Data brokers think you're a woman, or a man, they're not sure

When you run an online advertising campaign via one of the big platforms, where do you think the money goes?

For every Euro you spend trying to reach your audience, less than 50 cents goes to showing your ad. The rest feeds all the intermediaries: ad exchanges, data brokers, and the rest of the AdTech supply chain.

Neither you nor the publisher where the ad is shown get your money’s worth. The intermediaries, though, get the money and get to build dossiers on the people you’re trying to reach

The industry calls this “identity resolution”: stitching all the fragments of someone’s online activities into a detailed profile: email addresses, phone numbers, geographical locations, shopping habits, phone brands,… You name it, they connect it and sell it.

One company might know you visited a health site, another might know where you shop offline, a third knows where you live. All this gets combined and saved.

The worst part is that, despite all the spying, a lot of that data is plain wrong. A study found that data brokers only get someone’s gender right 42% of the time, which is worse than a coin flip! Accuracy doesn’t really matter to them, though, because selling big audience segments means bigger fees.

Adding to this, display ads get clicked around 50 times per 10000 views, which isn’t a lot. But the 10000 views still harvest data about the viewer each time. The clicking is barely worth it, the surveillance is (to them).

Platforms justify this invasive advertising by citing surveys saying users prefer relevant ads. But those surveys are rigged with leading questions. If they asked “are you happy to be tracked and profiled so ads can get your gender wrong half the time?” I doubt you’d get a positive answer. When Apple explicitly asked iPhone users if they wanted to be tracked, 96% said no (who are these 4%?).

If you’re an organisation that cares about privacy or ethics, think about where your advertising budget is going. Do you want to be funding the harvesting of your audience’s data and their “identity resolution”?

This doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t promote your work. But you should be choosing options that don’t feed the surveillance machine: contextual ads (ads based on where they’re shown, not who’s viewing them), newsletter sponsorships, direct deals with publishers, videos, podcasts,… You’ll most likely reach a better audience too.

Colin