May 26, 2022 • 48 mins
Have you ever searched for something online, only to find an eerily related series of ads popping up at each website you visit afterward? If so, you've encountered the Brave New World of targeted online advertising. But is it a force for good? For ill? Join the guys and special guest Jonathan Strickland as they explore the facts, fiction and controversy surrounding online ads.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
So it's no secret that at some point in their
lives everybody struggles to one degree or another with impostors syndrome,
with confidence, you know, and you have a lot of
people who want you UH to feel insecure and and
a lot of human life is UH an ongoing endeavor
(00:20):
to understand one self worth. Well, we have found a
quantitative worth for many people. It's in the world of
targeted online ads. Boys. It ever, it is weaponized insecurity,
UM writ large at its best or worst. I don't know,
you'd be the judge, you know. It's the way money
is made now. Really, when advertising money is spent, it
(00:44):
is usually on whatever service can offer the most targeting
or the most pinpoint targeting per dollar spent. Yes, down
to the dollars and cents of it. Uh. We were
very lucky to get our good friend to the show,
Jonathan Strickland, the created of tech Stuff, our local expert
on all things tech, to hop on this show with us.
(01:07):
In In this classic episode, you're gonna hear us chat
with Jonathan about targeted ads, how they work, and Honestly,
in the years since we recorded this, I am increasingly cynical.
I don't know about you. Guys, about all the privacy guarantees.
I'm even more optimistic, never been more. I'm also sarcastic.
(01:32):
Here we go from UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies.
History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back
now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Hello,
(01:54):
welcome back to the show. My name is not my
name is Noel, my name is Ben. You are you
that makes this stuff they don't want you to know?
But not any ordinary episode of this show. And here's
the part where you're saying, well, Ben, what is ordinary?
Great question? Question for another day, ladies and gentlemen, because
we are joined today by a special guest, a returning
force to our show, longtime collaborator and friend of all
(02:17):
three of ours, ladies and gentlemen, the illustrious, the magnanimous,
the transatlantic accenting, the phenomenal, the inevitable, Ladies and gentlemen,
Jonathan Strickland. Guys, I have to say that your ability
to introduce a person that is only matched by your
ability to tie incredibly complicated knots. I look forward to
getting out of the studio. What are we talking about today? Okay,
(02:40):
let's get through this quickly then, guys, look, no one
is getting untied until the show is over pipe down strictly,
all right, and that goes for you as well, Matt.
It is an excellent question. We are talking today about
something that might seem a little bit strange for some people,
which is advertising, but not just advertising, a specific kind
of advertise, targeted online advertising. So in our personal lives,
(03:05):
let's start there. Have you guys had any weird experiences
yourself with ads? Absolutely? Yeah, yeah, well, I mean all
sorts of things, right, But okay, so first, when you
think about targeted advertising, you know you wanted to find
that a little bit, right. This is advertising that is
specifically geared to most likely uh interest you, based upon
(03:28):
whatever data the advertiser has on you in the effort
to sell a good and or service to you. Right.
That's the whole purpose of acts. So often we talk
about data mining, machine learning, examining people's behavior in order
to target them more effectively. But in the beginning, before
(03:48):
you gather all that information you're targeted, ads tend to
be a little more random and chaotic, may not necessarily
really target the person. And I'm specifically thinking of an
ad that popped up again and again and again for
me on Facebook for the longest time until I actually
(04:11):
had to take the effort to hide that ad and
say I don't want to see this anymore. I didn't
know you could do that. Yes you can, you can,
you can. There's a little there's a little menu you
can pull up and say this doesn't interest me, post
this and and what it can do is it actually
tells Facebook, oh, well, I can better serve ads to
(04:32):
this person by not showing this stuff like it benefits Facebook,
it benefits the companies that are advertising, and it benefits
the user. Right, You're just helping. What was the head
was for a muscle enhancer which had an impossibly muscular
person with an impossibly tiny head like you look at
(04:56):
you think, if this isn't photoshopped, this guy as a
miserable experience in his day to day life because he's
so muscular that his range of movement has to be limited.
It does not at all make me want to even
remotely consider getting whatever nutritional supplement they're trying to sell
(05:17):
or or there you know, uh, weight loss program or
muscle building photoshop courses. I mean, you guys can see me.
You you guys out there can't, but the guys here
in the podcast room can see me. Your head is
normal size, and you can also tell that I am
clearly not terribly concerned about building lots of muscle mass.
I don't know. I might need a few moments here.
(05:39):
I could take off the shirt, but that's probably not
something any of us really wants to have burned into
our memory. All that being said, you do clearly have
a pension for different flavors of muscle milk. Well, that's true.
That's it's just because you know, I support those guys
to get in here before we move on. I recently
(06:01):
had a baby and we made the mistake of making
a registry at Target. And as soon as we did that,
all of the advertising back when we had cable, all
of it was maybe centric, and maybe it wasn't the
you know, going to Target doing that. Maybe it was
our search result history, maybe it was any number of things.
But as soon as that life event happened for us,
(06:23):
every advertisement that we saw was about it. I've got
I've got an even more recent one for me that, um,
I'm curious to see what comes out of it now,
because right now it's at the earliest stages. I was
looking for a price quote for a particular type of vehicle,
so I used a website where you can get price
(06:44):
comparisons for dealerships in your area that sell whatever vehicle
you're looking into. And in order to get that information,
you have to do things like put in your email
address and but in your phone number. I knew what
was going to happen while I was doing it, but
I really needed to see those price que so I
did it. Immediately, I'm getting phone calls and emails from
(07:04):
all the dealerships in the area. Now that's the first wave.
I suspect what happens next is if I keep checking
my email and I look through the spam filter, I'm
gonna see a lot of car related stuff come at me.
Not the specific make and model that I was looking at,
but all sorts of things like aftermarket and all that
kind of stuff, the related things around the car industry.
(07:28):
I expect I'll get a lot of that because I
have been identified as someone actively looking into purchasing a car,
and it is very valuable information for a company to have.
They could sell that to other companies before money. And
then I get inundated by all this advertising. So let's
look at advertisements. Jonathan. You provided an excellent definition of
(07:50):
what an advertisement is, essentially at heart and unsolicited attempt
to showcase the benefits of product X or the less
concrete sense of the brand, a tone of an experience
in hopes of having you, the customer, purchase an item
or service. And the thing is, this is super I'm
not gonna occurse because we're still a family show. This
(08:10):
is super old. How old is it? Well, the earliest
known advertisement that we have right now comes from three
thousand BC from Thebes, Greece. I'm not sure if you've
seen this, Jonathan. You might have seen this, but it's uh,
it's can't take a wild guests. I mean, if I
had to guess ancient Greece advertisement, I'm gonna say it's
(08:35):
something brothel related. No, in fact, which has got one
to tell you? Yeah? Yeah, okay, Well, let me do
this one really fast. So this was for okay, let's
just go to it. It was a seller of fabrics
who had made this papyrus right, and he claimed that
he would give a reward to anyone who would report
(08:56):
the whereabouts of quote slave sem somebody. This was Hapoo. Yeah,
hapo was was the name of the gentleman, and not
to be confused with Shemp, the underappreciated. Yes so anywhere,
Yes so. Anyone who would report the whereabouts of this
slave Sham and then report to him at his store
(09:18):
where he is would get a reward. And here's the thing.
It's said on the papyrus, anyone who returns him to
the store quote where the most beautiful fabrics are woven
for each person's taste. By the way, and I think
he sounds more like an A p B than an AD.
It's it's both, it's both. The pyrus was crazy, you know,
(09:39):
it wasn't as available as paper is today. But I
think I know the example you're going to mention. Yeah,
so the example I'm mentioning was a more permanent type
of advertising. And uh so, I've I've visited Pompeii, well
known as the village that was completely engulfed in volcanic ash,
killing every addie who was there, but preserving the village
(10:03):
very well. And you can go and tour Pompeii and
it's very interesting. One of the things you will notice
if you're looking down, which I recommend you do because
the ground is very uneven in certain places. Is that
every occasional paving stone you come across, there's a very
particular relief on that paving stone, a fallus, if you will,
(10:24):
or as my tour guide referred to it, a p noose.
And these pointed the direction toward the closest brothel. Yes,
because people would have visit Pompeii and they wouldn't necessarily
be able to speak Greek. It was all Greek to them,
but they understood what the signs meant, could follow it
(10:45):
and get to their desired destination, whereupon they would be
greeted with a mural that would have the offerings of
the house displayed, and they could just point to whatever
one they wanted repute. And so, as we see advertising
is an ancient craft, art, science, trick scam, much of
(11:08):
what we see a modern advertising today can be traced
back to a fellow named Edward Burnet's. We will not
labor you with the description of Edward Burne's other than
to say you can check out our multiple videos and
audio podcasts on it. The first audio podcast for this
show actually Go all the Way Back. The Dude was
incredibly manipulative and intelligent and and some could argue unscrupulous.
(11:37):
And so now we know there are several types of
advertisement and when they hear just a few. So first
we have direct address. So this is basically the equivalent
of Hello, I am an ad for this product, product X,
y Z whatever. Here is a cool joke by it
by me. So it's the idea of sort of instilling
positive feelings in people and associating those positive feelings with
(12:00):
particular product, like those those lovely Mentos ads from the nineties.
