Data driven women 1.1, september 2014

Demystifying Online
Advertising
Alison Sonderegger
Engineering Manager
BrightRoll

Alison Bellach Sonderegger
● UCSB, 1999
o BS in Computer Science
o BA in Religious Studies
● “Full-stack Generalist”
● Joined BrightRoll in May, 2014
● Likes memes in presentations
© 2013 BrightRoll, Inc. All rights reserved.

Agenda
● An Extremely Brief and Non-Exhaustive History of Advertising
● Advertising Technology (AdTech)
● Privacy

Not On The Agenda….

Television
Ads provide a significant amount of funding for most television
networks.
● Sunday Night Football $593,694*
● The Big Bang Theory $316,912*
● America’s Next Top Model $25,513*
● 16 30s spots per half hour == $$$
How did this start?
*source: http://adage.com/article/media/tv-ad-prices-football-king/244832/

WNBT/Bulova Test Pattern: July, 1941; $4-9

Television, cont.
Geographic Targeting:
● geographic

Television, cont.
Demographic Targeting:
● “a section of the population sharing common characteristics,
such as age, sex, class, etc”
● Nielsen ratings (user diaries and set meters)
18-49: the golden demo
Popularity in this demo is more desirable than number of viewers
● Friends 3x Murder She Wrote (same number of viewers
during overlap)
Then comes the internet and digital content...

Internet
Ads provide revenue for the site/application that hosts them.
● Revenue model is not as straightforward….
o CPM (cost per mille)
o CPC (cost per click), CPA (cost per action)
Early ‘70s: advertising on the internet was expressly forbidden
(ARPANET, NSFNet)
1978: Email ads/spam begin
1990s: display ads started gaining popularity

First Banner Ad, Oct 1994: HotWired.com for AT&T

Banner Ad, 1996

Other Types of Internet Ads
Search ads Sponsored content

Video Ads
Video ads (pre-roll, interstitial,
marquee, sponsored content)

Internet, cont.
Targeting can be much more specific…
● Companies ostensibly get more value for their money
● You see content that makes more sense

Geo-Targeting
Tells an advertiser where you are!
● informed by your IP address
● reveals location, ISP
● usually anonymous (most IPs are dynamically assigned)
Used for…
● content localization
● copyright

Content Localization

Copyright

Demographic Targeting
Tells an advertiser some specific things about you!
● Two cases…
o site serves a specific demographic
o you’ve knowingly, willingly provided information to a site
● usually awarded with some service (email, cloud storage space,
etc)
Used for…
● targeting advertisements to a demographic (like Nielsen ratings)

Behavioral Targeting
Tells an advertiser… a lot of things!
● what search terms you use
● what pages you click
● how long you stay on a site
● what you buy
BUT: this is not about you personally, it’s about your behavior!
Used for…
● highly targeted ads
● site usage reporting
How do they do this?

Cookies!

The Invention Of The Cookie
● “Cookie” is a term for small objects passed between cooperating
systems
● 1995, Netscape: cookies used to track if a site visitor is a repeat
● RFC2109, 1997: Specification indicates only writing/reading by
originating domain
● Browsers can control user’s
acceptance of cookies

What is a cookie?
Also called an HTTP cookie…
● key/value pairs
● expire
● tied to a domain and path

What does a cookie look like?
session-id-time 954242000 amazon.com/
session-id 002-4135256-7625846 amazon.com/
x-main eKQIfwnxuF7qtmX52x6VWAXh@Ih6Uo5H amazon.com/
ubid-main 077-9263437-9645324 amazon.com/

Cookies are not bad!
Session management
● logging into sites
● shopping cart persistence
Personalization
● skins/custom site layouts
● last user to log in

Examples of Cookie Usage
First visit to zappos.com
● First cookie set: session id (identifies you anonymously)
Look at shoes
● web server associates shoes with session id
Go to Facebook.com
● see advertisements based on zappos.com behavior… huh?
Who can see these cookies?

Third Party Cookies
Recall: only the domain associated with a cookie can access
information in that cookie.
Two choices…
● large companies share data between owned domains on the
backend
● third-party data collection
● BlueKai, eXelate
● use tracking pixels, code snippets, or ask partners to sell
data
● track over 80% of the internet

How Tracking
Pixels Work*
*interactions all invented

Outside the Internet...
This happens outside of the internet too!
● Catalina (30 years): “coupon-at-till”
o “Catalina understands and influences the purchasing of
more than 75 percent of American shoppers through
more than 31,000 grocery, drug, and mass merchant
stores nationwide.”
● In-Store Mobile Messaging (BLE): app-driven incentives
o Shopkick shopBeacon
● Anonymized Visa/MC Transaction Histories

The Target Pregnant Teen Story
“If you use a credit card or a coupon, or fill out a survey, or mail in a refund, or
call the customer help line, or open an e-mail we’ve sent you or visit our Web
site, we’ll record it and link it to your Guest ID,” Pole said. “We want to know
everything we can.”

Other Cookie Behaviors
Respawning
● Flash-based cookies (Local Shared Objects)
● Not analogous with browser cookies
● Can recreate browser cookies
Machine Entropy
● User Agent + Plugins + generic machine information =
fingerprint
● https://panopticlick.eff.org/

This seems scary… but it isn’t.
Publishers don’t send most of their information to advertisers
because they want to protect their audience.
Governments have strict policies in place to protect users.
● European Commission e-Privacy Directive: May 2011
o DNT policy considered by W3C
● FTC enforcement of browser settings
o 2012: Google pays $22.5m for circumventing Safari settings
The advertising industry is self-regulated (and motivated!).
● Internet Advertising Bureau, Digital Advertising Alliance, Direct
Marketing Association, National Advertising Initiative

Digital Advertising Alliance
● Established in 2010, functions like the BBB
● Advocates strong, self-regulating guidelines
● Participates with FTC, government bodies to define laws
● In 3 years, took actions against 19 companies, bringing them
into compliance
National Advertising Initiative
● Member companies participate in an opt-out program for
behavioral advertising specifically
● Still allows cookies related to session management and site
customization

fin.

Data driven women 1.1, september 2014

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

Viewers also liked

Viewers also liked (8)

Similar to Data driven women 1.1, september 2014

Similar to Data driven women 1.1, september 2014 (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Data driven women 1.1, september 2014