We Game Systems

And we expect a pat on the back because we're clever, dammit.

It is in our nature to game systems.

In my house, we put a very simple rule into place.  It’s one that should be familiar to you from the very first time you shared living space with anyone who wasn’t a family member, be that camp bunkmates, college roommates or the folks with whom you shared your first apartment.

You Kill It, You Fill It.

Keep it fair

It’s a simple rule and one designed to bring simplicity and fairness to cohabitation.  Quite simply, if you take the last pack of Ramen noodles or finish the last of the pitcher of iced tea, you must be the one to replenish the supply.  Sometimes, you’ll be the one to grab the last of the E.L. Fudge cookies, and you’ll have to go get more.  Sometimes, it will be your roommate and it will be their turn to run to the grocery store.  In the end, it all comes out in the wash.

Anyway, it would all even out nicely if it weren’t in our nature to game the system.

I guarantee that if you were to search through my pantry, you would find boxes of Cocoa Pebbles with nothing but cocoa dust on the bottom of the bag.  You would find boxes of Ritz crackers that had been there for months with a single cracker in the bottom.  And yes, you would find a container of orange juice in my fridge with just a swallow in it.  (NSFW language)

Digital’s Culture of (un)ethical hacking

We get used to systems with rules, which are really just surrogates that help us keep order, and then we find the ways to bend the rules to our advantage.

Hacker culture, which permeated the digital ad business in its early days, takes this to an extreme.  I remember the first time someone showed me how to make free calls from a payphone.  All you needed was a paperclip.  Short the coinbox to the microphone in the handset and it would somehow let you make a free local call.

Though I was almost 100 percent sure it was illegal, I liked the feeling that I was beating the game.  I made free phone calls until the phone company patched things up.

Digital media has been much the same way throughout its history.  We developed rules to keep things fair, and would often pride ourselves when we figured out how to bend or break them without consequence.

How fast can you develop new success metrics?

I’ve written before about how the value of digital display ads was, for a time, boiled down to the percentage of ad clicks to ad impressions (CTR).  Of course, as soon as that worldview took hold, many publishers began structuring Cost Per Click (CPC) deals.  Others kept their CPM structures and instead used bots or unauthorized targeting to boost the number clicks their clients’ campaigns would garner.

Over time, we’ve refined effectiveness metrics.  Regrettably, any new metrics are reverse-engineered almost as soon as they’re debuted.

That this happens is unfortunate, but expected.  Where the true sin lies is in the flagrant playing to the metrics and expecting to be rewarded for it.

You ran what?

In one of the first digital campaigns I worked on, I was having a phone conversation about a buy with a sales rep.  As was customary at the time, we were at our offices well past established business hours.  We talked for a bit about how I was going to measure success, and I told the rep we would be looking at CTR as one of our key metrics.

I had to hang up and finish the plan recommendation before we really got down to brass tacks, but I remember saying that I would look at a 7-cent CPC as a success if it delivered the right volume of digital sales.

The next day, I talked to the same sales rep and he had run a campaign of his own.  Without an insertion order.  Without me even having given him the client’s ads.  And he thought I should be happy because he drove thousands of people to the client’s website in the overnight hours.  And he thought I should pay him for all those clicks at seven cents a pop.

Once we got past the rogue elements, like running an unauthorized campaign without authorized ad materials, we ended up in this odd place where the sales rep thought I should serve all of this information up to the client as a good thing.  He had, after all, driven an entire month’s worth of click activity to the client’s site overnight.  (This was in the days before IAB standards and was one of the reasons we had to incorporate rules around pacing.)

So, you wanna just tell the client this was a success?

In other words, he wanted me to play to the metric and tell the client that we had exceeded their objectives.  Like he wanted me to side with him against my own client because he had driven the requisite number of clicks for the buy.  He was playing to the metric and not to advertiser success.

Culturally, has that ever really gone away? 

Open secrets about publishers buying traffic to boost their comScore numbers, bot armies clicking on mobile ads by the millions, pushing unfair advantages in RTB – all things we’ve had to deal with as an industry over the decades.  Everybody overwhelmingly tries to play to the metric instead of helping the advertiser achieve their business objective.  And yes, the methods are also fraudulent in more instances than digital practitioners would ever want to admit.

But the real sin is playing to those metrics, pressing unfair advantages, and then expecting to be rewarded for how clever we’re being.

The fraudsters are a clever bunch, but no one should be rewarded for fraud.  It leads to resentment, especially when you’re a straight arrow watching all the wrong people get rewarded.

There’s no way to filter out cheating completely, but if we’re looking for applications for AI in this industry, maybe they ought to be geared toward identifying bad actors who are playing to the metrics and not to advertiser success.