You know, that was a trivia question recently and I
immediately recalled the warm, fuzzy feelings you got when you
saw that plucky businessman who got paint on his suit
lay down on the bench and turn it into a
pin stripe. You know, it was just like you go, guys.
So for me, I think the most recent example that
(12:22):
that leaps to mind would be either the old spice commercials,
which sure yeah, the ones that evers Campbell as well,
those two, because they instill that sense of absurdity while
getting across this idea of this is this is a manly,
manly thing and will make you manly while not stinky,
and clearly for our purpose, is one of the most
(12:43):
important things here is that it is clearly being sold transparently, right,
And then that gets us to other things that would
be like branded constant. You can find this in uh
not nonprofits and NPR for instance. Though they will have
something where there will be a show that you might
enjoy or an episode of a thing, and then at
(13:04):
the beginning or at the end, or somewhere in the middle,
they will say brought to you by And this is
this is something where the advertiser wants to be associated
with the thing but doesn't want to, you know, be
all in your business. About. A company that is super
successful with doing that is red Bull. They do it
all for themselves, so they have these publications. They make
(13:25):
these skateboard videos, extreme sports videos, and all the gear
the people featuring these videos are wearing have red Bull
all over it. The skateboard half pipe says red Bull.
This guy down the bloody parachute says red Bull. You know,
but at the same time, you're like, you know what,
this is exciting content. I'm enjoying watching these people do
these dentifying feats. And and and one person sitting at
(13:46):
this table has a show sponsored by a large company.
I I do a show called Forward Thinking, and our
sponsor is Toyota. And Toyota is the company that makes
our show possible. It is entirely because of them. If
it in for Toyota, it would not exist. Again, you're
transparent about it. Every episode starts with a pre role
that's just brought to you by Toyota. And even even
(14:07):
more importantly to me is that Toyota gives me the
message of we want you to talk about things that
excite you about the future. That was my that's my
that's my direction. It's awesome. They don't they don't give
you anything. They don't ever they don't ever tell them like,
they don't ever tell them like what you should do
is relate space travel to this new sedan. Right, And
(14:30):
so the direction I get is what do you think
is really awesome about the future? Make episodes about that?
And I don't, like, I don't even have to submit
something to Toyota to get approval. They trust me to
do what is good for our show and good for
their brand, which is weird because you're crazy sketchy. Yeah, well,
I mean that's that's true. But for four years we
(14:53):
managed to do that show so and this is one
of those things where if it's done well, it can
be a huge wind for everyone involved, but it can
also go in a bad direction either for for any
of the parties, and it's just because it hasn't been
handled properly that brings us to a darker side what
(15:26):
is called native advertising, or in a clever portmanteau advertorial.
Yeah so that what's that in Jonathan? You know? Yeah,
it would go kind of like this, Hi, I'm a
real thing. I'm not an ad, but hey, hey is
it isn't product X cool? You know what? That reminds me?
(15:47):
There's some legitimate journalism that I can point to right
here that just shows you how objectively amazing Product X is.
Not to mention science, look at the science we use
beakers right and this this is this is an iteration
that you can probably recognize any time you've been on
the internet. You can also see it in history, for
(16:10):
one example with Edward Burns of course, and had the
reason people bacon for breakfast is because there was this
avatarial thing which was purportedly a study by doctors. During
a darker time in my life, I actually worked for UM,
a company that published a community magazine. You guys know
these community magazines. Everyone's got it. Your little city has
(16:32):
a City X magazine. So I'm not going to name names,
but based on my experience with this, I can only
assume that a lot of them are kind of like this,
but I could be wrong. With My particular situation was
like this, where every single piece of content in this
City X magazine was paid for by local business owners,
(16:55):
but it was all like trained as some sort of
profile or some sort of you know, community interest piece
where it's about, look the great things that this lawyer
is doing. But wait, why are there nine stories about
nine different lawyers in this magazine? That's weird. That is
native advertising, avertorials, and that's the bread and butter of
(17:17):
a lot of these smaller publications because people want to
be seen and they want but the thing is, no
one's Maybe some people are fooled, but I would say
anyone listening to the show likely would not be fool
taken in. It's one of the things that I find
the most maddening about that approach, because we know you
guys out there, We know that you are smart, we
(17:39):
know that you can smell when someone's trying to sell
something to you, and you can't imagine how frustrating it
can be on the other side of that equation to
be the person who has to produce that thing through
whatever directive, like to be told, Hey, you've got to
create this podcast or video or article or whatever it
may be because we want to sell more widgets, and
(18:01):
so you've got to make this widget thing. And uh,
it's your you know how widgets work, but you but
really you're you're explaining how awesome widgets are. Um, this
doesn't happen frequently, and it's not something that I think
most people have caught on that it's not necessarily the
most useful approach because since the audience can recognize what's happening,
(18:24):
they lose respect for the outlet that is producing the stuff.
They're saying, Oh, these people are just selling an ad
or they're just selling a product or service. Therefore I
don't respect them anymore because it is stuff they don't
want you to know. But the problem is you know
it when you see it. This brings us to the
subject of to Day's podcast, which is targeted advertising NOL
(18:48):
based on what we know about you, and we do
know more than you think Jonathan, Matt and I are
going to show you this product. You're going to love it.
Everything about who you are tells us you're going to
love it. I'm excited to see it. Look, look, look, look,
didn't you say you like kayaks? I love Kayaks and
this one plays electronica. I love electronica playing Kayaks and
(19:09):
maybe Tom York signed it. You'll never know unless you
buy it. Never know. There's also a handy place to
put whiskey. What are you saying that I'm an alcoholic? No,
we just know you. Oh no, he just clicked he
found this out offensive. Back to the drawing board. The
next step was to talk about Beard Oyle. That's funny.
That's funny, But it's kind of the way these things were.
(19:33):
It's a it's a series of trial and error. It's
like Jonathan was saying earlier with the offensive what not offensive?
But the ad that was getting on your nerves to
the point where you had to hide it. When you
told Facebook that you didn't want to see that ad it,
Facebook took that as an opportunity, opportunity to say, Okay,
well he doesn't like this, Let's try something new. Let's
try something let's let's change a little bit and see
(19:55):
if he maybe likes this version of this thing. It's
switching up the bait in the trap, just like going
further than that. Like like the early stages of this,
it relied a lot on us giving direct information to
whatever platform we're talking about, Like Facebook is a great example,
saying actively saying I don't like this. Well, Facebook's like,
all right, well, now we know they don't like this,
(20:16):
but maybe they like this other thing. Maybe bodybuilders with
bigger heads. Yeah, maybe that would have made me feel
less freaked out. Amazon is another great example, right, Like
the early version of Amazon is that you would buy something,
or you would be browsing for a specific thing, and
it would just show you related items that other people
(20:38):
who had also bought that that particular item we're interested in, saying, hey,
people who are interested in kayaks often also look at paddles.
That makes sense, right. The thing there is it's you
are feeding Amazon this information by buying things, and the
more things you buy, oh and god forbid you buy
one of those suggested items, the more accurate it gets
(21:01):
at predicting the kinds of things you or people like
you will like. Once a month, I buy something just
completely out of left field. It's like the ratings on Netflix.
You're giving the algorithm good information that it can then
turn around and serve you better adds. Is that a
good thing? Ah, that's where it goes. So let's just
talk about the evolution of this. So when the nineteen nineties,
(21:23):
internet companies websites advertised with a method that was pretty
similar to what we saw on television. Right, they would say,
we'll choose ads based on what we think will appeal
to the most people in an audience. So, for example,
we've got Jonathan on a site about baseball statistics, and
they don't know anything about you other than you're a
(21:45):
person who visited this site, and by the virtue of
that piece of information, they say, you know what, adds
for gloves, adds for bats, adds for related merchandise, bobbleheads,
bobbleheads perfs. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty simple on the surface.
It worked for t V, but a great deal of
marketing research and focus group stuff when in behind this.
In the early two thousands, online advertising, like the terminator robots,
(22:10):
started to become more sophisticated. At first, we could tell
the difference, right, but now it became a little more complex.
Company said hey, we can use this Amazon stuff. So
companies said, hey, we can use these Google browsing habits.
This anonymous information on this allowed companies to tailor ads
to a specific users. So it's for example, Matt, you
(22:32):
and Jonathan you could vote both visit the same website
on your computers and and and you wouldn't see the
same ads you would have. You would have space allotted
for an AD or perhaps a pop up or pop
under whatever format that ad would take. And I'm sure
we could all list our most hated types of advertising
from top to bottom. Pop unders are the worst anyway,
(22:56):
especially pop unders with automated audio playing. But yeah, what
is this my Space or geo cities. You made me
decide to never buy a kayak again, I guess, and
just not hanging out in the rapid. There are a
couple of sites in particular that are super guilty of those,
Like I'm gonna say Salon is like one of the
worst of the middle of an article and then this
(23:17):
animated video will come down and fill up the whole
screen play music at me, and I'm just like, I
don't even want to I don't even remember what I
was reading anymore. That there are other ones that have
like related video that will start to auto play. Yeah,
and then you have to track it down, like it
is at the top of the screen, is in the
bottom of the screen. Where can I turn this off?
