Category: Articles

Ugh. Where to start? I mean, where to begin with this most depressing of American presidential campaigns? November 8, 2016 just can’t come soon enough, right? We’ll just all wake up from this horrible dream, relieved it’s over and get back to normal. Such a peaceful thought. If only we could live our lives through rose-coloured lenses. Truth is, I know things aren’t right in this world when I find myself agreeing with a Globe and Mail columnist. John Ibbitson recently predicted that while Trump will likely lose, ‘he is the final warning to the elites.’ I’m afraid he hit this one on the head:

‘Unless political elites of both the left and the right become more humble, unless they once again ask themselves how their agendas will play in Peoria, the next rough beast might slouch over the corpse of the republic.’

We shouldn’t underestimate the strength of the anti-establishment sentiment in the US. It’s not going away anytime soon. Those of us looking for a return to normal are in for a surprise if Clinton wins. Her victory will bring immediate relief to just about everyone north of the border, but we won’t have time to catch our breath before an unsatisfied, unhappy underbelly of discontent rears its ugly head. I’d like to think the anti-establishment movement could shed itself of the racist, bigoted, protectionist elements that make it such a foul movement. But, I suppose that’s probably a pipe dream. I’m not the only one yearning for a return to something a little more—I don’t know—gosh darn sincere.

And for a brief moment, we all got that aw shucks sincerity. You may have heard of him. He was an Internet sensation for a couple days (that’s like 80 years in Internet age). Yep. Ken Bone, ye of perfect meme nomenclature. Amongst the wreckage of personal attacks that plagued the second presidential debate, this man-in-the-red-sweater asked a snoozer of a question about energy policy. Proving just how nerdy we really are, the Internet found love at first sight. In hindsight, I suppose it makes sense; Ken provided a respite from the divisiveness of this horrible campaign—a breath of fresh air in a moist, damp locker room.

What followed was as predictable as a Harlequin romance.

We Find Love

Within hours, people already had their perfect Halloween costume. Ken’s Twitter followers grew from a mere 7 to a whopping 250,000. He got play on the Late Night circuit and for a brief time symbolized all that is right with the world. We wanted to know why he went with a red sweater. We wanted him as a candidate. We couldn’t get enough. Why didn’t we see more of this in this campaign?

I’m not sure Ken knew what predicament he found himself in, but it was pretty much the worse place to be: the Internet’s hero. Once you reach that level, you can only fall, usually with a bruising thud. And when the Internet turns on you, it cuts deep. In truth, we all leave a trail on the Internet. And as we started digging, we found that our shiny new object wasn’t so shiny after all.

Our Hearts Are Broken

The debate question everyone loved…’what step will your energy policy take to meet our energy needs while at the same time remaining environmentally friendly and minimizing job loss for fossil power plant workers?’…wasn’t as innocent as it first appeared. Ken works in the coal industry for a company that opposes climate regulations and has dodged current legislation to be environmentally friendly. In hindsight, his question seemed a little more self-serving.

He took to his fame by hosting a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything). Sure, he was a gracious host, and started a T-shirt campaign to raise funds to fight homelessness — but he foolishly used his old username, which made it dead simple for anyone to dig into his past musings. He apparently left a comment on a pregnancy subreddit describing expecting mothers as ‘beautiful human submarines.’ He confessed to viewing naked pictures of Jennifer Lawrence and, uh…enjoying it. He committed felony insurance fraud and even suggested the shooting of Trayvon Martin was ‘justified.’ He used his fame for a one-off Uber promotion in St. Louis. Just like that, our hero had become an ‘ignorant bonehead‘, and a seedy sell-out.

We Piece Some of it Back Together

With the nasty stuff out of the way, some writers tried to paint a picture of a man—who like the rest of us—has many layers. No single person can be summed up in an Internet meme. This same Ken also wrote that he’s a conservative who likes Obama. He wrote a compassionate response to a rape victim. He condemned Stanford rapist Brock Turner.

Now Ken spends what appears to be considerable effort defending himself. He has clarified some of his comments. ‘I do not condone the shooting of Trayvon Martin. Justifiable means legal, not right.’ His Twitter feed now contains links to threads and articles that defend him. He still has fans who work feverishly to push out a more sympathetic narrative of Ken. But most of us have moved on. We’ve already had enough of Ken. He’s yesterday’s news.

