other end of this keyboard wants to see you know. Uh, I don't know what's a good website. Let's say Wired dot com. That's a great example, because Wired's going to come up in other parts of this discussion. Yeah,

and Wired, by the way, I love Wired. They do great work, and I've got a lot of friends who have worked for Wired, either in the past or currently. Love their stuff. So you're going to Wired dot com. What happens is the uh, this request goes out over the Internet and it's routed through a series of connections until it gets to the server where Wired dot com lives,

which is like the vault of their information. Yeah, it's a it's a it's an actual physical computer that has the instance of that website stored on it, and then when the request comes in, it serves the US living up to its name, the information to you, and it goes back across the Internet, not necessarily in the same pathway that your request came through. That gets into a discussion of packets that really is immaterial for this. Yeah,

I've talked about packets in previous episodes. So if you really want to know what packet switching is and how all that works, go check out the archives of tech stuff and it's out there. But the information comes to you, and your browser puts it together and displays it for you, and it does so based upon the rules set up by the web master rights whoever put it together. There are there's language tags that explain how it's supposed to look when it's displayed on your browser, and that's how

it works. And so you think, okay, so so it's really just a request and then a response. But then you have ads. Now, with ads, the content for the ads comes from a different place than the content for the web page itself. So those ads that are on

wired dot com, they're actually coming from different servers. They're not coming from wired's server, and the web page just has a space dedicated or some form of a relationship there that's dedicated to the ad that says this is where the ad will go when it's served to the viewer, and that depends on the arrangement between the advertiser and the content creator. Yeah, so you could probably, I mean, we could really dive down into this and say, all

these different types of ads have different rates. Like a banner add at this point is almost considered to be worthless, and a banner ad is a term describing those long, horizontal ads you will see that take up an entire row I guess of a website, right, Yeah, And you could say, like a rail would be the vertical version of that, either on the left or right. And then there are other things like they are pop ups, per tons of different types and they all have different rates

depending upon the lots of factors. How popular is the website and how effective are those ads considered to be, Like the least effective are the ones, They're going to be the least expensive. And in some cases you will find web pages that have completely abandoned some of the cheaper ones because they don't really work anyway, And you might as well try and command a higher price. So those impressions those that data is actually coming from other

servers and they're the advertisers. Servers are the more likely advertising agencies servers where that data lives. So as the page is loading up the sections for the ads, that gets another request saying hey, send me the information that's supposed to go here. It's coming from this other server that gets sent to your computer and is inserted into the appropriate section by your browser when it's constructing the

whole thing. The way ad blockers work is essentially it has a filter list saying anything coming from these particular servers, don't let it show up, just don't even let it through the door, like mad ads dot com. Yeah, which I just made up right right, So so anything that would come from that server would automatically get blocked and not be incorporated into the web page as you're displaying it. So that's the general way that most ad blockers work.

There's another way too. The ad blockers can also look for certain tags that are associated with advertising, like there's actually a tag for ad that kind of stuff, and just block anything that that shows up under that tag. But generally speaking, the idea is just a kind of a bouncer that says anyone from this neighborhood is not allowed into the club, and so checking your checking all the IDs and saying I'm sorry, you're from a part of the neighborhood where we don't let you in. It's

so discriminatory. That's the way. That's that's how an ad blocker has to work, right, It has to discriminate, otherwise you don't get You either get everything or you get nothing. So it has and we should do a disclaimer, yeah, which is what Oh, okay, I'll do it. Yeah. So we are fully aware, ladies and gentlemen, that we do work for an internet company how stuff works. It's our parent company for our range of podcasts, and it is AD supported, and it is AD supported, and quite a

few things online are AD supported. Yes. However, I will confess to my hypocrisy because I am an enormous fan of certain ad blockers. Yeah, and I completely understand why another person would use an ad blocker, especially given as you mentioned, the privacy concerns that we'll get to. Yeah. So there's a whole lot of stuff going on for reasons why people would consider using an ad blocker, and to your point, be not to leave you hanging out there.