Do I just need to mute the tab, which I
(23:39):
have done in the past, But at any rate, Yeah,
there's areas on a page that are designated for advertising,
whether it's on the physical page itself or it's some
sort of pop up or whatever. And while that layout
would remain largely the same for for Matt's visit and
for my visit, the actual ads we would view would
be based more upon the information that the web browser
(24:01):
was able to pull from me, that the the web
page owner was able to pull from me. Really, when
you think about it, those ads spaces, it's kind of
like a placeholder. You've got an advertising company that is
responsible for serving the ads that go into that placeholder.
The advertising company has tons of clients. Some of those
(24:22):
clients are going to appeal to Matt. Some of those
clients are going to appeal to me, Some might appeal
to both of us, And so what will happen is
based on Matt's behavior, which is exemplary, he would get
a certain type of ads, and based upon my behavior,
which is nefarious, I would get a different set of ads.
We're talking aboutlawful good, lawful evil, different ad experience. I
(24:43):
have often been described as lawful eye who I am
and really? Um So, so it sounds like we're kind
of demonizing ads a little bit. Yeah, but we do
need these things to to have our economy continue functioning.
(25:03):
Not to mention we specifically as Internet content creators, need
these things show and adds. Let's let's remember the ads
can actually show us stuff that is useful to us. Right, So,
so if if people use the abilities that we have
generated for targeted advertising, and those abilities include things like
(25:25):
collecting and mining huge amounts of information about an enormous
number of people, being able to differentiate the important factors
in that and match advertising up with those factors, to
parse it, yeah, and to act upon it properly. That's
that's pretty complicates of this kid stuff. If we use
(25:48):
that correctly, then under ideal circumstances, our experience as users
will be that we encounter the ads that actually matter
to us, stuff that either we would otherwise be in
tested it in maybe we were actively searching for it,
but we hadn't found what we really wanted yet, and
we would be able to connect to the things that
(26:08):
matter to us. And that's a positive experience on our end.
The the company selling that good or service, it's a
positive experience on their end because they get a customer.
The advertising company, it's a positive experience on there. And
because they delivered the proper ad to the proper place,
to the proper time. And for whatever website that ad
appears on, it's a positive experience because they get rewarded
(26:30):
for being the host of that ad. Everyone wins. The
problem is this technology, this capacity that we have, it
is much easier to misuse it than to use it properly.
Returning to our earlier comparison of the evolution of terminators,
or for fans of deep cuts, the evolution of the
(26:52):
robots and screamers, huhne, just like in that movie Looper.
Oh in you know, so many things are like that
movie Looper all the time. The thing that we find though,
is that as there is an increasingly cynical and jaded
and aware population, people don't care to be manipulated I
(27:16):
think we can all agree. As this population learns more
and more about these advertising tricks, and as people build
things like ad blockers and stuff like that, targeted advertising
is also evolving and finding new ways to gather more data.
So it leads us to a question, is there a
(27:39):
legitimate privacy concern when it comes to targeted advertising? Jonathan,
you raised an excellent point in a live podcast we
did just before we hopped into while we were in
the studio, but just before we started recording, and you
can also shameless plug check it out on our web
on our Facebook page Facebook come forward slash conspiracy stuff.
(28:01):
And you said something that really stayed with me, which
is you talked about collecting this data and you said
it's anonymous. You said, the thing they care least about
is your name. Your name means nothing. What what an
advertiser needs to know is what are you interested in?
How likely are you to buy something, how frequently are
you going to buy it? And what is the best
(28:23):
way to convince you to buy that thing? What your
name is matters probably the least. But here's the other
thing is that it takes a an incredibly small amount
of data to identify a person Uh. There was a
Harvard study that came out several years ago in which
a professor found that really if you had a person's
(28:44):
zip code, uh, the uh, the model of car they had,
and the color of that car. Um, I think there
might have been one other piece of information that you
could identify more than of the individuals based upon that
little bit of information. So think about all the stuff,
all the data you create just through your browsing. So
(29:07):
they're they're using local vehicle registrations to find everybody. Well,
this was just an example from Harvard saying that it
takes very little, It takes very few points of data
to to identify a person, to to link it to
an actual individual. But Jonathan, I'm a beautiful and unique snowflake.
Isn't it a bit reductive to you describe me and
(29:29):
to find me based on just a handful of data points? Absolutely,
But that's what advertising does. Right. There's this sounds like
there's some unrest in the thirty four demo. That's okay,
we can we can give him some some nice, some nice,
some nice soft drinks to really just take that edge off.
Just fill the room with valium valium gas. So here's
(29:51):
the thing. It doesn't take very much information to get
a really good grip on who a person is. Even
if you don't know the person's name, you know what
their wants and desires are, Like the things that make
us us. We end up sharing that through our activities online,
(30:11):
just through your browsing history. That tells people a lot
of stuff. What you share on social networks obviously tells
people a lot of stuff. And this is valuable information
for advertisers. They pay money to get access to that
kind of information. And so there are companies that when
they gather that info, they gather that data, they'll sell
(30:33):
it to a data broker. The data broker will go
around collecting larger and larger amounts of this information. Just
imagine a huge spreadsheet filled with lots of little data
points about the things that you are particularly interested in.
Then they'll go and sell that to advertisers who will
then plot advertising against that information. Now, clearly this could
(30:56):
lead to some really nasty uh breaches in privacy and
security if it's used incorrectly. Before we move on, I
remember you did a tech stuff a while back. We
talked about some of this stuff, and I was surprised
to find that as an individual, your data ain't worth
all that much in terms of monetary value. It's when
(31:18):
you bundle it together for big picture use that it
becomes valuable. But do you remember what that number was?
It was? It was I think just it was either
just over or just under one dollar for for a person.
That's how much you're worth. Now. Now, obviously to you,
that information is worth a lot more because that is you,
That is who you are, that that information represents the
(31:39):
person that you are. So do you it is priceless.
To a company that is trying to sell that data
to an advertiser, it's worth around the buck a dollar
per person. Obviously the amount of money is dependent also
(32:03):
upon how rich is that data, how much information do
they have, what's the depth of profile? And we are
the ones handing that information over. We are actively doing
it ourselves simply by using the internet, by browsing the
pages we go to, by posting the things that we
post on Facebook or Twitter. We are actively generating that
(32:24):
information that other people are selling and profiting from. Now
you can limit that to a degree. Yeah, mitigate is
probably a better word. So you could do things like
you could use uh incognito mode where you're not using
cookies or anything like that. That would help limit the
amount of information that you are sharing when you're visiting
(32:45):
various websites, but that also limits what you're able to do.
Right Let's say you want to buy something on Amazon, Well,
you've got to be signed into an account to do
I mean, that's just the way the system works. It's like,
if you want to buy something in a store, you
better money or a credit card or something like that. Uh,
if you don't, you can't buy the thing. And or
(33:06):
for something like a social media platform, Facebook being the
example we're using in this podcast, a social media platform
that is built to show you things it thinks you
would like from your friends, uses some of the same
techniques that they used to sell you kayaks or baseball, uh, gloves, bats.
What do we do? I think we did tickets, giant
(33:30):
like sticks the ball into the goal and you know
what sports ball paddles. It adds up, It adds up.
But that's that's a very good point, and at this
point we also should look at something that needs to
be more transparent across the board. Often, online advertising is
what I would call the Achilles heel of online content.
(33:54):
You know it's it's a primary funding thing that enables
a lot of the stuff we like to see to occur.
And you know, if you have listened to this show
for more than this episode, you know that occasionally we
have run ads, sometimes by really cool companies like Great
Courses right where you can pretty much learn for free,
(34:15):
or we've run ads for shadier companies, like an outfit
called Illumination Global Unlimited. So we want to be completely
clear about this that we see this practice across the board,
across the world, and across the net as a continuing thing.
(34:36):
The Pandora's box, which was actually a jar in the story,
is is already open. Ben. It's not just a continuing thing.
This is going to be an explosive thing. Let me
paint a picture of what the future is going to be, Ben.
Should I get under the table, No, No, just grab
a brush. Just imagine this, this future. This is the
future of future generations, Matt. So you think about that
(35:00):
for a second. Okay, I'm getting real here, man. So
it's a world where you can put on uh an
augmented reality pair of glasses which gives you incredible abilities
to see all sorts of really awesome information. Imagine being
able to walk down the streets of London and with
a simple command you can look at what it would
(35:21):
have looked like during Shakespeare's time. It would be really cool.
That's really interesting stuff. Or you're just asking to get
directions in a city that you're not familiar with, and
it's giving you a little overlay showing you where you
need to walk and where you can turn. Really useful stuff.
Oh it's also pointing out that, hey, you really like curry.
You had eight of that curry place a couple of
(35:41):
weeks ago. That was really awesome. This place that you're
passing right now has the best curry in the city.
