Written by Dong, 2021 Cohort
Today, I want to talk about programmatic advertising from a critical perspective. Maybe a little boring for our readers, but it is worth thinking about.
As we all know, programmatic advertising based on algorithm technologies can match the perfect man whose interests, cognition, and identity are consistent with the products or services that advertisers want to sell, so as to realize the maximum consumption targeted by advertising, which is a normal thing in the digital era.
However, with the common use of native advertisements such as information streaming or feed ads (like Toutiao, an intelligent news dissemination tool in China), the boundaries between advertising and platform content become more and more blurred, and the conditions and phenomena of “filter bubbles” seem also to be more “contained” in Internet advertising.
“Filtering Bubbles” was first coined by Eli Pariser in Filtering Bubbles: The Internet Didn’t Tell You in 2011. He believes that different kinds of websites that we use for getting information are like bubbles, isolating us from other Internet information and immersing us in our carefully curated news world.
If the algorithm merely focuses on “pushing the information that they believe the audience really wants,” people may be stuck in those “bubbles” in the long run.
Because when an algorithm pushes selected feed ads to users, its information value may not necessarily be in line with the user’s true demands. For example, after you searched Pocari Sweat on a video platform, you might receive many beverage videos on the home page. If this video platform shares the user’s cookies with shopping websites, beverage recommendations will also appear when shopping, which is not what users really want to buy. Those precise but polarized advertisements can narrow down users’ interests, reduce the diversity of needs, and even stimulate users to produce false needs, which accelerates the formation of consumerism.
Secondly, spaces for long-tail commodities may therefore be squeezed.
Chris Anderson came up with this idea in 2004, which refers to a phenomenon that unique products or services with relatively small quantities, due to their huge total volume and other attributes, may accumulate more than mainstream products. When the conversation between friends that owned similar interest circles moves from offline to online, us, social animals may not share information that we really need, but talk about the similar advertising content that the system pushed onto them. Advertising by personalized algorithms more appeared in the interpersonal circle, and those advertising gradually tends to be homogenized and mainstreamed. For consumers, their reference options become limited and may even turn to unrealistic, but mainstream goods or services. But for manufacturers, it will greatly squeeze the living space of niche goods or services and is not conducive to good market competition.
Advertisers should be more vigilant about the “filter bubbles” of advertising content. One of the advertising trends in the future is the large area and deep application of native advertising, that is, the integration of advertising to platform content, which makes it difficult to distinguish which is the content provided by the platform. If its information value is not necessarily needed by users, in addition to the social impact of “filtering bubbles”, the advertising traffic spent by advertisers is hardly effective, and then the balance between personal interests and social impact is particularly clear and wise for advertisers.