Modern sports fans and the attribution cartel

if you don’t like the attribution tracking you can just turn it off?

Now that I have explained why nobody wants to sell me an NBA or NFL team, this is also why I don’t buy the argument that if I don’t like the attribution cartel I can just go into browser settings and turn the attribution tracking off. Every individual sports fan can make the decision to not get into the gambling apps, too. But the more fans that the NBA and NFL can convert into downpaymentless gamblers, the bigger the problem they’re creating for legit brands that depend on selling to prosperous homeowners. And a problem for those brands will turn into a problem for agencies, TV networks, and the leagues. And for everybody, really. Call me a normie but I’d rather have homeowner neighbors than a bunch of angry guys living in vans. (If the wrong politician gives them the wrong easy answers for how that got into that situation, things could go real bad real fast.)

Every in-browser ad scheme turns into a few extra minutes of privacy labor for people who know to turn it off, and I resent having to flip some setting every time the browser people have some half-baked idea, but it’s not about me.Today’s Web is a two-class platform, and that’s a problem On average, everyone in the USA has about $1200 in ad money spent to try to reach them, and when the attribution cartel shifts ad money away from legitimate ad-supported sites and other resources over to their own services, that affects everyone. Some people would have benefited from the positive externalities of legit ad-supported services, some people are harmed by the negative externalities of Big Tech’s platforms, and most of us are both. “Privacy” is a collective problem, not an individual one.

appeasement: a useful reaction to boundary testing?

To my surprise, one of the weaker arguments for in-browser ad features is somehow making the rounds again: that the Attribution proposal is an “alternative” to more intrusive tracking. But that’s just not how people work. Has any perpetrator of privacy violations ever backed off one data collection method because they were able to get another one? The original claim for Google “Privacy Sandbox” was that if you let Google Chrome be a little creepy, then they won’t have to do fingerprinting. Haha nope. See August 22, 2018 and December 18, 2024 in the Google “Privacy Sandbox” timeline.

I have linked to Terri Cole’s Navigating Boundaries: Strategies for Addressing Repeat Violations with Effective Consequences before, but if you haven’t read it, please click through and maybe come back to this post later. When a “repeat boundary offender” is a large corporation, though, we need to think about “Consequences For Repeat Boundary Offenders” at the state legislature level and not just individual actions.

And as an individual you’re not going to be able to detect every instance of boundary testing by a group of extremely large corporations. So you have to lower the expected payoff of any given scheme by “overreacting” to the ones you can spot.

the reports are bogus but marketing pros can compensate?

The new argument for the attribution cartel is that we know the attribution system is going to produce misleading reports, but, hey, we’re all professional marketers here. And a professional marketer should know how to take a report that’s skewed in favor of search, social, and app store advertising, read between the lines in the right places, and add all the appropriate grains of salt. That’s nice, but as a person with professional marketing skills, you aren’t the main intended audience for attribution cartel reports. Bosses, clients, and politicians are.

If a professional marketer’s professional marketing judgment results comes out against Big Tech, that’s when Google reps play hardball with AI pitches to clients. Marty Swant at Digiday reports,

Google Ads sales reps are increasingly contacting agencies’ clients with advice that at times contradicts agency strategies—and in some cases mismanages campaigns—according to range of media agencies in the U.S. and U.K. Sources. They also say the tactics feel more aggressive and more inappropriate than in the past.

Many agencies say the efforts seem designed to sow confusion, discredit agencies and ultimately cut them out of the picture. For example, agencies claim that when they reject Google reps’ misaligned advice, the reps go around them—directly to clients—discrediting the agency by implying they don’t understand how Google Ads work.

If the agency or marketing department doesn’t believe the attribution cartel reports, the cartel members will keep going up the org chart until they find someone who will.

On the public policy side, the Big Tech firms also have large-scale lobbying operations that hide behind small business owners and organizations. They worked against a California privacy bill last year, and The outreach was particularly noteworthy because Google had not itself taken a public position on the bill.

Expect the attribution cartel reports to show up most consequentially in the places where marketers with data science knowledge aren’t: in over-your-head meetings with CEOs and clients, at state capitols any time a bill would restrict the cartel members, and in data shared with sympathetic academic researchers. The Big Tech companies have the budget and the access to be in every one of those places. Professional marketers who can understand the limitations and misleading aspects of their claims don’t.

Conclusion

The Attribution proposal is probably best understood as part of the general “pivot to crime” by Big Tech. Considered as a set, the attribution cartel companies’ decisions to enshittify are a sign of weakness. A double-digit growth rate by companies that already control the majority of a business that’s growing at a single-digit rate is not sustainable in a honest way. More: Think before you click

Bonus links

‘Be very pessimistic of advertising studies’ by James Swift. These more humble figures bring the advertising elasticities produced by econometric models closer to the lower estimates that are frequently seen when researchers try to discern the effects of advertising from controlled lab experiments.

On Google declaring war on the Web by tante. The goal is to take away the web and guide people into Google’s abstraction on top of it. An abstraction they control and moderate. It’s about monopolizing access to information.

Ad Infinitum by Matthias Ott. The web was the scaffolding Google needed to build its index, to train its models, to accumulate the world’s information, and put ads next to it to get filthy rich. Now that the content is inside the system, the scaffolding is no longer needed.

Gwadar witnesses soaring sale of Chinese solar systems from Independent News Pakistan. (PE-owned retailers in the USA, any time there is any news anywhere: we are out of stock because supply chain issues. Shopkeepers in Gwadar, Pakistan after sales go up 60 percent in a global crisis: come on down, plenty of high-quality panels, batteries, and kits in stock.)

Square Peg in a Round Hole: AirPower against Mobile Targets and Missiles on History Does You. The more uncomfortable conclusion is that air forces have been here before, and that the problem of finding and killing mobile launchers and missiles from the air may be less a tactical shortcoming than a structural feature.