You should probably go in there and eat. Oh and
by the way, across the street, Uh, there's a book
shop and they are having a sale for Neal game
in books. And I know you really love of the
the last Neil game in but you loved American Gods,
(36:03):
so you need to go in there. And oh, by
the way, you try to push, you try to push
skip and then you get at you cannot skip this content.
Now you know who's done this the best, the best
um pop culture representation of this near future Dystopia is
on a little show called Black Mirror that many of
(36:25):
you might be familiar with, in an episode called fifteen
Million Merits, and it's the second episode. Is the second episode. Yes,
it depicts a world where there is a hierarchy, um
a class divide between content creators basically and people that
are working the equivalent of blue collar jobs, and they
(36:46):
ride these bikes to generate power for the content creators.
Presumably it's not entirely clear because it's almost this fairy
tale structure, which it's a wonderful one, and you're following
from the perspective of one of those blue colors, which
means that you have a limitted amount of information about
the world. But the way it works is they spend
time on these exercise bikes and earn the equivalent of pay,
(37:12):
but it's actually some sort of imaginary money called for merits.
It's like Xbox points, and it gives them the ability
to buy um different pieces of clothing for their avatar,
which in the episode looks kind of like those WE
those ME characters and the WE networks or whatever. And
I don't want to spoil anything. Everyone that hasn't seen it,
please watch it. It's a wonderful, prescient piece of science fiction.
(37:35):
The whole series is fantastic. Actually, it's been picked up
by Netflix for an American not reboot, but whole new run,
featuring the same show runner, Charlie Brooker, who is a genius. Anyway,
the way the ads play in the episode are you
get this ad and you can skip it, but it
could cost you. It will cost you your merits to
skip the ad. And then eventually, you know, the people
(37:58):
that don't have any merits, they got to watch all
the ads, and it's this whole economic ecosystem, for lack
of a better term, where you know, it's like a
self feeding system. It's it's like indentured servitude, but it's
a high tech version of it. So the thing is
that that this advertising is going to become more pervasive
(38:18):
as we get into the realm of the Internet of things,
as we get personal digital assistance, like you get things
like the Amazon Echo or Google. As we record this,
it's on the day that Google announced their Google Assistant,
and they're going to have their own Amazon Echo type
of product called Google Home. These are products that will
live in our houses if we choose to buy them,
(38:41):
and they will listen when we talk to them, and
maybe sometimes they'll listen when we're not trying to talk
to them, and they will help us do things and
buy stuff and learn about us and learn what stuff
we want to buy. And it becomes so pervasive and
part of our lives that it just becomes reality. It
is no longer adds. It is reality, right right, It's
(39:02):
just another layer of information that is biquitous, the same
way that the majority of people receive constant information from
their skin, their eyes, their ears, or their nose. Right.
And it's terrifying because I just see these pictures of
someone like Let's let's step even further a little bit
less plausible at this point. Let's go full dystopian. Let's
(39:26):
say that you have an offer to have the Internet
in your head boom little chip. You can search anything
we talked about on this show before. And it's free,
but it's ad supported, which means that every so often,
when you're in the midst of some amazing research and
you're saying, you're saying, oh, Google, what was the name
(39:48):
of r Siri or whomever? What was the name of
that John Carpenter movie with Kurt Russell, right, right right,
and and then this list pops up in your in
your like interface and you can somehow see it, and
then it pauses, and everything stops, and you listen to
a voice in your head tell you about the reboot
(40:11):
of Big Trouble in Little China, and it's and it's louder. Jonathan,
you are our tech expert here how stuff works. And
one thing we love about having you over on our
show or coming to visit you on your show is
that we are able to explore in a credible and
(40:32):
well informed way these possibilities that that can so often
be exaggerated but then also ignored when there, when there
is dangerous. So we come to you today to ask
do you think this stuff is possible? If so, do
you think it's plausible? How realistic is that picture you painted?
So the picture I painted with augmented reality is not
(40:54):
just possible, it's happening. I mean, you get things like
the Microsoft holow lens that is going to open up
opportunities for app developers to create apps that are going
to be AD supported, just as the apps on your
smartphone often are ADS supported. If you've ever played any
game on your smartphone, chances are you've encountered one that
is supported by ads, and in order to progress in
(41:14):
the game, you need to watch an AD first. Same
thing is gonna happen with augmented reality. For a future
in which the entire reality is ADS supported, I think
that's going to be that's more far fetched. But devices
that that react to us and listen to us, you
can guarantee that they are going to go into feeding
(41:37):
more data. Two services like Amazon or Google that will
build out even more robust dossiers if you prefer on
the individuals within that home. Because there's an adage that
goes if the service you are using is free, you
are the product. You are the thing that is being sold.
(41:59):
Google is not really a search company. Google is an
ad company. And Google is able to sell information based
upon the searches that numerous individuals over billions of different
searches have provided. And that's not necessarily a bad thing,
but it can be a bad thing, and certainly it's
(42:19):
the it's the sort of stuff that if someone had
the intent to misuse it, they could do a great
deal of harm or um end up being personally very
damaging to a particular individual. It's not likely to happen.
It's not like it would behoof whichever company it is
(42:40):
that owns that data to allow it to happen. But
it's possible because information is power. I mean, if you
have a lot of information about somebody, you can use
that information either to help that person or you could
do lots of harm to that person. Um. So, really,
I think the worry is making sure that the companies
that are gathering all this information are practicing good stewardship,
(43:05):
that they're being responsible with it. Uh. But there's nothing
forcing them to do that other than their own self interests.
But self interest is I agree. So I'm saying like,
as soon as their behavior affects the bottom line, only
then will they change. But I would argue that we
contribute to this system willingly because it's the cost of
(43:28):
doing business, the cost of having all the benefits and
joys associated with being able to be on the internet
all the time, and having free email accounts and free
web hosting and this down the other I mean free podcasts.
We we love this stuff, you know well, and and
with things like social media platforms like Facebook and and
the fact, you know, people talk about oversharing here, I
(43:50):
say we're addicted to this stuff. Well, for me, Facebook
is the primary way that I interact with my friends
now because I have so little time, My friends have
so a little time. We don't live close to one another.
Uh that taking the time to to make taking time
to make time, boy son of a preacher man, to
(44:11):
take that time so that we can have personal interactions
in a real space, it's getting increasingly difficult. So Facebook
is a legitimately valuable tool for me to stay in
touch and learn what's going on with my friends lives.
You know who's having who just got a new job,
who's getting married, you know who's having a kid, that
(44:33):
kind of stuff. That's really important for me to to
be able to keep up with that. And I love
being able to share in those experiences even vicariously through
this platform. And so I willingly engage in using Facebook
because it does have a value to me. Um. But
I know that the flip side of that is I'm
feeding more and more information about myself in the process,
(44:56):
And you have to ask your question yourself, a question,
is what I'm getting out of it worth the fact
that I'm giving up some of myself in return, exactly?
And that is a question that we would like you
to answer for us, ladies and gentlemen today, we are
going to skip our shout out corner because we wanted
(45:16):
to spend some more time exploring this question. You can
check out that live broadcast we mentioned earlier at the
front of our podcast where you can see Matt, Jonathan, Noel,
and I talking about some other aspects of this that
maybe we didn't quite touch on in the same So
I was worried that when we did that that we
(45:37):
were leaving all around the table and we're going to
skip it in the podcast. We ended up kind of
going in a little bit different directions. So definitely a
good supplement from this episode. So do check it out.
And while you're on the internet, hey, hey, why not
like and follow us on Twitter and Facebook. What a
great time to mention it. And let's know you're you're
already you're already on a list. It's uh, we're conspiras
(46:00):
see stuff at both of those. Jonathan. For the people
who have not heard your appearances on earlier episodes or
our appearances on earlier episodes of your show, where's the
best place for people to find you? Well, I mean,
if you love the tech World. Tech Stuff is the
podcast that is going on eight years now and more
than seven hundred fifty episodes of all things tech, so
(46:24):
you can go check that out. We've done everything from
how specific technology works, to deep profiles of big tech
companies to explanations of important events in tech like the
video game crash of Night three, So that would be
my first suggestion. And of course you can check out
things like now dot how stuff works dot com, which
(46:45):
is our more news oriented website. I write and shoot
video for that site constantly, so you can check me
out there, uh tons of other places, but you just
need to explore how stuff Works dot com. If you
love this show and you love learning, and you love
knowing what really makes the universe tick, you gotta go
(47:06):
to how stuff Works dot com. Well said. I will
also mention you can catch Jonathan. As we said, I'm
forward thinking and brain stuff audio and video. If you
like the future, you'll love those things. And speaking of
the future, our best suggestions for upcoming episodes come from you,
ladies and gentlemen, So let us know on Twitter, let
(47:28):
us know on Facebook. Answer to the question Jonathan posed
at the end, which I think virges on philosophy and
matters of cosmic import. We want to hear your answer.
We want to hear your recommendations for things we should cover.
If you don't, and that's the end of this classic episode.
If you have any thoughts or questions about this episode,
(47:50):
you can get into contact with us in a number
of different ways. One of the best is to give
us a call. Our number is one eight three three
st d w y t K. If you don't want
to do that, you can send us a good old
fashioned email. We are conspiracy at i heart radio dot com.
