09 Jun 2018
Nudgestock 2018 notes and links
(update 3 July 2018: transcript)
Thanks for coming to my Nudgestock 2018 talk. First, as promised, some links to the signaling literature. I don’t know of a full bibliography for this material, and a lot of it appears to be paywalled. A good way to get into it is to start with this widely cited paper by Phillip Nelson: Advertising as Information | Journal of Political Economy: Vol 82, No 4 and work forward.
Gardete and Bart “We find that when the sender’s motives are transparent to the receiver, communication can only be influential if the sender is not well informed about the receiver’s preferences. The sender prefers an interior level of information quality, while the receiver prefers complete privacy unless disclosure is necessary to induce communication.” Tailored Cheap Talk | Stanford Graduate School of Business The Gardete and Bart paper makes sense if you ever read Computer Shopper for the ads. You want to get an idea of each manufacturer’s support for each hardware standard, so that you can buy parts today that will keep their value in the parts market of the near future. You don’t want an ad that targets you based on what you already have.
Kihlstrom and Riordan “A great deal of advertising appears to convey no direct credible information about product qualities. Nevertheless such advertising may indirectly signal quality if there exist market mechanisms that produce a positive relationship between product quality and advertising expenditures.” Advertising as a Signal
Ambler and Hollier “High perceived advertising expense enhances an advertisement’s persuasiveness significantly, but largely indirectly, by strengthening perceptions of brand quality.” The Waste in Advertising Is the Part That Works | the Journal of Advertising Research
Davis, Kay, and Star “It is not so much the claims made by advertisers that are helpful but the fact that they are willing to spend extravagant amounts of money.” Is advertising rational- Business Strategy Review - Wiley Online Library
New research on the effect of ad blocking on user engagement. No paywall. Ben Miroglio, David Zeber, Jofish Kaye, and Rebecca Weiss. 2018. The Effect of Ad Blocking on User Engagement with the Web. In WWW 2018: The 2018 Web Conference, April 23–27, 2018, Lyon, France. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 9 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3178876.3186162 (PDF)
Here’s that simulation of unicellular advertisers that I showed on screen, and more on the norms enforcer situation, which IHMO is different from pure signaling.
For those of you who are verified on Twitter, so haven’t seen what I’m talking about with the deceptive ads there, I have started collecting some: dmarti/deceptive-ads
I mentioned the alignment of interest between high-reputation brands and high-reputation publishers. More on the publisher side is in a series of guest posts for Digital Content Next, which represents large media companies that stand to benefit from reputation-based advertising: Don Marti, Author at Digital Content Next Also more from the publisher point of view in Notes and links from my talk at the Reynolds Journalism Institute.
What’s next? The web advertising mess isn’t a snarled-up mess of collective action problems. It’s a complex set of problems that interact in a way that creates some big opportunities for the right projects. Work together to fix web ads? Let’s not.