I’ll leave it to Ken and his fanbase to defend his words and deeds. I only highlight his story as an example of how fickle we are. We don’t have time for old news. We move from one meme to the next in just about the same amount of time Usain Bolt runs 100 meters. It’s an unforgiving place—time is never on your side, and people are apt to remember the most negative thing that was last said about you. Never mind the full story or context. That’s boring. We want to be entertained.

But, we’ve gotten to the point where that entertainment is blurry. It’s not fun, even if we try to make it that way. There’s no escaping the slog of this campaign season. There was one symbol—even if we never really took it seriously— that was supposed to provide some kind of light in a dark world. Ken, version 1.0, made the Internet pleasant, at least for a couple hours. Now that light doesn’t shine so brightly. In a way, Ken has become a symbol of this campaign. Whenever we have thought that it might get better, it only gets worse. Everywhere we look, it’s ugly. All of it. And I’m afraid it only gets uglier here on in, no matter what happens on November 8.

On that cheery note, let me get back to what really matters.

The Internet is an art project. So says Virginia Heffernan in Magic and Loss — a treatise on Internet culture that likens the World Wide Web to a communal humanist effort. This kind of thinking is useful to explain, in part, why we never seem to be able to stop trying to explain the web and what it is doing to us. The Internet reflects us more than we would like to believe and we have organized our platforms, and our associated judgements of those spaces, with aesthetics and feelings that are not web-specific, but specific to the way create, and have always created, a collective consciousness.

The magic of the web, as we think of it in everyday terms — the communicating, the efficiency, the ease — is a practical and often lifeless way to explain the Internet, that drains it of its personality and excitement. Heffernan delights in the low and high culture that exists simultaneously online, from retro or hectic designs and interfaces of chatrooms to the coolly minimalistic and decidedly luxe graphics of new apps. The loss part is a rumination on what we’ve given up as we’ve left the analog world. But Heffernan frames this as an inevitability of technological shift, something to be expected as we move from one era to another. Things are always lost in the fire, but that loss doesn’t necessarily detract from the magic that replaces it. Also, we haven’t lost as much as we think: we’ve just moved it to another arena.

The pendulum of anxiety for the web swings from worrying about ephemerality to worrying about its permanence. Things disappear quickly — like on Twitter, where Heffernan points out, we obsessively read content that is oftentimes poignant and precise. Or, things stay forever — like your search results, which will never be truly scrubbed of the embarrassing thing about you that you wish didn’t exist. Moving through the building blocks of the internet — design, text, images, videos, and music — Heffernan talks about each as they exist within our lives, as much as how they exist online.

Outside of Heffernan, there’s an easy example of this: Minimalism has progressed from a design aesthetic to a life aesthetic, with people eschewing clutter in favour of the right possessions. As Mirelle Bernstein wrote in the Atlantic in March, being able to embrace a minimalistic approach is a privilege of its own kind. Detailing Marie Kondo’s (Japanese author whose book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up started a minimalist movement) advice to rid yourself of nostalgia, Bernstein notes that minimalism ignores a lot of the sentimentality we attach to items, especially when those items were hard to come by. She relates it to her and her parents’ experiences as immigrants: being able to throw out things you haven’t used in a while means you feel confident that you’ll be able to purchase and/or acquire those things when the time comes.

We can apply this to the Internet. In a world driven by search engine optimization, keywords, and advertising, your web efforts to make money need to be hidden. Anything conspicuous screams of desperation: click-baity content intended to drive traffic rather than quality. This too is a privilege. Existing on the web simply to exist is, in part, a luxury, signifying that you don’t need the attendant marketing push that so many others do. From a design perspective, the minimalist and ‘clean’ look aspires for a kind of simple elegance that aesthetics loaded with information, text, and animation,make tacky and complicated. Minimalism is a feeling — one of restraint and discipline — with an inherent judgement of superiority.

Social media functions in a similar way. Describing Beyonce’s social media presence, writer Jenna Wortham notes that Beyonce has been able to use social media to become more mysterious rather than less, an idea that is counterintuitive to the constant life-casting that many participate in online. However, this kind of self-restraint is particular to those who have an established personality and star power. People have to want to know about you for them to feel a lack of knowledge; absence only makes the heart grow fonder if the heart was hungry in the first place.