Stuff they don't want you to know is a production
of I heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
(48:12):
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
So it's no secret that at some point in their
lives everybody struggles to one degree or another with impostors syndrome,
with confidence, you know, and you have a lot of
people who want you UH to feel insecure and and
a lot of human life is UH an ongoing endeavor
(00:20):
to understand one self worth. Well, we have found a
quantitative worth for many people. It's in the world of
targeted online ads. Boys. It ever, it is weaponized insecurity,
UM writ large at its best or worst. I don't know,
you'd be the judge, you know. It's the way money
is made now. Really, when advertising money is spent, it
(00:44):
is usually on whatever service can offer the most targeting
or the most pinpoint targeting per dollar spent. Yes, down
to the dollars and cents of it. Uh. We were
very lucky to get our good friend to the show,
Jonathan Strickland, the created of tech Stuff, our local expert
on all things tech, to hop on this show with us.
(01:07):
In In this classic episode, you're gonna hear us chat
with Jonathan about targeted ads, how they work, and Honestly,
in the years since we recorded this, I am increasingly cynical.
I don't know about you. Guys, about all the privacy guarantees.
I'm even more optimistic, never been more. I'm also sarcastic.
(01:32):
Here we go from UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies.
History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back
now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. Hello,
(01:54):
welcome back to the show. My name is not my
name is Noel, my name is Ben. You are you
that makes this stuff they don't want you to know?
But not any ordinary episode of this show. And here's
the part where you're saying, well, Ben, what is ordinary?
Great question? Question for another day, ladies and gentlemen, because
we are joined today by a special guest, a returning
force to our show, longtime collaborator and friend of all
(02:17):
three of ours, ladies and gentlemen, the illustrious, the magnanimous,
the transatlantic accenting, the phenomenal, the inevitable, Ladies and gentlemen,
Jonathan Strickland. Guys, I have to say that your ability
to introduce a person that is only matched by your
ability to tie incredibly complicated knots. I look forward to
getting out of the studio. What are we talking about today? Okay,
(02:40):
let's get through this quickly then, guys, look, no one
is getting untied until the show is over pipe down strictly,
all right, and that goes for you as well, Matt.
It is an excellent question. We are talking today about
something that might seem a little bit strange for some people,
which is advertising, but not just advertising, a specific kind
of advertise, targeted online advertising. So in our personal lives,
(03:05):
let's start there. Have you guys had any weird experiences
yourself with ads? Absolutely? Yeah, yeah, well, I mean all
sorts of things, right, But okay, so first, when you
think about targeted advertising, you know you wanted to find
that a little bit, right. This is advertising that is
specifically geared to most likely uh interest you, based upon
(03:28):
whatever data the advertiser has on you in the effort
to sell a good and or service to you. Right.
That's the whole purpose of acts. So often we talk
about data mining, machine learning, examining people's behavior in order
to target them more effectively. But in the beginning, before
(03:48):
you gather all that information you're targeted, ads tend to
be a little more random and chaotic, may not necessarily
really target the person. And I'm specifically thinking of an
ad that popped up again and again and again for
me on Facebook for the longest time until I actually
(04:11):
had to take the effort to hide that ad and
say I don't want to see this anymore. I didn't
know you could do that. Yes you can, you can,
you can. There's a little there's a little menu you
can pull up and say this doesn't interest me, post
this and and what it can do is it actually
tells Facebook, oh, well, I can better serve ads to
(04:32):
this person by not showing this stuff like it benefits Facebook,
it benefits the companies that are advertising, and it benefits
the user. Right, You're just helping. What was the head
was for a muscle enhancer which had an impossibly muscular
person with an impossibly tiny head like you look at
(04:56):
you think, if this isn't photoshopped, this guy as a
miserable experience in his day to day life because he's
so muscular that his range of movement has to be limited.
It does not at all make me want to even
remotely consider getting whatever nutritional supplement they're trying to sell
(05:17):
or or there you know, uh, weight loss program or
muscle building photoshop courses. I mean, you guys can see me.
You you guys out there can't, but the guys here
in the podcast room can see me. Your head is
normal size, and you can also tell that I am
clearly not terribly concerned about building lots of muscle mass.
I don't know. I might need a few moments here.
(05:39):
I could take off the shirt, but that's probably not
something any of us really wants to have burned into
our memory. All that being said, you do clearly have
a pension for different flavors of muscle milk. Well, that's true.
That's it's just because you know, I support those guys
to get in here before we move on. I recently
(06:01):
had a baby and we made the mistake of making
a registry at Target. And as soon as we did that,
all of the advertising back when we had cable, all
of it was maybe centric, and maybe it wasn't the
you know, going to Target doing that. Maybe it was
our search result history, maybe it was any number of things.
But as soon as that life event happened for us,
(06:23):
every advertisement that we saw was about it. I've got
I've got an even more recent one for me that, um,
I'm curious to see what comes out of it now,
because right now it's at the earliest stages. I was
looking for a price quote for a particular type of vehicle,
so I used a website where you can get price
(06:44):
comparisons for dealerships in your area that sell whatever vehicle
you're looking into. And in order to get that information,
you have to do things like put in your email
address and but in your phone number. I knew what
was going to happen while I was doing it, but
I really needed to see those price que so I
did it. Immediately, I'm getting phone calls and emails from
(07:04):
all the dealerships in the area. Now that's the first wave.
I suspect what happens next is if I keep checking
my email and I look through the spam filter, I'm
gonna see a lot of car related stuff come at me.
Not the specific make and model that I was looking at,
but all sorts of things like aftermarket and all that
kind of stuff, the related things around the car industry.
(07:28):
I expect I'll get a lot of that because I
have been identified as someone actively looking into purchasing a car,
and it is very valuable information for a company to have.
They could sell that to other companies before money. And
then I get inundated by all this advertising. So let's
look at advertisements. Jonathan. You provided an excellent definition of
(07:50):
what an advertisement is, essentially at heart and unsolicited attempt
to showcase the benefits of product X or the less
concrete sense of the brand, a tone of an experience
in hopes of having you, the customer, purchase an item
or service. And the thing is, this is super I'm
not gonna occurse because we're still a family show. This
(08:10):
is super old. How old is it? Well, the earliest
known advertisement that we have right now comes from three
thousand BC from Thebes, Greece. I'm not sure if you've
seen this, Jonathan. You might have seen this, but it's uh,
it's can't take a wild guests. I mean, if I
had to guess ancient Greece advertisement, I'm gonna say it's
(08:35):
something brothel related. No, in fact, which has got one
to tell you? Yeah? Yeah, okay, Well, let me do
this one really fast. So this was for okay, let's
just go to it. It was a seller of fabrics
who had made this papyrus right, and he claimed that
he would give a reward to anyone who would report
(08:56):
the whereabouts of quote slave sem somebody. This was Hapoo. Yeah,
hapo was was the name of the gentleman, and not
to be confused with Shemp, the underappreciated. Yes so anywhere,
Yes so. Anyone who would report the whereabouts of this
slave Sham and then report to him at his store
(09:18):
where he is would get a reward. And here's the thing.
It's said on the papyrus, anyone who returns him to
the store quote where the most beautiful fabrics are woven
for each person's taste. By the way, and I think
he sounds more like an A p B than an AD.
It's it's both, it's both. The pyrus was crazy, you know,
(09:39):
it wasn't as available as paper is today. But I
think I know the example you're going to mention. Yeah,
so the example I'm mentioning was a more permanent type
of advertising. And uh so, I've I've visited Pompeii, well
known as the village that was completely engulfed in volcanic ash,
killing every addie who was there, but preserving the village
(10:03):
very well. And you can go and tour Pompeii and
it's very interesting. One of the things you will notice
if you're looking down, which I recommend you do because
the ground is very uneven in certain places. Is that
every occasional paving stone you come across, there's a very
particular relief on that paving stone, a fallus, if you will,
(10:24):
or as my tour guide referred to it, a p noose.
And these pointed the direction toward the closest brothel. Yes,
because people would have visit Pompeii and they wouldn't necessarily
be able to speak Greek. It was all Greek to them,
but they understood what the signs meant, could follow it
(10:45):
and get to their desired destination, whereupon they would be
greeted with a mural that would have the offerings of
the house displayed, and they could just point to whatever
one they wanted repute. And so, as we see advertising
is an ancient craft, art, science, trick scam, much of
(11:08):
what we see a modern advertising today can be traced
back to a fellow named Edward Burnet's. We will not
labor you with the description of Edward Burne's other than
to say you can check out our multiple videos and
audio podcasts on it. The first audio podcast for this
show actually Go all the Way Back. The Dude was
incredibly manipulative and intelligent and and some could argue unscrupulous.
(11:37):
And so now we know there are several types of
advertisement and when they hear just a few. So first
we have direct address. So this is basically the equivalent
of Hello, I am an ad for this product, product X,
y Z whatever. Here is a cool joke by it
by me. So it's the idea of sort of instilling
positive feelings in people and associating those positive feelings with
(12:00):
particular product, like those those lovely Mentos ads from the nineties.
