Silly marketer, attribution cartel reports are for lobbyists!

In The W3C Is Making A Mistake About Measuring Advertising Effectiveness, Rick Bruner writes,

Platforms increasingly optimize ad delivery toward users already likely to convert. Consumers already in-market naturally generate more searches, retailer visits, social engagement, commerce activity and measurable lower-funnel signals. Attribution systems, therefore, risk confusing underlying purchase propensity with advertising persuasion. The result is a structural bias toward channels positioned closest to observable conversion activity, including search, retail media, retargeting and click-oriented social advertising.

The structural bias problem is related to, but not the same as, the problem I covered in What Happens When The Attribution Cartel Meets Advertising’s Halo Effect? Because of the way that big companies work, even if the attribution tracking did start to go in the direction of producing a right answer, it wouldn’t be allowed to. Either way:

If attribution systems systematically overcredit lower-funnel media environments already optimized around purchase intent, advertisers risk steering billions of dollars toward channels that harvest existing demand rather than create new demand.

Those big platform companies don’t just sit back and snipe unearned ad revenue. Extra ad money diverted to search, social, and app store advertising will fund risky data practices, fraud and extremism that harm everyone, while people are deprived of the positive externalities of other kinds of ad-supported media.

But none of these fine points of advertising data science are news to the attribution cartel companies. They can read the literature as well as anyone, and could even simulate attribution cartel results using their existing first-party data (like Google could have used in-house data to see the Inferring Users’ Demographics and Sensitive Interests Using the Topics API problem.)

But for the attribution cartel, getting the wrong answer is the point. That’s because marketing data science experts aren’t the most important audience for attribution reports—state legislators are.

Big Tech lobbyists already show up with voluminous research that doesn’t really hang together to back up their claims that legitimate businesses depend on Big Tech advertising. If the attribution cartel succeeds at W3C, they will be able to level up from existing misleading claims to extra-strength misleading claims, mathematically peer-reviewed and standardized. And—considering the lobbying coverage Big Tech can afford compared to the rest of us, they will have a lot of opportunities to use them.

Privacy concerns?

Fraud risks?

Noise and land use issues with data centers?

Too bad! This attribution data says that all businesses in the state depend on Big Tech advertising to sell anything.

Anyway, considered as a pure math project, the attribution proposal is probably fine. Give it a gold star. But whatever you do, don’t let it on the real web—take it out in the desert and bury the damn thing before the lobbyists start using it.

(Title borrowed from the Trix Rabbit, “who has been seeking the fruit flavor of Trix since 1959.”)

More: Think before you click

Bonus links

Demand Is Booming for New No Tech, Repairable Tractor by Jason Koebler. Ursa Ag’s Doug Wilson told me that the company designed the tractor because of a need in the marketplace for a new machine that isn’t loaded with tech and is easy to maintain. The company follows in the footsteps of consumer electronics companies like Fairphone, which makes a repairable smartphone and Framework, which makes modular, repairable laptops. The demand Ursa Ag has seen is part of the backlash to manufacturer repair monopolies and the injection of technology and internet-connected sensors and terms of use into even the most basic of gadgets.

The UK CMA says publishers in the country will be allowed to opt out of Google AI search results, giving the company nine months to implement the changes by Imran Rahman-Jones and Laura Cress (this also gives vibe CMS companies a chance to set up scraping and regeneration of a paraphrased version. Google must be fine with one extra LLM pass)

European Parliament ditches Google for French search firm over privacy concerns by Milena Wälde and Pieter Haeck. Searches conducted through the address bar in Firefox and Edge browsers will automatically be routed through Qwant, although lawmakers will remain free to use competing search engines or change their default settings.

Google Encloses The Web by John Battelle. To feed their increasingly ravenous AI maws, Google (and other contenders like Anthropic and OpenAI) are paying up for raw materials to ensure their products have fresh and accurate information. This is a business development first approach to information: aggregators who have captured our attention will decide which information suppliers are worthy of ingestion. Those suppliers are then relegated to a fixed-margin business at the mercy of their upstream overlords. (I don’t think they’ll have to pay much. Scraping plus vibe CMS with mimimal human oversight will generate enough raw text for LLM training purposes.)

What Is a Dickover? by John Gruber. This malicious design pattern is so ubiquitous that it has spread even to personal blogs, like this one from my friend Om Malik, and to great brands like Field Notes, both asking you to sign up for their newsletters. (I even have one, sort of.)

Slate’s new privacy policy is a dumpster fire by Jonathan Kamens. (Probably the right choice, though. For the cost of the lawyer hours to get a privacy policy letter-perfect, a site could do a revenue-positive feature.)