Since the web was created there have been anxieties about the anonymity of online interaction. People hide behind usernames and avatars. In the early days of AOL chat rooms and the more R-rated Chatroulette, such anonymizing aspects were suspected of covering a whole matter of sins. Today, existing online with such secrecy is a privilege, reserved for those unnaturally adept at concealing their tracks or completely abstaining from online activity. On October 3, a post on The New York Review of Books’ blog revealed the – allegedly – true identity of Elena Ferrante, an Italian writer who has managed to keep her identity a secret while becoming a beloved author. Most of her fan base does not want to know who Ferrante ‘really is’ and reacted with anger to the ‘outing.’ Ferrante had created a personal and deep connection with her readers that didn’t need to be bolstered by her identity or details of her life. In a crossover of a pre-digital age and the now wholly digital age, Ferrante kept her pen name in place by responding to (some) interview requests via email. As she stated in a 2014 interview, ‘I didn’t choose anonymity; the books are signed. Instead, I chose absence. More than 20 years ago I felt the burden of exposing myself in public. I wanted to detach myself from the finished story.’

Wortham echoes the sentiment behind this statement in her aforementioned piece on Beyonce. In thinking about online personalities, she sees the selective representation that Beyonce projects as an ‘illusion that feels intimate and real, a hologram self for us to interact with that, in theory, provides the actual Beyonce space to exist away from our prying eyes.’ Wortham notes that hierarchies and biases exist online, they’ve just been coded a different way. Social media has given room to create other selves, and perhaps, paradoxically, a way to preserve a sense of our true identity. It can be its own version of the pen name. While there have always been worries about the meretricious nature of social media as it applies to our personal lives, both Wortham and Heffernan seem to suggest that embracing, rather than fighting, this aspect can be more fulfilling. For Heffernan, it’s part of the delight — the mix of high and low — and the way we construct our culture and consciousness. For Wortham, it’s self-preservation: ‘We could instead use social media as a prism through which we can project only what we want others to see. We can save the rest for ourselves — our actual selves.’

Perhaps this is why we have worked to make certain online spaces look and feel a certain way. Lacking the physical markers we’ve come to associate with the experience we should expect, we’ve aestheticized spaces to evoke a first impression. Design serves a deeper purpose than just surface looks. From the classic air of the digital New York Times to the back-web of 4chan and Reddit, we have categorized the ‘type’ of people and conversations that happen online by the way these space look. While the mainstream revels in clean typeface, negative space, and intuitive navigation, those familiar with the web’s behind-the-scenes are comfortable delving into the messy threads filled with obvious bounding boxes, splashes of courier new, and self-direction.

A portion of this harkens back to the loss aspect that Heffernan explores. There’s something nostalgic in design that reminds us of Web 1.0 (pre social media). Heffernan weaves this throughout her narrative, revelling in the newness and excitement of the web and the sentimentally of what we’ve discarded, recalling hours-long phone conversations that were physically grounded by a telephone cord. But besides being able to move freely between the joys and yearnings that digitization creates in equal measure, the most impressive aspect of her book is that she so firmly conceives of the Internet as a cultural construct. Of course the web has aesthetic periods. It reflects any other time of our collective consciousness. Things move into and out of fashion within the web like anywhere else, and perhaps we are now finding different ways to express the things we mislaid with digitization. There’s a lot to be gained in conceding that the Internet is as much a humanist endeavour as a technological one — and much of what is gained mitigates the loss.

A lot has been made of Donald Trump’s online supporters—many of whom are part of a social media brigade of trolls posting offensive, oftentimes racist and sexist memes to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Hillary Clinton made these people—known collectively as the ‘alt-right’—the subject of a speech in which she attacked Trump’s association with the movement.

Trump is not the first political candidate to have a major online following. During the 2008 and 2012 GOP primaries, Ron Paul was famous for his Revolutionaries whose ubiquitous social media activity ensured that ‘End the Fed’ was a top post on even the most obscure and unpolitical YouTube videos. In 2016, Bernie Sanders’ mass of young, white men posting in support of single-payer healthcare and free college tuition became known as ‘Bernie Bros.’

Ron Paul, Bernie Sanders, and Donald Trump all mobilized sizeable and enthusiastic online followings. But, only Trump has been able to transform that support into tangible electoral success. Why?

In 2008, Ron Paul earned just over one million primary votes. He barely doubled that number in 2012 when he won (controversially) a majority of delegates in four states. During the 2016 primaries, Sanders undoubtedly generated more electoral success than Paul when he earned over 13 million votes and won 23 states. Still, neither of these men were able to clinch their respective nominations. On the other hand, Trump captured 14 million votes as well as the Republican nomination.

