The Marketized Epistemology of Not-so-Random Ads
posted by Frank Pasquale
Via Brian Leiter: Scholars including Michael Fischl and Angie Littwin are disturbed by the Google-served ads that appear next to their papers on SSRN. Littwin states:
I would strongly prefer not to have ads for credit cards running next to my paper arguing for major changes in the credit-card market. And that subject-matter mismatch will often be the case.
The ads raise a number of interesting issues addressed by both Leiter and Lipshaw commenters. On the one hand, I agree with Hal Varian’s point that marketing in general can create a great deal of value by connecting people to products in unexpected ways.
On the other hand, I think it’s important to realize who is permitting these “potential rebuttals” and who is not. Many have called for a “norm of trackback” on newspaper editorial pages that would give some small platform to critics of their contents. But it’s not really catching on. By and large, the people who will have to give a “right of reply” to critics (via served ads) are people that can’t afford to run their site without such funds.
So though we’ve gotten a bit beyond Liebling’s old bromide “freedom of the press belongs to one who owns one,” inequalities of influence persist in unexpected ways. The credit card companies can easily afford to saturate served ads with their content by, for example, bidding up the price of adwords like “loan” or “luxury splurge.” I very much doubt Prof. Littwin could buy her way onto the MBNA site….though ISP-inserted advertising might provide a way around that.
July 21, 2007 at 7:26 pm
Posted in: Advertising
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Responses (2)
Alfred - July 22, 2007 at 12:48 pm
Frank–thanks for this post. Do we have any sense of what the credit card companies think about this? I wonder if they’re unhappy as well? I’m guessing that readers of Professor Littwin’s paper aren’t going to be good prospects for the credit card companies.
Seth Finkelstein - July 22, 2007 at 3:54 pm
“Many have called for a “norm of trackback” on newspaper editorial pages that would give some small platform to critics of their contents.”
The effectiveness of this is almost always so close to zero as not to be worth discussing. Any popular article will be buried in trackbacks saying “YAY! or “ECHO” or “SUCKS!”, that any well-thought-out reply will be unfindable. You can see this in action on Google’s blog posts, which do have a blogs-commenting-on-this-post function.
The idea that somewhere, someone *could* find a rebuttal, and thinking ends there, has got to be one of the most annoying technofantasies that arises from this sort of theorizing.
Buying adwords is just PR writ small. Companies can do this for TV, for radio, for print … and for web sites.
Heck, there’s even a perverse sort of cross-subsidy going on in this case. How often do other media publish material which is against the interests of their advertisers?
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