For 25 years, Google Search was built on a contract. The web provided the content – billions of pages, freely linked, freely crawled. In return, Google sent people back. The link
was the unit of exchange. It’s what made the Web thrive as an information system: you publish, Google indexes, users click through, and value flows back to the source. Win-win.
That contract is now broken. Generative UI doesn’t link to your article, necessarily. It absorbs your article, synthesizes it into a
widget, and presents it as Google’s own answer. Information agents don’t send users to websites. They deliver “synthesized updates” with maybe a link or two buried at the bottom.
The web was the scaffolding Google needed to build its index, to train its models, to accumulate the world’s information, and put ads next to it to get filthy rich. Now that the
content is inside the system, the scaffolding is no longer needed. Google is creating its own context.
Google thinks it no longer needs the Web to deliver answers. And it no longer needs ad slots to deliver ads. What it needs is you. Your emails, your files, your calendar,
your purchase history, your travel plans – all flowing into Spark, all building the richest possible picture of who you are and what you’re likely to click on. That’s exactly the
kind of personal context those auction models need to work. The prediction module in the prominence allocation framework doesn’t run on keywords. It runs on knowing you.
…
An excellent piece by Matthias Ott, discussing revelations from this year’s Google I/O. In particular, the imminent pivot of Google Search from its lifelong “query in, list of links
out” model to a wholesale “query in, LLM output out” one.
This isn’t just about putting AI output at the top of the search results, as I gather they do today, but about getting rid of search “results” entirely, and
running everything through the model.
To which Matthias wisely asks: well, how will ads work then? Google’s business model is based on mining your personal data and shoving ads in your face. Where do they go in a search
interface that it’s really a search but a “helpful” AI.
It turns out there’s a few approaches that Google seem to be considering, but what they’ve all got in common is the idea that marketers will be able to “influence” the LLM’s token
generation, perhaps by using an LLM of their own to decide whether you (based on everything Google knows about you) are worth marketing to, and how much they’ll pay to do so, and then
this input being “weighted” against competing advertisers and actual ingested data in order to feature advertiser-influenced content woven directly into the output of the LLM.
Superficially, this sounds a little like product placement, like you sometimes see in American-made TV shows and movies. You know, where one character says, of “I’m going to go get a
drink refill. You know you can get unlimited refills on any drink you want… and it’s free?”, and the next says “It’s a wonderful restaurant.”, while they’re sitting in Burger King.
Except this isn’t about saying “hey, people who watch this show are probably high and want a snack, let’s push our fast food their way”. It’s individualised.
It’s more like if the characters, knowing that your GMail account had a recent email about some test results, and your Google Calendar had an appointment tomorrow at the doctor, started
talking about a particular brand of medication to, y’know, put the idea into your head.
The future presented in Futurama was supposed to be a joke, right?
We’re not at the point of completely-customised TV shows – nor the injection of commercials into dreams – yet. But Google’s plans, which blur the already-grey boundaries between organic
and advertising content, are pretty insidious.
Assuming you’re in their ecosystem already, and possibly even if you’re not… Google may already be looking at your search terms, your calendar, your emails, your location and schedule,
who you communicate with and how often, which web pages you visit, which apps you use, where you spend money, etc. (Seriously: if you somehow haven’t begun de-googling already, what are
you waiting for?)… there’s a huge potential for misuse there.
But the arms race between people blocking or learning-to-ignore ads and advertisers trying to foist them upon us continues, and Google thinks this is an acceptable next step in
escalating that. Using an insane amount of energy to recycle other people’s work without crediting them, in order to mash up the result with information they know about you in order to
deliver you an unverifiable soup of words which might answer your question but with no clue how much or little commercial interest went into producing it, or by whom.
That’s some proper Darkest Timeline shit, right there.
You don’t need to take my nor Matthias’s word on it (although you should read his full post because it’s excellent): just look at the concept videos in Google’s blog post on the subject. You’ll also notice that almost-nowhere
in their demos do Google even hint at the possibility of linking-out to anybody else’s website: there’s like one “visit site” button that appears at the very end of
one of the flows, after the agent has done its things. Google is building a walled garden where they hope you’ll live, served by their AI butler on behalf of the companies
who pay Google to tell you about their products.
One of my goals was to uncover the origin of the ubiquitous Winking Chef. We’ve all seen him – the chubby mustachioed man wearing a chef’s hat and often making a gesture of approval
with his hand. I dug around as much as I could – searching old magazines and websites looking for the origin of the image. Of course generic chef images go way back in print
advertising but I was looking for one image in particular, the one I grew up with on my pizza boxes in New Jersey. Who was this guy? Was the image based on a real person? What’s the
deal????
…
There are few people in this world who are more-obsessed with pizza than I, but Scott’s gotta be one of them. Since discovering this blog post of his I now really want to
go on one of his pizza-themed walking tours of New York City. But you might have guessed that.
Anyway: Scott – who has a collection of pizza boxes, by the way (in case you needed evidence that he’s even more pizza-fixated than me) – noticed the “winking chef” image,
traced its origin, and would love to tell you about it. An enjoyable little read.
Maintaining a blog can be a lot of work. A single article can take weeks of research, drafting and editing, collecting and producing included materials, etc. It’s not unusual to
seek some form of compensation for it, and those rewards require initiative. With a good monetization strategy, it can become a fairly
lucrative venture.