I use ad blockers too sometimes sometimes I will set exemptions for websites that I think are handling advertising in a responsible way, in a non invasive, non potentially harmful kind of way. So you can you can with most ad blockers set filters and say anything on this page, go ahead and show me the ad. It's fine. Can white list stuff exactly sowire dot com. There's an example that's on my white list. A couple of others too. There's some that want to be on my white list

that I have not put on there. Cough Forbes cough. But we'll get into that too. So there are a lot of different reasons, and some of them you could argue are more valid than others for people to want to use ad blockers. So I'm going to run through a few of those. And also I could say that there's other things you can do, like through your browser itself that don't necessarily block ads, but block elements of

ads that you might find particularly irritatingly. Yeah. Yeah, Like you can disable video or audio or flash animation, or you can not even have flash installed, So that also helps yeah, I don't know. Is Yeah, there's a lot of content out there that is dependent upon flash and without it. Without flash, it makes it harder. Another some things have definitely helped by moving to HTML five. So at any rate, let's talk about some of the reasons folks block ads. Uh, some of them, like we said,

are just obnoxious. They're intrusive. They ruin the experience you're trying to have. If you are trying to read an article and as you scroll down, a window slides into view, covering up the text you're trying to read and is auto playing some commercial that has no bearing on your life whatsoever, that's a bad experience. Right Like if if I were going on a page about a technical gadget and I'm reading and as I scrolled down, an ad for diapers comes on, I'm going to be irritated. I

don't have a baby, I don't need diapers myself. Yet you're not reading about something related to diapers. No, I'm not reading about the latest and diaper tracking software, you know, getting that notification on your app that's time to change the diaper. I'm not reading any of that. That would be a very bad experience. It could be I poop. I mean I do. That's I don't want to get into it. That's probably one that we will not pitch on that show. Yeah, so that's one reason. Just just

because it's an it can be an unpleasant experience. Depending upon the way the ad is presented, it's disruptive, it is, it is disruptive. Another is that it slows downloading time, right because there is this additional uh communication that has to happen to pull that information in while the page is loading. And we all know that we have very

little patients to wait around when loading website. If you've ever had one of those days that here at work where occasionally our network gets a little sludgy, oh pandemonium. Oh yeah, you're like, you're like typing in even if you're just typing in something like I just need to Google something and you're typing in your Google search and you hit in her and it's not that point three second response and it takes like a couple of seconds.

You go nuts, You're like, what is happening? Bandemonium? We're one slow internet connection from away from a series of knife fights. Yeah no, I mean we have the knives here in the office, right, I personally plan on hiding because there's some crazy people in this Oh yeah, yeah, Scott, Benjamin's got some moves. He's got to reach to man's got he's got that armspan. So ads also can take up a lot of bandwidth, right, that's another huge problem because a lot of I sps are using bandwidth caps,

especially in the mobile world. Old Ben Boland and I will be back in just a moment to talk a little bit more about the problem with ads after this quick break. So, both in mobile and my home ISSP technically have a data cap. Now I have paid extra to get out of the cap on both sides, but that's because I make enough money where I can pay a little extra to do that. That should not be

something I don't think that should be encouraged. I think that there's no real good reason for data caps, particularly for home networks. But if you have ads activated, that's more data that's coming through. That means that not only do you not want to see these things, but it's taking away your opportunity to see other stuff exactly. Also, also,

are have you done a data caps episode, Jonathan? I haven't because I probably would be frothing at the mouth end of it so angry about that the emperor has

no clothes. Yeah, let's just say that. Uh, I think some companies can be a little bombastic, which rhymes a lot with a certain isp that I'm not happy about, right, Right, But as you're saying that's that's an excellent point because you know, let's say you see this ad for diapers and it's a video, right, it's an AutoPlay video while you're reading about your latest gadget that you're doing research on, right, and then the chances of this happening are very small.