You know, that was a trivia question recently and I
immediately recalled the warm, fuzzy feelings you got when you
saw that plucky businessman who got paint on his suit
lay down on the bench and turn it into a
pin stripe. You know, it was just like you go, guys.
So for me, I think the most recent example that
(12:22):
that leaps to mind would be either the old spice commercials,
which sure yeah, the ones that evers Campbell as well,
those two, because they instill that sense of absurdity while
getting across this idea of this is this is a manly,
manly thing and will make you manly while not stinky,
and clearly for our purpose, is one of the most
(12:43):
important things here is that it is clearly being sold transparently, right,
And then that gets us to other things that would
be like branded constant. You can find this in uh
not nonprofits and NPR for instance. Though they will have
something where there will be a show that you might
enjoy or an episode of a thing, and then at
(13:04):
the beginning or at the end, or somewhere in the middle,
they will say brought to you by And this is
this is something where the advertiser wants to be associated
with the thing but doesn't want to, you know, be
all in your business. About. A company that is super
successful with doing that is red Bull. They do it
all for themselves, so they have these publications. They make
(13:25):
these skateboard videos, extreme sports videos, and all the gear
the people featuring these videos are wearing have red Bull
all over it. The skateboard half pipe says red Bull.
This guy down the bloody parachute says red Bull. You know,
but at the same time, you're like, you know what,
this is exciting content. I'm enjoying watching these people do
these dentifying feats. And and and one person sitting at
(13:46):
this table has a show sponsored by a large company.
I I do a show called Forward Thinking, and our
sponsor is Toyota. And Toyota is the company that makes
our show possible. It is entirely because of them. If
it in for Toyota, it would not exist. Again, you're
transparent about it. Every episode starts with a pre role
that's just brought to you by Toyota. And even even
(14:07):
more importantly to me is that Toyota gives me the
message of we want you to talk about things that
excite you about the future. That was my that's my
that's my direction. It's awesome. They don't they don't give
you anything. They don't ever they don't ever tell them like,
they don't ever tell them like what you should do
is relate space travel to this new sedan. Right, And
(14:30):
so the direction I get is what do you think
is really awesome about the future? Make episodes about that?
And I don't, like, I don't even have to submit
something to Toyota to get approval. They trust me to
do what is good for our show and good for
their brand, which is weird because you're crazy sketchy. Yeah, well,
I mean that's that's true. But for four years we
(14:53):
managed to do that show so and this is one
of those things where if it's done well, it can
be a huge wind for everyone involved, but it can
also go in a bad direction either for for any
of the parties, and it's just because it hasn't been
handled properly that brings us to a darker side what
(15:26):
is called native advertising, or in a clever portmanteau advertorial.
Yeah so that what's that in Jonathan? You know? Yeah,
it would go kind of like this, Hi, I'm a
real thing. I'm not an ad, but hey, hey is
it isn't product X cool? You know what? That reminds me?
(15:47):
There's some legitimate journalism that I can point to right
here that just shows you how objectively amazing Product X is.
Not to mention science, look at the science we use
beakers right and this this is this is an iteration
that you can probably recognize any time you've been on
the internet. You can also see it in history, for
(16:10):
one example with Edward Burns of course, and had the
reason people bacon for breakfast is because there was this
avatarial thing which was purportedly a study by doctors. During
a darker time in my life, I actually worked for UM,
a company that published a community magazine. You guys know
these community magazines. Everyone's got it. Your little city has
(16:32):
a City X magazine. So I'm not going to name names,
but based on my experience with this, I can only
assume that a lot of them are kind of like this,
but I could be wrong. With My particular situation was
like this, where every single piece of content in this
City X magazine was paid for by local business owners,
(16:55):
but it was all like trained as some sort of
profile or some sort of you know, community interest piece
where it's about, look the great things that this lawyer
is doing. But wait, why are there nine stories about
nine different lawyers in this magazine? That's weird. That is
native advertising, avertorials, and that's the bread and butter of
(17:17):
a lot of these smaller publications because people want to
be seen and they want but the thing is, no
one's Maybe some people are fooled, but I would say
anyone listening to the show likely would not be fool
taken in. It's one of the things that I find
the most maddening about that approach, because we know you
guys out there, We know that you are smart, we
(17:39):
know that you can smell when someone's trying to sell
something to you, and you can't imagine how frustrating it
can be on the other side of that equation to
be the person who has to produce that thing through
whatever directive, like to be told, Hey, you've got to
create this podcast or video or article or whatever it
may be because we want to sell more widgets, and
(18:01):
so you've got to make this widget thing. And uh,
it's your you know how widgets work, but you but
really you're you're explaining how awesome widgets are. Um, this
doesn't happen frequently, and it's not something that I think
most people have caught on that it's not necessarily the
most useful approach because since the audience can recognize what's happening,
(18:24):
they lose respect for the outlet that is producing the stuff.
They're saying, Oh, these people are just selling an ad
or they're just selling a product or service. Therefore I
don't respect them anymore because it is stuff they don't
want you to know. But the problem is you know
it when you see it. This brings us to the
subject of to Day's podcast, which is targeted advertising NOL
(18:48):
based on what we know about you, and we do
know more than you think Jonathan, Matt and I are
going to show you this product. You're going to love it.
Everything about who you are tells us you're going to
love it. I'm excited to see it. Look, look, look, look,
didn't you say you like kayaks? I love Kayaks and
this one plays electronica. I love electronica playing Kayaks and
(19:09):
maybe Tom York signed it. You'll never know unless you
buy it. Never know. There's also a handy place to
put whiskey. What are you saying that I'm an alcoholic? No,
we just know you. Oh no, he just clicked he
found this out offensive. Back to the drawing board. The
next step was to talk about Beard Oyle. That's funny.
That's funny, But it's kind of the way these things were.
(19:33):
It's a it's a series of trial and error. It's
like Jonathan was saying earlier with the offensive what not offensive?
But the ad that was getting on your nerves to
the point where you had to hide it. When you
told Facebook that you didn't want to see that ad it,
Facebook took that as an opportunity, opportunity to say, Okay,
well he doesn't like this, Let's try something new. Let's
try something let's let's change a little bit and see
(19:55):
if he maybe likes this version of this thing. It's
switching up the bait in the trap, just like going
further than that. Like like the early stages of this,
it relied a lot on us giving direct information to
whatever platform we're talking about, Like Facebook is a great example,
saying actively saying I don't like this. Well, Facebook's like,
all right, well, now we know they don't like this,
(20:16):
but maybe they like this other thing. Maybe bodybuilders with
bigger heads. Yeah, maybe that would have made me feel
less freaked out. Amazon is another great example, right, Like
the early version of Amazon is that you would buy something,
or you would be browsing for a specific thing, and
it would just show you related items that other people
(20:38):
who had also bought that that particular item we're interested in, saying, hey,
people who are interested in kayaks often also look at paddles.
That makes sense, right. The thing there is it's you
are feeding Amazon this information by buying things, and the
more things you buy, oh and god forbid you buy
one of those suggested items, the more accurate it gets
(21:01):
at predicting the kinds of things you or people like
you will like. Once a month, I buy something just
completely out of left field. It's like the ratings on Netflix.
You're giving the algorithm good information that it can then
turn around and serve you better adds. Is that a
good thing? Ah, that's where it goes. So let's just
talk about the evolution of this. So when the nineteen nineties,
(21:23):
internet companies websites advertised with a method that was pretty
similar to what we saw on television. Right, they would say,
we'll choose ads based on what we think will appeal
to the most people in an audience. So, for example,
we've got Jonathan on a site about baseball statistics, and
they don't know anything about you other than you're a
(21:45):
person who visited this site, and by the virtue of
that piece of information, they say, you know what, adds
for gloves, adds for bats, adds for related merchandise, bobbleheads,
bobbleheads perfs. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty simple on the surface.
It worked for t V, but a great deal of
marketing research and focus group stuff when in behind this.
In the early two thousands, online advertising, like the terminator robots,
(22:10):
started to become more sophisticated. At first, we could tell
the difference, right, but now it became a little more complex.
Company said hey, we can use this Amazon stuff. So
companies said, hey, we can use these Google browsing habits.
This anonymous information on this allowed companies to tailor ads
to a specific users. So it's for example, Matt, you
(22:32):
and Jonathan you could vote both visit the same website
on your computers and and and you wouldn't see the
same ads you would have. You would have space allotted
for an AD or perhaps a pop up or pop
under whatever format that ad would take. And I'm sure
we could all list our most hated types of advertising
from top to bottom. Pop unders are the worst anyway,
(22:56):
especially pop unders with automated audio playing. But yeah, what
is this my Space or geo cities. You made me
decide to never buy a kayak again, I guess, and
just not hanging out in the rapid. There are a
couple of sites in particular that are super guilty of those,
Like I'm gonna say Salon is like one of the
worst of the middle of an article and then this
(23:17):
animated video will come down and fill up the whole
screen play music at me, and I'm just like, I
don't even want to I don't even remember what I
was reading anymore. That there are other ones that have
like related video that will start to auto play. Yeah,
and then you have to track it down, like it
is at the top of the screen, is in the
bottom of the screen. Where can I turn this off?