Trump has been able to inspire support, both online and offline, because his message is emotional rather than ideological. In contrast to Trump, Ron Paul had the least emotional and most ideological message of these three candidates. During debates he would rail against the Federal Reserve and fiat currency, even getting booed for suggesting the 9/11 terror attacks were a result of blowback from U.S. foreign policy. Ron Paul’s ideological campaigning was strong enough to make celebrities of two obscure economists when he urged his supporters to search out the works of Murray Rothbard and Ludwig von Mises to understand his economic policies.

Sanders preached a similarly ideological message, and, while it did contain emotional elements—the attacks against the 1%; appeals to Americans who were hurting from the economic collapse, who, unlike the major banks, received no bailouts—the message still came from Sanders’ years of studying socialist doctrine. From his time at a Marxist kibbutz in Israel, to his tenure as a member of the far-left Liberty Union Party of Vermont, Sanders honed his thinking around economic inequality and the power of democratic socialism.

From what we’ve seen of Trump, he has no ideology. The only author he ever cites as inspirational is himself as author of The Art of the Deal. The only book he claims to like more than his magnum opus is the Bible, which he has shown little evidence of having actually read (when asked his favourite verse Trump replied, ‘Well, I think many. I mean, when we get into the Bible, I think many, so many,’). Likewise, unlike Ron Paul and his supporters—who exalted the Constitution—Trump’s claims of constitutional support seem false: he stated that he would ‘protect Article I, Article II, Article XII.’ There is no Article XII of the Constitution.

These gaffes don’t shake Trump’s supporters, though. Had Ron Paul or Bernie Sanders made a similar mistake, it’s unlikely they could have survived. Their supporters were more dedicated to ideology than they were to the candidate. Paul’s Revolutionaries refused to support his slightly less libertarian son, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, for president, and the Bernie Bros bristled at the idea of backing Hillary Clinton, who they saw as a Wall Street sell-out. Trump supporters have no ideological test for their candidate—and many of them don’t desire one. Trump has never required an ideological test for his supporters either. Instead, he appeals to the emotions of voters who feel left behind and ignored. Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders told voters if they learned enough they could change the system. Trump told voters they were allowed to be angry—angry at an economy that’s shifting jobs away from America’s heartland to China and Mexico—and that they were allowed to be fed up with politicians who promised workbooks of policies they would implement and then compromised behind closed doors after getting elected. Paul and Sanders gave voters instructions to use their brains; Trump gave them permission to listen to their hearts.

After Clinton’s speech about the alt-right, several leaders of its online movement held their own press conference to answer questions about their ideology. Peter Brimelow, an anti-immigration author and editor-in-chief of VDare.com; Richard Spencer, a white nationalist blogger and head of the National Policy Institute think tank; and Jared Taylor, a self-proclaimed ‘race realist’ and founder of American Renaissance magazine; told the press that, while they and their supporters want Trump to win, they don’t think he shares their racist convictions. It was a bizarre moment in the campaign. Trump has been labelled by the mainstream media as a bigot since he announced his candidacy and here were three of his supporters complaining that he wasn’t racist enough. But, they tempered their criticism by explaining they had no delusions about his lack of ideological devotion to their ideals. Instead, they were supporting him because Trump was an emotional lightning rod that drew white, working-class support. He may have stumbled onto some shared policies—deporting illegal immigrants and barring Muslims from entering the country—but ultimately it was more important that Trump win than he be a true believer. To them, Trump represented the test of a supposition: could a candidate win without appealing to minority voters and by criticizing multiculturalism and immigration? If Trump could accomplish this, it would not matter if he followed through on his promises. If Trump could pull off the election he would prove to the alt-right that there was an opening for its candidates. Trump would break a hole in the system wide enough for a new generation of ideologically rigorous alt-righters to climb through.

This promise of success is a major contributor to Trump’s support among lower-class, poorly educated Americans. Similarly to how the alt-right views Trump, residents of rural Appalachia and the former manufacturing strongholds of the Northeast (the areas Trump performed the strongest during the primaries) see in Trump a chance for salvation. These rural voters, like the alt-right online, have no meaningful representation in the political process. Due, in the case of working-class Americans, to their lack of economic agency, and in the case of the alt-right to their socially unacceptable political views, both groups see Trump as a bomb that can blow up the system and provide them an opening.

