substitution effects

Previously: Arguments for the attribution cartel

One of the arguments for the attribution cartel is that in-browser attribution tracking will somehow displace other forms of ad measurement. Because reasons, I guess. Or because the cartel members believe that they can convince people that everyone else’s ad data collection needs consent—or at least those fake “consent” dialogs that the Irish regulators will let you get away with—and somehow the attribution cartel doesn’t.

The problem with that argument is that there have already been two big opportunities for substitution effects to happen. And they haven’t.

• Google’s “Privacy Sandbox” included an Attribution Reporting API. But as far as I can tell it was the only one of the major “Privacy Sandbox” ad systems not to get an independent test. (If I’m wrong, let me know and I’ll add it to the timeline.)

• Apple Safari has “privacy-preserving ad attribution” that came out in 2021, but as far as I can tell most of the people talking about it are users who found it buried under “Advanced” in settings and are talking about turning it off.

Why so little marketer interest in an in-browser ad measurement system?

The problem is that for the attribution cartel, the system has a limited set of acceptable outputs. The Google and Apple systems would have had to agree that the best-performing ads are on Google and Apple properties.

Likewise, whatever W3C ends up standardizing on, the attribution reports will have to agree with the ad placement decisions already made by the Facebook and Instagram algorithms, by Google’s Performance Max, and by whatever Apple is going to be doing as they continue to enshittify over there. Imagine an attribution report that contradicted the optimal placements decreed from above, and gave credit for sales to legit independent sites instead. That would be like writing a biology paper contradicting Trofim Lysenko back when he was a big shot.

Since marketers can predict that the attribution reports are going to hide the halo effects of the likely most impactful ad placements, and just back up what the cartel members were saying anyway, there was little interest in the Google and Apple systems, and there will be little interest in the new one. The attribution cartel members have reasons to do what they’re doing—but they have to do with lobbying and consolidation, not benefits to legit advertisers or legit ad-supported sites.

More: Are ya winning, son? How the attribution cartel is getting privacy nerds and adtech execs to agree on something.

Related

(Re)enter Sandbox by James Swift. If there’s one consolation for opponents of the Attribution API, though, it’s that not even Thomson, who is working on the project, expects it to make a huge difference.

Mozilla Privacy Blog: Building Competitive Digital Markets: From Rules to Results (The attribution cartel saga is another sad example of Mozilla vs. Mozilla—on one hand they’re trying to advocate for competitive digital markets, on the other they’re participating in building the opposite.)

Bonus links

Developers: Beware of Ad Libraries that Betray Your Users’ Location Privacy by Lena Cohen and Bill Budington. When developers let advertising SDKs collect location data, they’re putting users at risk of more than just creepy ads. Location information sourced from the advertising industry has been used for ICE investigations, global spy tools, outing a gay priest, tracking union organizers, and tracking US military personnel.

Wikipedia Turned on its Volunteers. Now it’s Coming for its Workers. by Asif Youssuff. Wikimedia’s CEO since January 20 has been Bernadette Meehan. Bernadette has had a career in high finance and in public service, and she’s now revolved into the executive role at the Wikimedia Foundation. Bernadette admits that she has never been an editor of Wikipedia…. (yikes)

Thomson Reuters Built Its Own AI Model That Now Ranks Among the World’s Best - Thomson Reuters Institute by Joel Hron and Jonathan Schwarz. Thomson is competitive with the world’s leading frontier models despite being a fraction of their size and cost to train and operate. Thomson Reuters has achieved that performance by combining exceptional AI talent with authoritative proprietary content and deep domain expertise. And with less than 10% of Thomson Reuters content used in its training so far, there remains significant opportunity to expand its capabilities.

Ulysses S. Grant on the Future Dividing Line by David Mikkelson. If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon’s, but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition, and ignorance on the other. — U.S. Grant (confirmed)

Samsung bans smart TV apps that share users’ internet connections with strangers by Zack Whittaker. AI companies, for example, increasingly rely on resproxies to scrape data from multiple places on the internet in one go to train their AI models. (A positive use of these proxies is spotting surveillance pricing.)

BMW Is Showing Commercials on Their Car’s Dash Screens as a Treat by Jason Torchinsky. (Don’t complain—it it weren’t for the ads, they would have to charge money for the cars.)