Do I just need to mute the tab, which I
(23:39):
have done in the past, But at any rate, Yeah,
there's areas on a page that are designated for advertising,
whether it's on the physical page itself or it's some
sort of pop up or whatever. And while that layout
would remain largely the same for for Matt's visit and
for my visit, the actual ads we would view would
be based more upon the information that the web browser
(24:01):
was able to pull from me, that the the web
page owner was able to pull from me. Really, when
you think about it, those ads spaces, it's kind of
like a placeholder. You've got an advertising company that is
responsible for serving the ads that go into that placeholder.
The advertising company has tons of clients. Some of those
(24:22):
clients are going to appeal to Matt. Some of those
clients are going to appeal to me, Some might appeal
to both of us, And so what will happen is
based on Matt's behavior, which is exemplary, he would get
a certain type of ads, and based upon my behavior,
which is nefarious, I would get a different set of ads.
We're talking aboutlawful good, lawful evil, different ad experience. I
(24:43):
have often been described as lawful eye who I am
and really? Um So, so it sounds like we're kind
of demonizing ads a little bit. Yeah, but we do
need these things to to have our economy continue functioning.
(25:03):
Not to mention we specifically as Internet content creators, need
these things show and adds. Let's let's remember the ads
can actually show us stuff that is useful to us. Right, So,
so if if people use the abilities that we have
generated for targeted advertising, and those abilities include things like
(25:25):
collecting and mining huge amounts of information about an enormous
number of people, being able to differentiate the important factors
in that and match advertising up with those factors, to
parse it, yeah, and to act upon it properly. That's
that's pretty complicates of this kid stuff. If we use
(25:48):
that correctly, then under ideal circumstances, our experience as users
will be that we encounter the ads that actually matter
to us, stuff that either we would otherwise be in
tested it in maybe we were actively searching for it,
but we hadn't found what we really wanted yet, and
we would be able to connect to the things that
(26:08):
matter to us. And that's a positive experience on our end.
The the company selling that good or service, it's a
positive experience on their end because they get a customer.
The advertising company, it's a positive experience on there. And
because they delivered the proper ad to the proper place,
to the proper time. And for whatever website that ad
appears on, it's a positive experience because they get rewarded
(26:30):
for being the host of that ad. Everyone wins. The
problem is this technology, this capacity that we have, it
is much easier to misuse it than to use it properly.
Returning to our earlier comparison of the evolution of terminators,
or for fans of deep cuts, the evolution of the
(26:52):
robots and screamers, huhne, just like in that movie Looper.
Oh in you know, so many things are like that
movie Looper all the time. The thing that we find though,
is that as there is an increasingly cynical and jaded
and aware population, people don't care to be manipulated I
(27:16):
think we can all agree. As this population learns more
and more about these advertising tricks, and as people build
things like ad blockers and stuff like that, targeted advertising
is also evolving and finding new ways to gather more data.
So it leads us to a question, is there a
(27:39):
legitimate privacy concern when it comes to targeted advertising? Jonathan,
you raised an excellent point in a live podcast we
did just before we hopped into while we were in
the studio, but just before we started recording, and you
can also shameless plug check it out on our web
on our Facebook page Facebook come forward slash conspiracy stuff.
(28:01):
And you said something that really stayed with me, which
is you talked about collecting this data and you said
it's anonymous. You said, the thing they care least about
is your name. Your name means nothing. What what an
advertiser needs to know is what are you interested in?
How likely are you to buy something, how frequently are
you going to buy it? And what is the best
(28:23):
way to convince you to buy that thing? What your
name is matters probably the least. But here's the other
thing is that it takes a an incredibly small amount
of data to identify a person Uh. There was a
Harvard study that came out several years ago in which
a professor found that really if you had a person's
(28:44):
zip code, uh, the uh, the model of car they had,
and the color of that car. Um, I think there
might have been one other piece of information that you
could identify more than of the individuals based upon that
little bit of information. So think about all the stuff,
all the data you create just through your browsing. So
(29:07):
they're they're using local vehicle registrations to find everybody. Well,
this was just an example from Harvard saying that it
takes very little, It takes very few points of data
to to identify a person, to to link it to
an actual individual. But Jonathan, I'm a beautiful and unique snowflake.
Isn't it a bit reductive to you describe me and
(29:29):
to find me based on just a handful of data points? Absolutely,
But that's what advertising does. Right. There's this sounds like
there's some unrest in the thirty four demo. That's okay,
we can we can give him some some nice, some nice,
some nice soft drinks to really just take that edge off.
Just fill the room with valium valium gas. So here's
(29:51):
the thing. It doesn't take very much information to get
a really good grip on who a person is. Even
if you don't know the person's name, you know what
their wants and desires are, Like the things that make
us us. We end up sharing that through our activities online,
(30:11):
just through your browsing history. That tells people a lot
of stuff. What you share on social networks obviously tells
people a lot of stuff. And this is valuable information
for advertisers. They pay money to get access to that
kind of information. And so there are companies that when
they gather that info, they gather that data, they'll sell
(30:33):
it to a data broker. The data broker will go
around collecting larger and larger amounts of this information. Just
imagine a huge spreadsheet filled with lots of little data
points about the things that you are particularly interested in.
Then they'll go and sell that to advertisers who will
then plot advertising against that information. Now, clearly this could
(30:56):
lead to some really nasty uh breaches in privacy and
security if it's used incorrectly. Before we move on, I
remember you did a tech stuff a while back. We
talked about some of this stuff, and I was surprised
to find that as an individual, your data ain't worth
all that much in terms of monetary value. It's when
(31:18):
you bundle it together for big picture use that it
becomes valuable. But do you remember what that number was?
It was? It was I think just it was either
just over or just under one dollar for for a person.
That's how much you're worth. Now. Now, obviously to you,
that information is worth a lot more because that is you,
That is who you are, that that information represents the
(31:39):
person that you are. So do you it is priceless.
To a company that is trying to sell that data
to an advertiser, it's worth around the buck a dollar
per person. Obviously the amount of money is dependent also
(32:03):
upon how rich is that data, how much information do
they have, what's the depth of profile? And we are
the ones handing that information over. We are actively doing
it ourselves simply by using the internet, by browsing the
pages we go to, by posting the things that we
post on Facebook or Twitter. We are actively generating that
(32:24):
information that other people are selling and profiting from. Now
you can limit that to a degree. Yeah, mitigate is
probably a better word. So you could do things like
you could use uh incognito mode where you're not using
cookies or anything like that. That would help limit the
amount of information that you are sharing when you're visiting
(32:45):
various websites, but that also limits what you're able to do.
Right Let's say you want to buy something on Amazon, Well,
you've got to be signed into an account to do
I mean, that's just the way the system works. It's like,
if you want to buy something in a store, you
better money or a credit card or something like that. Uh,
if you don't, you can't buy the thing. And or
(33:06):
for something like a social media platform, Facebook being the
example we're using in this podcast, a social media platform
that is built to show you things it thinks you
would like from your friends, uses some of the same
techniques that they used to sell you kayaks or baseball, uh, gloves, bats.
What do we do? I think we did tickets, giant
(33:30):
like sticks the ball into the goal and you know
what sports ball paddles. It adds up, It adds up.
But that's that's a very good point, and at this
point we also should look at something that needs to
be more transparent across the board. Often, online advertising is
what I would call the Achilles heel of online content.
(33:54):
You know it's it's a primary funding thing that enables
a lot of the stuff we like to see to occur.
And you know, if you have listened to this show
for more than this episode, you know that occasionally we
have run ads, sometimes by really cool companies like Great
Courses right where you can pretty much learn for free,
(34:15):
or we've run ads for shadier companies, like an outfit
called Illumination Global Unlimited. So we want to be completely
clear about this that we see this practice across the board,
across the world, and across the net as a continuing thing.
(34:36):
The Pandora's box, which was actually a jar in the story,
is is already open. Ben. It's not just a continuing thing.
This is going to be an explosive thing. Let me
paint a picture of what the future is going to be, Ben.
Should I get under the table, No, No, just grab
a brush. Just imagine this, this future. This is the
future of future generations, Matt. So you think about that
(35:00):
for a second. Okay, I'm getting real here, man. So
it's a world where you can put on uh an
augmented reality pair of glasses which gives you incredible abilities
to see all sorts of really awesome information. Imagine being
able to walk down the streets of London and with
a simple command you can look at what it would
(35:21):
have looked like during Shakespeare's time. It would be really cool.
That's really interesting stuff. Or you're just asking to get
directions in a city that you're not familiar with, and
it's giving you a little overlay showing you where you
need to walk and where you can turn. Really useful stuff.
Oh it's also pointing out that, hey, you really like curry.
You had eight of that curry place a couple of
(35:41):
weeks ago. That was really awesome. This place that you're
passing right now has the best curry in the city.
You should probably go in there and eat. Oh and
by the way, across the street, Uh, there's a book
shop and they are having a sale for Neal game
in books. And I know you really love of the
the last Neil game in but you loved American Gods,
(36:03):
so you need to go in there. And oh, by
the way, you try to push, you try to push
skip and then you get at you cannot skip this content.