This has been Trump’s power all along. His real-world political success is the result of what he represents to his followers. Whether he is a crypto-racist for the alt-right or a strong and competent businessman who will turn the economic fortunes of working-class America around, Trump’s lack of adherence to any clear ideology is what has allowed him to gain his political foothold. Trump supporters aren’t supporting a specific economic plan or set of moral guidelines, they’re supporting a man who has spent his entire adult life selling himself as a brand. Trump isn’t a politician so much as he is a promise—a promise of success, of glitz, glamour, and greatness. And in this campaign he has become a promise to so many Americans that the America they lost—the America that once employed millions in the Rust Belt in manufacturing and Appalachia with mining jobs—could one day return. That America could be Great Again.

Paul and Sanders built online followings by promoting ideals that had to be studied and researched. They inadvertently created ideological purity tests for their supporters and themselves. If they didn’t stick to the checklist of acceptable beliefs they created for their followers, they would be abandoned. By abandoning ideology in favour of his personal brand, Trump built an ideological following online and generated real votes at the ballot box. On November 8, we will see how many Americans buy what Trump is selling.

“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” – Sherlock Holmes

You will not find a more agonized fan than the one who awaits Season 4 of the popular BBC show, “Sherlock”. Diehards have been waiting for more than two years for the next installment of Benedict Cumberbatch running around the streets of London and solving crimes with the likes of Martin Freeman as Dr. Watson. Adapted from the 1892 classic by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the storyline in its modernized form still captivates audiences today as much as it did back in 19th century Britain.

Why? Humans are natural problem-solvers – goal-oriented, adaptive, and curious. We are very good at assessing our surroundings and deducing information from our experience. We are always looking for that one conclusion we can draw from our observations. In fact, the scientific method was one of the earliest creations of human society, passed down from the Ancient Greeks through Aristotle.

Eliminating the Impossible

Fortunately for progress, the reach of the scientific method of deduction has not been limited to ancient Greek culture or the fictional parameters of 121B Baker Street. In the medical world, it’s veritable equivalent is known as Occam’s razor. Translated from the original Latin, it posits: “Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.” Simply put, a simple explanation is preferred to a complex one.

This is also known as that moment in each episode of House, where Dr. Gregory House has that moment of clarity about the one obvious and perfect diagnosis that explains all the symptoms and solves the mysterious disease of his patient before (and sometimes after) they expire. Hint: it’s not lupus.

The theory of Occam’s razor was challenged centuries later by a man named John Hickam, MD. Hickam found the established process of eliminating causes and exhaustively speculating on rare diseases to explain all the strange symptoms in a patient ineffective. He thought it was far more likely for patients in these cases to have a set of common diseases, rather than a perfect cause that explained all symptoms. This led to the blunt conclusion: “Patients can have as many diseases as they damn well please”.

Double, Double Toil and Trouble

In the public affairs world, the world that Navigator maps out on a daily basis, the same theories take on similar applications. Clients run to the experts and expect there will be one, all-encompassing solution to the issue, or set of issues, they face. Most of the time, the solution may be simple. For the rest, a more layered approach is required.

In a 1973 treatise, two German design theorists Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber coined the term “wicked problem” to aptly describe problems of such scope that could not be solved like the more “tame” problems found in mathematics and puzzle games. “Wicked problems” were much more complex – social, political, environmental – and required strategies that included more collaborative, unconventional approaches and “outside-the-box” thinking.

We are living in a world where our collective problems are becoming increasingly “wicked” and difficult to solve in a narrow sense. Whether you’re talking about climate change, armed conflict and terrorism, or democratization, these are not problems that can be solved in isolation or independent from the efforts of other global players.

Smart, Honest Counsel

Wicked problems are not confined to the international sphere, but are increasingly entering the world of public affairs. Few experts have decided to abandon the approach of Occam’s razor and turn to the Hickum’s dictum equivalent of diagnosing these problems and propose collaborative strategies. What they fail to realize is that some of these challenges are simply too complex and unique, essentially uncharted territory for many clients, and clients themselves will need someone who understands this new environment.

Gone are the days when you can simply knock on government’s door, make your case, and get an answer. To increase your chances of success, you may need to work with third parties with aligned interests. You may need to mobilize your online and offline supporters. You may need to get public opinion among Canadians onside with your proposal before coming to the table.