But what if it's the proverbial feather on your internet's camel back, you know what I mean, Like, right, that's the thing that happens, and then the camel just collapses and you get the pop up warning. Well, then that's exceed your data. And if it's a video based advertisement, that kind of stuff, I mean, that takes up a more data and and I mean you think about how

much browsing you do in a typical month. If you are already bumping up against that data cap toward the end of the month, like in that last week, ads could be accumulatively across the rest of the month be enough to make that happen in the middle of the month, a problem magnified or exacerbated for mobile users exactly. So

that's a reason some people use ad blockers. They say, listen, I have a limited amount of data I am allowed to access, and I'm bumping up against it, and I don't have other options, I mean, other than just stopping. But that's crazy talk, is what that is. And also, finally, well, two other things. One is that targeted advertising some people find it very off putting. Right the idea that let's say that's it's not an ad for diapers that's completely

irrelevant to my life. Let's say it's an AD that's very relevant. Maybe it's I don't know, head wax so that I can get my head up to a nice glossy finish. Or maybe it's Hamilton. May have a conversation about Hamilton. It could be that, Yeah, Hamilton is coming to Atlanta, the musical Hamilton's coming to Atlanta. Buy your tickets. That's an AD that would be precisely targeted to me, and I would freak out. I'd say yes, yes, yes, And that would be an AD that would work on

me because I would love to see that show. If you have Hamilton tickets, I will happily take them, all right. So that's a great example, But there are other targeted ads that can be a little scary, right, especially for people who are trying to research something that's really sensitive. The example that we have given many times on this show is the one about Target, where a young woman had been browsing Target ended up sending information to the

young lady about coupons related to being pregnant. Her father intercepted essentially the coupons and got very mad at Target, saying, how dare you insinuate that my daughter is pregnant, and then later contacted Target again and said, I would like to apologize to you. I had a conversation with my daughter and it turns out that I didn't know about it,

but it turns out my daughter is pregnant. But that was one of those instances where you know your online activity might indicate something you're not comfortable sharing with the world at large, and even if your personal identity is not part of that, that almost doesn't matter, right, Like your name is the least important thing about your personal data. What it is you want and need that's way more important to advertisers right, and your habits, your frequency of wanting, needing,

and acquiring those things. And sometimes that's helpful, like if you go onto a shopping site like Amazon and it starts giving you suggestions based upon things you bought in the past, and you might see something it's like, oh, you know what, I do need that or I didn't even know that existed and now I want it right, Like based on your preferences for the following science fiction stories, we think these are novels that you will find of interest.

Right Hamilton in Space that would be right up there. But there are other cases where targeted advertising you might feel that that's too much of a threat to your privacy. And I mean, I can't I can't fault anyone for feeling that way. And you might say, look, I don't I don't allow cookies. I don't allow any of that stuff to kind of trace my my online behaviors because I want it to be just me. Whatever I need

to research or access, that's it. And that would be a reason to install ad blockers so that you don't have that following you around. And then finally, ads can sometimes be a vector from malware. We'll talk about that specifically in just a little bit. So that's to me, like, those are the reasons a lot of people give for why they install ad blockers, and I think, you know, again,

to varying degrees, they're valid. And there's some interesting arguments about why ad blockers shouldn't be condemned or outlawed, why they they serve a purpose and content providers should not

make a big deal out of this. Now, the reason we bring this up is that more and more content providers are using means to detect when an ad blockers in place, right, and you'll get a notification that says, we see that you're using an ad blocking service, right, And this notification from the website has a range of responses, so you may see something that says we see you're using an app blocker. We get it. That's are annoying, but this is our business, right, this is how we

make money. To the furthest extreme, which which I think we already alluded to Forbes, Yeah, where the website is crippled or restricted right unless you turn off an app block And I get it again, we work for a company that makes money through advertising, and I get the need to say, look, I got to protect my business. I can't just let people quote unquote steal stuff, right, I can't let people walk in take things, and there's no means for me to generate revenue because then I