Now you know who's done this the best, the best
um pop culture representation of this near future Dystopia is
on a little show called Black Mirror that many of
(36:25):
you might be familiar with, in an episode called fifteen
Million Merits, and it's the second episode. Is the second episode. Yes,
it depicts a world where there is a hierarchy, um
a class divide between content creators basically and people that
are working the equivalent of blue collar jobs, and they
(36:46):
ride these bikes to generate power for the content creators.
Presumably it's not entirely clear because it's almost this fairy
tale structure, which it's a wonderful one, and you're following
from the perspective of one of those blue colors, which
means that you have a limitted amount of information about
the world. But the way it works is they spend
time on these exercise bikes and earn the equivalent of pay,
(37:12):
but it's actually some sort of imaginary money called for merits.
It's like Xbox points, and it gives them the ability
to buy um different pieces of clothing for their avatar,
which in the episode looks kind of like those WE
those ME characters and the WE networks or whatever. And
I don't want to spoil anything. Everyone that hasn't seen it,
please watch it. It's a wonderful, prescient piece of science fiction.
(37:35):
The whole series is fantastic. Actually, it's been picked up
by Netflix for an American not reboot, but whole new run,
featuring the same show runner, Charlie Brooker, who is a genius. Anyway,
the way the ads play in the episode are you
get this ad and you can skip it, but it
could cost you. It will cost you your merits to
skip the ad. And then eventually, you know, the people
(37:58):
that don't have any merits, they got to watch all
the ads, and it's this whole economic ecosystem, for lack
of a better term, where you know, it's like a
self feeding system. It's it's like indentured servitude, but it's
a high tech version of it. So the thing is
that that this advertising is going to become more pervasive
(38:18):
as we get into the realm of the Internet of things,
as we get personal digital assistance, like you get things
like the Amazon Echo or Google. As we record this,
it's on the day that Google announced their Google Assistant,
and they're going to have their own Amazon Echo type
of product called Google Home. These are products that will
live in our houses if we choose to buy them,
(38:41):
and they will listen when we talk to them, and
maybe sometimes they'll listen when we're not trying to talk
to them, and they will help us do things and
buy stuff and learn about us and learn what stuff
we want to buy. And it becomes so pervasive and
part of our lives that it just becomes reality. It
is no longer adds. It is reality, right right, It's
(39:02):
just another layer of information that is biquitous, the same
way that the majority of people receive constant information from
their skin, their eyes, their ears, or their nose. Right.
And it's terrifying because I just see these pictures of
someone like Let's let's step even further a little bit
less plausible at this point. Let's go full dystopian. Let's
(39:26):
say that you have an offer to have the Internet
in your head boom little chip. You can search anything
we talked about on this show before. And it's free,
but it's ad supported, which means that every so often,
when you're in the midst of some amazing research and
you're saying, you're saying, oh, Google, what was the name
(39:48):
of r Siri or whomever? What was the name of
that John Carpenter movie with Kurt Russell, right, right right,
and and then this list pops up in your in
your like interface and you can somehow see it, and
then it pauses, and everything stops, and you listen to
a voice in your head tell you about the reboot
(40:11):
of Big Trouble in Little China, and it's and it's louder. Jonathan,
you are our tech expert here how stuff works. And
one thing we love about having you over on our
show or coming to visit you on your show is
that we are able to explore in a credible and
(40:32):
well informed way these possibilities that that can so often
be exaggerated but then also ignored when there, when there
is dangerous. So we come to you today to ask
do you think this stuff is possible? If so, do
you think it's plausible? How realistic is that picture you painted?
So the picture I painted with augmented reality is not
(40:54):
just possible, it's happening. I mean, you get things like
the Microsoft holow lens that is going to open up
opportunities for app developers to create apps that are going
to be AD supported, just as the apps on your
smartphone often are ADS supported. If you've ever played any
game on your smartphone, chances are you've encountered one that
is supported by ads, and in order to progress in
(41:14):
the game, you need to watch an AD first. Same
thing is gonna happen with augmented reality. For a future
in which the entire reality is ADS supported, I think
that's going to be that's more far fetched. But devices
that that react to us and listen to us, you
can guarantee that they are going to go into feeding
(41:37):
more data. Two services like Amazon or Google that will
build out even more robust dossiers if you prefer on
the individuals within that home. Because there's an adage that
goes if the service you are using is free, you
are the product. You are the thing that is being sold.
(41:59):
Google is not really a search company. Google is an
ad company. And Google is able to sell information based
upon the searches that numerous individuals over billions of different
searches have provided. And that's not necessarily a bad thing,
but it can be a bad thing, and certainly it's
(42:19):
the it's the sort of stuff that if someone had
the intent to misuse it, they could do a great
deal of harm or um end up being personally very
damaging to a particular individual. It's not likely to happen.
It's not like it would behoof whichever company it is
(42:40):
that owns that data to allow it to happen. But
it's possible because information is power. I mean, if you
have a lot of information about somebody, you can use
that information either to help that person or you could
do lots of harm to that person. Um. So, really,
I think the worry is making sure that the companies
that are gathering all this information are practicing good stewardship,
(43:05):
that they're being responsible with it. Uh. But there's nothing
forcing them to do that other than their own self interests.
But self interest is I agree. So I'm saying like,
as soon as their behavior affects the bottom line, only
then will they change. But I would argue that we
contribute to this system willingly because it's the cost of
(43:28):
doing business, the cost of having all the benefits and
joys associated with being able to be on the internet
all the time, and having free email accounts and free
web hosting and this down the other I mean free podcasts.
We we love this stuff, you know well, and and
with things like social media platforms like Facebook and and
the fact, you know, people talk about oversharing here, I
(43:50):
say we're addicted to this stuff. Well, for me, Facebook
is the primary way that I interact with my friends
now because I have so little time, My friends have
so a little time. We don't live close to one another.
Uh that taking the time to to make taking time
to make time, boy son of a preacher man, to
(44:11):
take that time so that we can have personal interactions
in a real space, it's getting increasingly difficult. So Facebook
is a legitimately valuable tool for me to stay in
touch and learn what's going on with my friends lives.
You know who's having who just got a new job,
who's getting married, you know who's having a kid, that
(44:33):
kind of stuff. That's really important for me to to
be able to keep up with that. And I love
being able to share in those experiences even vicariously through
this platform. And so I willingly engage in using Facebook
because it does have a value to me. Um. But
I know that the flip side of that is I'm
feeding more and more information about myself in the process,
(44:56):
And you have to ask your question yourself, a question,
is what I'm getting out of it worth the fact
that I'm giving up some of myself in return, exactly?
And that is a question that we would like you
to answer for us, ladies and gentlemen today, we are
going to skip our shout out corner because we wanted
(45:16):
to spend some more time exploring this question. You can
check out that live broadcast we mentioned earlier at the
front of our podcast where you can see Matt, Jonathan, Noel,
and I talking about some other aspects of this that
maybe we didn't quite touch on in the same So
I was worried that when we did that that we
(45:37):
were leaving all around the table and we're going to
skip it in the podcast. We ended up kind of
going in a little bit different directions. So definitely a
good supplement from this episode. So do check it out.
And while you're on the internet, hey, hey, why not
like and follow us on Twitter and Facebook. What a
great time to mention it. And let's know you're you're
already you're already on a list. It's uh, we're conspiras
(46:00):
see stuff at both of those. Jonathan. For the people
who have not heard your appearances on earlier episodes or
our appearances on earlier episodes of your show, where's the
best place for people to find you? Well, I mean,
if you love the tech World. Tech Stuff is the
podcast that is going on eight years now and more
than seven hundred fifty episodes of all things tech, so
(46:24):
you can go check that out. We've done everything from
how specific technology works, to deep profiles of big tech
companies to explanations of important events in tech like the
video game crash of Night three, So that would be
my first suggestion. And of course you can check out
things like now dot how stuff works dot com, which
(46:45):
is our more news oriented website. I write and shoot
video for that site constantly, so you can check me
out there, uh tons of other places, but you just
need to explore how stuff Works dot com. If you
love this show and you love learning, and you love
knowing what really makes the universe tick, you gotta go
(47:06):
to how stuff Works dot com. Well said. I will
also mention you can catch Jonathan. As we said, I'm
forward thinking and brain stuff audio and video. If you
like the future, you'll love those things. And speaking of
the future, our best suggestions for upcoming episodes come from you,
ladies and gentlemen, So let us know on Twitter, let
(47:28):
us know on Facebook. Answer to the question Jonathan posed
at the end, which I think virges on philosophy and
matters of cosmic import. We want to hear your answer.
We want to hear your recommendations for things we should cover.
If you don't, and that's the end of this classic episode.
If you have any thoughts or questions about this episode,
(47:50):
you can get into contact with us in a number
of different ways. One of the best is to give
us a call. Our number is one eight three three
st d w y t K. If you don't want
to do that, you can send us a good old
fashioned email. We are conspiracy at i heart radio dot com.
Stuff they don't want you to know is a production
of I heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio,
(48:12):
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
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