At Navigator, the solution will not always be the simple one for your company. Whether you’re seeking social licence for a massive cross-country infrastructure project, or engaging a major financial transaction affecting national interests, or activating a public advocacy campaign – you will need the smart, honest counsel that will get your public affairs goals to the finish line.

Last week, Adblock Plus announced it would begin selling ads. That is not a misprint. The company literally named ‘adblock’ ( as in stop or prevent advertisements) and ‘plus’ (to tell users that they do that very well) is doing the exact opposite of the thing it promises to do.

For those unfamiliar, Adblock Plus was one of, if not the, leading adblocker. As a plugin or browser extension, users could install it to prevent advertisements from appearing in the websites they visited. The program is generally credited with popularizing online adblocking, which has had a major impact on how information travels on the Internet. Selling ads after selling the ability to block them is a complete 180. In fact, it looks like the company built on preventing ads from being served never really understood how users and advertisers interact with the ads they do see in the first place.

Predictably, initial reaction to the announcement was harsh. This could very well be the beginning of the end for the company. Technically, Adblock Plus is expanding its Acceptable Ads initiative with ‘a fully functional ad-tech platform that will make whitelisting faster and easier’ that promises to ‘turn the model on its head.’ According to Adblock Plus, the new program offers advertisers auction-based or real-time bidding (RTB), just like Google or Facebook. The difference is that all of the ads are, theoretically, vetted by Adblock Plus’ users. This is supposed to act as a kind of guarantee that they will not detract from any website’s browsing experience. If you ask the company, Adblock Plus is offering an alternative to RTB — instead of targeting options offered by every other RTB platform, user experience determines which ads are ultimately served.

Basically, Adblock Plus is hoping to enter the supply side of the digital advertising market. The new service will allow publishers and bloggers to buy ads vetted by Adblock Plus or users of Acceptable Ads because these ads are not disruptive to the browsing experience. Yes that was supposed to sound weird. There are lots of problems with this strategy. First is the problem of perception: Adblock Plus, a celebrated Adblocker is selling advertisements to online publishers. IAB UK CEO Guy Phillapson alluded to some of the other strategic issues in a statement, comparing the company’s new direction to a protection racket:

‘We see the cynical move from Adblock Plus as a new string in their racket. Now they’re saying to publishers we took away some of your customers who didn’t want ads, and now we are selling them back to you on commission. The fact is, in the UK ad blocking has stalled. It’s been stuck at 21% throughout 2016 because the premium publishers who own great content, and provide a good ad experience, hold all the cards. More and more of them are offering ad blocking consumers a clear choice: turn off your ad blocking software or no access to our content. And their strategy is working, with 25% to 40% turning off their blockers. So with their original business model running out of steam, Adblock Plus have gone full circle to get into the ad sales business.’

Adblock Plus’s decision, and the initial reaction to it, prove the company misunderstood its old customer base and the publishers or advertisers it is hoping to turn into customers. First, Adblock assumed its current users, people who downloaded something that, again, is named Adblock Plus, want to filter ads instead of blocking them. They also misjudged how appealing RTB is in its current form for advertisers, and like Phillapson said, that users are actually willing to put up with highly targeted ads from the content suppliers they enjoy. Most importantly, as a brand or someone paying for an ad, why switch to a system with less control when there is no substantial opposition to the current RTB model?

Besides Adblock Plus, there are other similar adblocking programs that provide practically ad-free browsing experiences. Many of them have capitalized on the negative reaction to Adblock Plus’s announcement by doubling down on their stated promise of actually blocking ads. Most of these programs use a process similar to the ‘whitelisting’ service Adblock is offering, allowing users to view ads from the sites they deem safe. This gives users the sense of control Adblock Plus is convinced it just invented.

Adblock Plus’ new take on whitelisting ignores the dynamic its previous version helped establish between users, publishers, ads, and advertisers. In the original model, training users to whitelist sites instead of individual ad units placed credit or blame for ads appearing with the publishers who accept revenue from them. Once a publisher or website was whitelisted, they remained whitelisted until the Adblock Plus user manually reversed their decision. Giving the ‘pass’ to publishers, instead of individual ads, made a ton of sense: ads change much more frequently on a random site than on a site someone frequently visits, and publishers generally adhere to the same standards when deciding which ads they’ll allow on their site.