can't pay the people who work for me. If I can't pay the people who work for me, I go out of business. And then you don't have the content in the first place. That is a valid argument, right, that's valid to say. Look, I have to be able to generate revenue in order to do the thing you want. You came to me buster, you put in my address in your little URL bar, or you did a search

and follow the link. So I have something you want, but you want it for free, and I can't perpetually give it away for free because then I can't pay the rent, I can't buy food. We have to have this exchange for this to work. I get that. But some people say, listen, condemning the ad blockers is the wrong way to go, And here is the reasoning. It sounds a lot like the same reasons people say piracy doesn't ultimately matter that much online. Yeah, okay, I'm scooting

to the edge of my Yeah. So here's the argument. The argument is that the people who install ad blockers are the people who would otherwise be ignoring your ads anyway, oh a self selecting sample, Yeah, they would be. They would be the ones that ads would not be effective on them. They don't want the ads, they don't see the ads. They're blocking the ads mainly because they just don't even want the distraction there. So these are the

are lost revenue. They're never going their impressions don't matter. They are never going to buy those diapers. Yes, and so the argument is that if you factor in their impressions, if you were to say, okay, no ad blockers, then the people who figure out the rates for advertising, the ones who say, here's how much it's worth to display

an ad on your site. If they say, well, you don't allow ad blockers and you've got x x number of visitors per month, we estimate that a certain percentage of those, let's say thirty percent would normally use ad blockers if you allowed it. That thirty percent is worthless to us. So it dilutes the value of advertising on your web page because you're forcing them to look at something that doesn't work for them, which means it's a lost cause. You can't count those numbers and say that's

a success. You can't say these this thirty percent of people who saw your ad means that it's worth x amount because they're worthless. And so to see the analog in the piracy argument there, I assume it would be the same thing that such a person who pirates torrents, downloads illegally streams some sort of videos. Let's go with Game of Thrones. Sure, okay, so someone who is stealing Game of Thrones, which I believe still holds the record for the most torrented. I'm pretty sure that every time

that a new season debuts that breaks the record. Yeah, so people around the world are stealing the holy hack out of this thing. Yeah, but would they have would they have paid for an HBO subscription? Would they have or HBO now right right? Would they have gone through a regular channel anyway? And the answer is it's impossible to say. But it appears that there are lots of

people out there who will pirates something. Uh. And the really easy examples are the ones that like movies that a lot of people aren't feeling very strongly about beforehand, like like there was the Wolverine film Wolverine the Origins film, and it was getting panned by critics, and it got pirated like crazy, and then you had the studios say, hey, you've stolen revenue from us, and the pirates said, we weren't going to pay to see your movie at all.

So really the option was we steal your movie and watch it, which, granted for you, stinks, or we don't see the movie at all, but either way you don't get any money, like right, So that's that's a I mean, it's a weird argument to make saying like, well, you're not losing revenue because you wouldn't have made it anyway. You would not have made those sales, So saying that the piracy cost you sales is disingenuous. But saying that people are accessing your content without paying for it fairly,

that's a that's totally legitiment. That's a completely legitimate argument. So it's a little bit of a perspective issue, right, It depends on what you're arguing for. If you're saying you're costing me because otherwise you would have bought this thing, that may not hold true. But if you're saying you're stealing something I made and really you should pay for it, that's that's a different argument. So those are that's kind of laying the groundwork for the rest of our conversation here.

Let's start with well, let's start with some just some thoughts, Like when I talk about that targeted advertising we mentioned the example, have you ever really looked into that at all? First stuff they don't want you to know, or anything related to that. Yes, yeah, the example of you you're

talking about the kid, right, yeah, predicting the birth. Yes, we have looked at this in a couple of different ways, and one of the one of the ways that we looked into it most often would be the concerns of big big data, big data, the information that people just emanate or create through their passage online. Picture your average day on the internet, like one of those old family

circus comic strips with the map and the little dotted line. Yeah, those accumulated billy goes running around the neighbors exactly, God, billy walk in a straight line, you know what I mean?

