Advertising doesn’t have to be evil

A better model based on trust and consent is not only possible, it’s good for business.

Jeremy Belcher
UX Collective
Published in
5 min readAug 31, 2020
surveillance camera photo to set the tone and make you feel freaked out before you even start reading
Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash

Yet today it is. Hyper-targeted ads have become an eye-poppingly lucrative business. Unbeknownst to most users, companies suck up our personal data from a growing and often surprising list of sources in order to better target ads in the hopes they can coerce us into buying something.

It’s manipulative. It removes agency from people. And it’s unnecessary!

There is most certainly a profitable ad model that doesn’t rely on shaky ethics and deceit. That doesn’t secretly sell my data, or track my browser history, or listen to my conversations.

Good ads can add value

I am not opposed to advertising. We live in a consumer society. We are often “in the market” for products and services. Not long ago, I needed a new mattress. I am not a survivalist, sleeping under the hides of my most recently hunted bear skins — I was ready to spend real money for a good night’s sleep.

Mattress shopping is a terrible experience. There are so many choices that it became cumbersome quickly. I wanted less choice, not more. This is not unique to mattresses. There are countless variations on all sorts of products and services with often unclear differentiation. Learning about them requires work, and more importantly, time. I would love to signal to an ad network that I was in the market for a certain sized mattress in a specific price range, and it would serve me the correct ads accordingly.

This is kind of what re-targeting is meant to be, except re-targeting does it without consent. If only it they would ask! I would likely not only grant the consent, but I might provide additional information to help better target the results. It would make my life easier. I have lots to think about, and using brain space to shop for a mattress isn’t something I relish.

It’s good for business

Facebook, Google, and Amazon combined control nearly 70% of online ad dollars. It would seem that these giants could implement a feature like this fairly easily, given their armies of design and engineering talent.

Instagram has been making inroads into commerce for years, and this seems like a natural progression. Why not allow me flag to the network what I intend to buy? That way I see a curated collection of ads targeted right at my stated need instead of the Instagram algorithm’s best guess. Many of the ads I see today are largely for well designed consumer products by new direct to consumer brands. I often click them because, as a designer, I am interested in the designs of the products. I have no intent to buy. Meanwhile, the ad server no doubt recognizes my interaction with these ads and serves up more of them as a result, which I often click for the same reasons as before, essentially giving the personalization and targeting algorithms a feedback loop of almost entirely false positives. The advertiser is spending their marketing budget for these impressions and clicks on a user with no intention to buy anything.

In other words, they have done a great job identifying what I’m interested in, but not a great job in identifying what I intend to buy. They never think to ask!

Both the advertiser and Instagram could make more money. It would make for a better user experience, presenting a personalized, curated experience without making me feel like I am being sold to. Plus I might finally stop seeing ads for tasteful modern furniture that I would never buy because my kids will destroy it.

Google could make inroads here too. Amazon is overtaking their lead on product search - over half of product searches are now taking place directly on Amazon instead of Google.

Their increasingly capable Google Assistant could easily identify when a user is doing product research using the search engine. During this search process, the assistant could surface and offer a personal shopper-like experience, using a simple conversational interface to ask what I am shopping for as well as any additional search criteria, such as price range, styles, colors, other products I like, or any other host of relevant facets. Combining these inputs with traditional Google magic, they could suggest the best products for my requirements, saving me time and anguish.

Not only would this be a nice and helpful service, but I’d prefer this open, two-way conversation versus Google reading my emails, search history, and who knows what else and then targeting ads at me based on what their algorithm thinks I might buy.

These networks could likely increase the amount they charge because the advertisers would be paying for warmer leads with a higher potential for conversion. Maybe an entirely new unit of ad sales could be created, a more expensive ad-buy further up the value chain, but one not quite as risky for the publisher as an affiliate sale or CPA model. We’ll call it Cost Per Intention, or CPI, and it would be more expensive than CPM or CPC. It would likely be more effective for the advertiser, and if your ad network proves effective for the advertiser they will spend more on your platform, increasing their lifetime customer value to the ad network.

Increasing the cost of our attention has knock-on benefits as well. When an ad impression is cheap, like the few cents per impression it can be today, these companies require billions of them to make money. To get these billions of impressions, they need our repeated engagement. They game this system by by making their products “sticky,” aka surfacing content that makes us fucking crazy — like your ex’s vacation photos with their new fling or your racist uncle’s unhinged rant about Globalist lizard people. Engagement is the only metric that matters when ads are the business model, and crazy keeps us coming back. It doesn’t matter that it makes us lonely, depressed, angry, and violent. They keep us doomscrolling, because more posts we view, the more ads we see, the more money they make. Society is coming apart at the seams, but it’s fine — check out this charcoal-infused toothpaste from a new brand with playful old-timey name — payable in installments!

It doesn’t have to be this way. It could be a good and valuable user experience, instead of a manipulative and adversarial one. And when the network suggests the right product based on my stated intent to buy and I buy it, I don’t mind them taking a cut of the sale. I might even pay a small premium for the service, secure in the knowledge that the relationship was consensual, my data was safe, and I could trust the recommendations it provides. It could be a service based on respect that treats users like real people. And I would use it again!

The UX Collective donates US$1 for each article published in our platform. This story contributed to Bay Area Black Designers: a professional development community for Black people who are digital designers and researchers in the San Francisco Bay Area. By joining together in community, members share inspiration, connection, peer mentorship, professional development, resources, feedback, support, and resilience. Silence against systemic racism is not an option. Build the design community you believe in.

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Published in UX Collective

We believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers. Curated stories on UX, Visual & Product Design. https://linktr.ee/uxc

Written by Jeremy Belcher

UX/UI Product Design Lead, occasional speaker, creator of UXA Today - jeremybelcher.co, uxatoday.com

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