This system was successful because it was simple. It also let advertisers actually advertise, which is by nature intrusive. Crucially, by placing agency on the sites, ads were presented as a necessary evil to support the content that users enjoyed. The new model abandons that simplicity by asking users to vote on the ads themselves and it changes the criteria for whitelisting. No advertiser in their right mind would choose an ad unit that is sanctioned for its inability to draw attention when alternatives advertising models exist. Adblock Plus seems to have forgotten that publishers need ads, and ads need to be somewhat disruptive in order to be effective, which is why there was a desire to block them in the first place. Also the RTB marketplace Adblock Plus envisions would require a staggering amount of sanctioned ads in order to provide enough variety to publishers to compensate for the (likely) reduced appeal among actual advertisers. Adblock Plus probably doesn’t have the user base necessary to vett that many ad units, especially after losing so many customers in the wake of its announcement. In fact, RTB, or the auction model Adblock Plus is attempting to adopt, is dependant on the relationship between site owners or publishers and users. Before, the company played a part in emphasizing this relationship, but now it’s neglecting it at its own peril.

Real time bidding is practically the only way to advertise on social media and search engines. First popularized by Google, versions of this bidding can be found on practically every other search engine, the largest social networks –like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn –as well as leading content marketing services like OutBrain and Taboola. These platforms employ continuous streams of content, and the auction model was the only way to account for how they disseminate information in real-time based. The auction system accounts for the practically infinite variations of a given user’s news feed or search results. Instead of paying for a predetermined placement, advertisers bid to appear in the most relevant possible placements as they become available. The innumerable choices in social or search platforms that determine where ads could be shown mean users are subject to an incalculable number of ad units. This only works if the users trust the website or publishers to choose ‘acceptable’ ad units. Going through each ad individually would take forever. Even in content marketing, random units appearing in a given site’s ad spaces are subject to browsing data that essentially creates the same degree of randomness as social media. It is more practical to establish trust between sites and the people who visit them, instead of users and ads. One could argue any RTB system needs to be based on demographics instead of user experience, because targeting needs to be grounded in something that correlates to the person actually seeing the ad to account for the endless contexts in which it can appear.

Demographic information was key to popularizing RTB because advertisers love getting this info. They gain access to unprecedented amounts of users in a single ad buy, and a targeting system that is infinitely more specific than any other format. Social and search advertising use demographic categories based on static information (as well as in-platform decisions, but that’s for another column), like registration data, as static endpoints in a given user’s ever-evolving data set. Essentially, this allows advertisers to bid on who sees an ad, unlike older models where they paid for placement. RTB took out a lot of the guesswork in terms of ‘is the type of person I want to see my ad guaranteed to see my ad?’ Though users may complain about advertisers using their private information to build RTB campaigns, the information advertisers actually get to work with cannot identify individual users. There are certainly issues with privacy and RTB, though they are not close to significant enough to overthrow the system.

Right now, it looks like although Adblock Plus understood the trends in online advertising, they failed to contextualize their role in a changing digital landscape. People care generally if ads are on their screen, but the vast majority do not worry about how they were targeted. Though users are growing more tolerant of ads, and perhaps concerned over how they are delivered, high quality content keeps them coming back to sites using granular tracking options in their RTB units. People understand that websites need to pay the bills and, for the most part, they are willing to let them serve targeted ads in exchange for the services they provide. Up until recently, users who were unwilling to make that trade relied on Adblock Plus. Since, until last week, its entire business was blocking ads, the company is still considered toxic by many groups it now hopes to count as customers. Any chance of building up the user base quickly is slim, having lost a considerable portion of existing customers, and they do not seem to have the quality content needed to attract new ones. The promise of an ‘acceptable’ advertising experience is nice, but it’s a job for a plugin, not a content publisher or even an ad broker, which is what Adblock Plus is trying to morph into. Perhaps slowly rolling out a different plugin, branded with something connected to its acceptable ads initiative, working to accelerate the whitelisting process, maybe by gathering information about which ads users find acceptable to later sell to publishers, while still maintaining their initial service or line of business, would be a better strategy. Anything to avoid having to say ‘Hi we are called Adblock Plus, though we will no longer be blocking ads, as much as asking sites to pay us to show ads to users they attracted without any real help from us.’ Adblock Plus already alienated online publishers. Trying to quickly pivot and turn those people into customers may have cost them the ones they did have for their original service. Unless content providers, advertisers, and users radically change how they interact with ads online, Adblock Plus’ may end up using their new RTB platform to sell their office space instead of actual ad units.