Come on, kid, right, But this is a good comparison because those breadcrumbs, those accumulated dashes of our circuitous lines in our day to day traffic, establish a precedent, establish a pattern, and most people, most Internet users are astonished when they see how accurate or how sophisticated the profile pain of them can become. You know, you may say I have a collection of different passwords. Right, you may say you know you And I earlier did an episode

on whether it's possible to be anonymous on the Internet. Yeah, and it is possible, but it is such a pain in the key start, right, and the more activity you do, the less possible it becomes. Exactly because while again, like when I said, your name is the least important piece

of information about you, it really is. People don't need to know your name to know who you are based upon the things that are important to them, which is why it is again I love that you use the word disingenuous, which is it's disingenuous as well to say this data is anonymous. Yeah, you know, yeah, because all sorts of little data points point to who you are as a person, even if it doesn't give you a first and last name. Right. It's like saying these fingerprints

are anonymous, Yeah, there's still somebody's fingerprint, exactly. And the stuff we leave behind it's kind of like a digital fingerprint, and and some of that information might be stuff that a lot of people know about us, like the Hamilton thing. Ben clearly knows about it. Of course we talked about it before a video. Yeah, but that's something that you know, people know who know me, they know that I'm a big fan of musicals. But then there may be other

stuff that you don't want people to know. Let's say there's a let's say you have you or someone close to you has a medical condition, right, right, and you don't want people to you know, you don't want people to know, for instance, that let's just say your partner or your spouse is being tested for some sort of cancer. Right. That's none of anyone else's business but me and my spouse. Right. That's a that's an example that is perfectly cromulent in

this case, right. And I know it's an extreme one, right right, But it's it's anything like that, right, anything where it's like it's not that I'm ashamed of something, that I've done something wrong, far from it. It's just that it's a piece of information I don't want to share with the rest of the world. Ben and I will be back to chat a little bit more about ads and the thorny situations around them after we come

back from this break. Our activities online can inadvertently, in some cases give that information to third parties which may use it in order to try and profit from it. Not necessarily maliciously either. That's where the targeted advertising comes in, and you get this targeted ad that is again not malicious, it's necessarily we'll talk about malicious ads in a minute, not malicious in intent, but it could have a negative impact on your experience variance of being online, because then

you think I thought I was being careful. I thought no one knew, but now someone knows. Now I logged into Facebook after I was logged out of Facebook. By the way, those are some pernicious cookies. Oh yeah, after I was logged out of Facebook ostensibly and checked on learned about the specific type of cancer my spouse might have came back logged in, and now I see an ad for a cancer clinic and hoping with cancer, And

that's self extrusive. That is offensive. Yeah, it's is to a point where like that is not the direction that I think a lot of people were thinking about when they started thinking about the potential or targeted ads, Like, absolutely not the ideal situation is that the ads you see are the ones that are relevant to you in your situation and ones that would be effective in getting you to purchase a product or service. And because that's

ultimately what ads are for. Ads are there to inform you and convince you you need this thing or service or whatever it may be. And if it's done well, then everyone's happy because we all get access to the stuff we want, We see things that we want to purchase. The advertisers succeed in what they're doing, their clients succeed,

everyone is happy. The problem is that that's a very narrow band of the overall experience that people have had with targeted advertising, and again has led to this realm of this this culture where ad blockers are seen as being a perfectly legitimate response to that. And it's funny because you know, we've both talked about how we admitted

to using ad blockers. I was amazed at how many articles I came across where they're written on websites that have advertising by employees of that website, and the employees are saying, yeah, I use ad blockers too, right, like to the point where you're sitting there thinking like, wow, this is pretty heavy stuff when you're seeing it from

