The EU's war on behavioral advertising
Uh... hmmm. I work in the industry and this article is very even handed but still a bit off.<p>We don&#x27;t really have have a term for &quot;behavioral&quot; advertising. So a lot of things are being lumped together that don&#x27;t necessarily fit.<p>For example, Facebook USED to be highly valued because of the amount of &quot;targeting&quot; (again, we don&#x27;t use the term &quot;behavioral&quot;) data they had. When you went to tell FB what you liked and didn&#x27;t like they used that. They also kept that valuable data under lock and key - they have no interest in sharing it.<p>Things are a bit different now. Since they and everyone else switched to an endless &quot;doomscrolling&quot; experience, all that data is worthless. No one keeps their likes up to date, no one engages with content. So there&#x27;s really not that much targeting (&quot;behavioral&quot;) data out of FB anymore. So native ads are less effective, but people look at <i>much more</i>.<p>&quot;Data brokerages&quot; are pretty niche. They don&#x27;t exist to the extent that people think they do. And the data they provide is often absolute garbage. Users switch phones, emails, numbers way too often to actually get anything resembling a permanent &quot;lock&quot;. Marketing data ages FAST. Do you go to a store and find they have an address that is like 4 moves old?  That&#x27;s kind of the quality of brokerage data - it&#x27;s good for filling in gaps, but is not nearly as valuable as first-party data.<p>So part of what you are seeing is not necessarily advertisers responding to upcoming EU regulations, but organic changes in what sort of advertising is even effective anymore. Third party cookies are not as useful as they used to be, and they cut into the big advertisers&#x27; monopolies on user data. So they are being phased out anyway.<p>&gt; Attribution &#x2F; measurement of advertising campaigns became more and more precise<p>This is the exact <i>opposite</i> of what is happening in the industry. There are so many different data sources that all conflict that data quality is often very dire in most large organizations. So there is a ton of fraud and snake oil used to justify advertising budgets.<p>However, where the author hits the nail on the head I think are future outcomes: EU markets <i>are</i> being deprioritized (it doesn&#x27;t hurt that economically, consumer wealth in Europe is falling like a rock). Users <i>are</i> opting in to more advertisements (Instagram is quickly becoming the QVC of the internet). One thing he misses is the rising importance of sponsorships and physical marketing..