other journalists. And in fact, there was an editor, Duncan Riley, a publisher, in fact, Duncan Riley who wrote in Silicon Angle dot com a piece that came out today, in fact, April twenty nine is when we're recording this twenty sixteen, and the title of the piece is confession of a longtime publisher. I now use an AD blocker and I like it. And the piece kind of lays out the same sort of things we've been talking about already and

mentions that there's already a problem here. The big problem is that advertising has become so obnoxious that it is counterproductive. It is doing the opposite of what it is intended to do. It is driving people away, not bringing people in. Right, and to the point where people are looking at advertisement not as a vast series of varying cases, but as

one monolithic thing. Yeah and yeah, well really it doesn't take that many really bad experiences to paint with abroad with broad strokes, right, because you get something like a truly awful experience that's enough to convince people to say, well, even for the ads that are not that bad, I'd rather go ahead and use an ad blocker to avoid the ones that are that bad, even if I only encounter those rarely. And part of the problem, there is a question of evolution and learning curve because a lot

of targeted advertising functions in an automated fashion. Yeah, yeah, no, there's no person there to apply human compassion and judgment. There's no one. There's no one saying, Johnna constricted in day. I feel like it's time for some diapers, right right, Yeah, there's no diaper's buttons behind the scenes. I wish there were.

It would be hilarious to see, like there's just some some mischievous, impish person sitting behind the scenes with a massive panel of buttons, and different buttons for different things, ones like one's like cheaper razor blades. Right, Jonathan, you've been shifting in your seat. Here's an adverstool softener. I think, what the heck is going on? Well, well, gaing him up to an eye poop. That's right, we'll be pitching

that later. So. One of the other things that Duncan Riley pointed out in this piece that I thought was interesting. He said that the other big push in online advertising right now, apart from video ads, which I mean that because a mobile, the mobile experienced video ads has become a big thing, right the other skip this ad in five, Yeah, exactly, the big The big one is um native advertising, which to you guys out there may not mean very much.

To people in our position, it means our worst nightmare. So what is native advertising for people who are not Because that's a little bit of an inside baseball term. Native advertising is when you get paid by a company to produce a specific piece of content, typically one that supports that company's products, also known as advertorial. Yes, and a lot of if you do it really really well,

which is very hard to do. But if you do it really really well, it can still be informative, it can still be entertaining, and it can still do the purpose of advertising whatever the product or services without it feeling absolutely creepy on the part of the person who had to write it. But it is really hard to do that. Yeah, it can feel creepy for the people creating this, because native advertising can put someone in an

ethical dilemma. Yes, wherein for instance, let's say Jonathan and I have a have a show wherein we are going to do a tech stuff about the technology behind strip mining, all right, what I mean? Yeah, And while we're exploring that, naturally you and I would say, well, here are some things you need to know about strip mining. Here. Here's like the environmental impact of strip mining. Right, here's the historical significance, the political battles that have happened over strip mining.

Here's how it has affected people who live in areas where strip mining happened. But if it were a piece of native advertising where a mining company had paid for it, and they said, all right, you can do pieces on it, just don't mention any of those things, right right, and don't call it strip mining. We have a new term. We call it mineral hugs. Yeah, then that would be problematic. And as as as Riley points out, he says that you eventually end up with advertising pretending to be editorial.

He says, and that not only sucks if not labeled properly, it's downright dishonest and constitutes deceiving your readers. And we know you guys are smart, right, like the people who are in the writer and editorial departments. We know you're smart. We know that you can tell when something is something is like that, oh buddy, yeah, anyone on the Internet, although you'll hear all these stereotypes of people being credulous in general. Yeah, more so than a radio or television audience.

People who listen to podcasts, people who go online for their news or entertainment are very, very aware of this. They can sense, they can like they're like Matt Murdoch, Well, for one thing, one thing, we've been sold to all our lives. We in America, we have grown up in a culture of advertising and selling, and after a while, you get good at recognizing it. Right. So that's that That's an argument that often comes up when it when it gets down to sales versus editorial, which not doesn't

happen that frequently, but it has happened. Then the editorial will say, listen, this is a road we don't want to go down because it is a bad experience for our audience. They recognize what it is right away. It is very hard to do well, and it doesn't work for the advertising right. It doesn't do anyone in any favors. Right. It tells the audience we don't we don't we don't

value your intelligence. We don't think that you're smart enough to realize that this is essentially an advertisement you're reading um and audience ends up saying well, if you don't value me, I don't value you, let alone the products you're trying to sell. So I'm out and we know this, and and so native advertising is one of those things that again, if you do it very transparently and if you are very careful, I think you can do it well if you have a separation of I guess a

separation church and state in a way. Yeah, that's a phrase that we've used before wherein so let's say, just for an example, let's say, ladies and gentlemen, that Jonathan does a show for just your average everyday podcast, right it's tech Stuff. Does a tech Stuff episode is approached by someone who wants them to do some native advertising for let's see a cell phone? Sure, right, yeah, those

are popular. And then Jonathan, with the editorial oversight, would say, well, if we do this, I want it to be clear, this is brought to you by right, you know whomever, right, and just say like so, people who listen to it from the very beginning, they know what they're getting into and that they trust me to give them information that is that is honest. It may be that due to that agreement, there's certain things I'm not allowed to talk

about for whatever reason. But as long as I'm completely honest upfront and just say, you know, this is this episode is brought to you by so and so, we're going to talk about their product today. Here's what I

have to say about it. That's that's okay. It's even better if they give you full editorial control where you can like you can say, like, can I say things that may be a little critical of the product, as long as I'm being fair, like I'm not attacking, but I'm bringing up concerns people have had because if I don't do it, my listeners well being objective, being at the forefront of this. What I love about the line of argument we're looking at here is that the editor

the publishing question is absolutely correct. It's a new it's a more evolved form of targeted advertising, because then the target becomes not just someone who looked at someone who googled something three times in the past week. It becomes any audience member that trusts you yes and that, and then all of a sudden that there's this prepackaged demographic assuming that you have any you know, perceived integrity and reputation, then absolutely no, your reputation precedes you. Yeah, I'd like

to think that people believe I have integrity. If you do not think I have integrity, please feel free to feel free to send an email to stuff you should know with this, with this targeting stuff, as you said, it is difficult to do, it can be done, it can be done well. For example, the Daily Show under John Stewart's regime. Yeah, under John Stewart's run on the show, they had Arby's as a sponsor, right, And what was hilarious about it is every time they brought up Arby's

they talked massive amounts of trash about Arby's. Yeah, but but to the point where Arby's got the joke. Yeah, and they incorporated the joke themselves. On his last episode, there was like a statement from arby saying we'll miss you John. And I just thought like that's amazing, Like, how many companies do you know that are that saving Yeah, that would say like, look, this is this they're having fun. They're not really trying to damage our brand. That's not

what it's really about. Let's just have fun too. I mean, that's a hard decision to make because you could. If you feel your brand is under attack, right, then you know you want to go on the offense as soon as possible. Right. So that's the reason why a certain bombastic cable provider hasn't just gone the whole nine yards yet and use the monopoly man in Darth Bay as their sponsored right. Yeah. I hope you enjoyed that conversation about the problem with ads, because we're going to continue

it next week because this is a two parter. But yeah, Ben and I ended up talking a lot about that back in twenty sixteen, and clearly we could have a whole new conversation that's twice as long if we were to have it today. And maybe I will see if I can get him back on the show to talk about this again. It's I mean, he is a busy dude, like I'm busy, But man, I don't know how Ben gets everything done because that guy, he works on so many shows and it's just he's tireless, and it's it's

inspiring and intimidating. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of Tech Stuff, please reach out. You can download the iHeartRadio app if you want to it's free to download, free to use. You can navigate over to tech Stuff using a little search field, and there you will see there's a little microphone icon. If you click on that, you can leave me a voice means and chip to thirty seconds in length. Let me know what you would like to hear, or if you prefer,

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