So let’s talk about monetizing a blog, starting with the most obvious and perhaps easiest avenue: display advertising.
A content creator with an established audience can leverage that audience and sell ad space on their blog. Here’s an example:
…
I’m not sure I have words for how awesome this blog post is. If you’ve ever wanted to monetise your blog and are considering an ad-driven model, this should absolutely be the first (and
perhaps last) thing you read on the subject.
If you’re not convinced that Tyler is an appropriate authority to speak on this subject, I highly suggest you visit their other site that’s got a wealth of useful tips, PutAToothpickInTheChargingPortDoctorsHateThatShit.christmas. Yes, really.
Back in 2005 I reblogged a Flash-based interactive advert I’d discovered via del.icio,us. And if that sentence wasn’t early-naughties enough for you, buckle up…
This screenshot isn’t from the original site but from my homage to it. More on that later.
At the end of 2004, Unilever brand Axe (Lynx here in the UK)
continued their strategy of marketing their
deodorant as magically transforming young men into hyper-attractive sex gods. This is, of course, an endless battle, pitting increasingly sexually-charged advertisements against the
fundamental experience of their product, which smells distinctly like locker rooms and school discos. To launch 2005’s new fragrance Feather, they teamed up with London-based
design agency Dare Digital to create a game at domain AxeFeather.com (long since occupied by domain squatters).
In the game, the player’s mouse pointer becomes a feather which they can use to tickle an attractive young woman lying on a bed. The woman’s movements – which vary based on where she’s
tickled – have been captured in digital video. This was aggressively compressed using the then-new H.263-ish
Sorensen Spark codec to make a download just-about small enough to be tolerable for people still on dial-up Internet access (which was still almost as popular as broadband). The ad became a viral hit. I can’t tell you whether it paid for itself in sales, but it
must have paid for itself in brand awareness: on Valentines Day 2005 it felt like it was all the Internet wanted to talk about.
I suspect its success also did wonders for the career of its creative consultant Olivier Rabenschlag, who left Dare a few years
later, hopped around Silicon Valley for a bit, then landed himself a job as Head of Creative (now Chief Creative Officer) with Google. Kudos.
Why?
I told you about the site 16 years ago: why am I telling you again? Because this site, which made
headlines at the time, is gone.
And not just a little bit gone, like a television ad no longer broadcast but which might still exist on YouTube somewhere (and here it is – you’re welcome for the earworm). The website went down in 2009, and because it was implemented in Flash the content
was locked away in a compiled, proprietary format, which has ceased to be meaningfully usable on the modern web.
The parts of AxeFeather.com’s code that are openly readable don’t help much, but I love this comment, which carries the scent of the adolescent web in the same way at Lynx deodorant
carries the scent of an adolescent human.
The ad was pioneering. Flash had only recently gained video support (this would be used the following year for the first version of YouTube), and it had so far been used mostly for
non-interactive linear video. This ad was groundbreaking… but now it’s disappeared like so much other Flash work. And for all that Flash might have been bad for the web,
it’s an important part of our
digital history [recommended reading].
Third-party Flash emulation is imperfect. I tried to make Axe Feather work in Ruffle and got… an empty bed? What is this, a metaphor for being a
lonely nerd?
So on a whim… I decided to see if I could recreate the ad.
Call it lockdown fever if you like, because it’s certainly not the work of a sane mind to attempt to resurrect a 16-year-old Internet advertisement. But that’s what I did.
How?
My plan: to reverse-engineer the digital assets (video, audio, cursor etc.) out of the original Flash file, and use them to construct a moderately-faithful recreation of the ad,
suitable for use on the modern web. My version must:
Work in any modern browser, without Flash of course.
Indicate how much of the video content you’d seen, because we live in an era of completionists who want to know they’ve seen it all.
Depend on no third-party frameworks/libraries: just vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Let’s get started.
Reverse-engineering
At this point I noticed that the videos had no audio tracks: the giggling and other sound effects must be stored separately.
I grabbed the compiled .swf file from archive.org and ran it through
SWFExtract and an online decompiler: neither was individually able to extract
all of the assets, but together they gave me a full set. I ran the .flv files through Handbrake to get myself a set of
.mp4 files instead.
In what appears to have been an exercise in size optimisation, the original authors cropped the videos differently depending on how much space was needed (e.g. if the subject
stretched her arms above her head, more space would be required). Clearly, some re-alignment would be needed.
Seeing that the extracted video files were clearly designed to be carefully-positioned on a static background, and not all in the exact same position, I decided to make my job easier by
combining them all together, and including the background layer (the picture of the bed) as a single video. Integrating the background with the subject meant that I was able to use
video editing software to tweak the position, which I imagined would be much easier than doing so in code. Combining all of the video clips into a single file provides compression
benefits as well as making it easier to encourage a browser to precache the entire video to begin with.
My design called for three “layers” above my web page: the video, a transparent (and usually hidden) canvas showing the hit areas for debugging purposes, and the feather-shaped
cursor.
The longest clip was a little over 6 seconds long, so I split my timeline into blocks of 7 seconds, padding each clip with a freeze-frame of its final image to make each exactly 7
seconds long. This meant that calculating the position in the finished video to which I wanted to jump was as simply as multiplying the (0-indexed) clip number by 7 and seeking to that
position. The additional “frozen” frames acted as a safety buffer in case my JavaScript code was delayed by a few milliseconds in jumping to the “next” block.
I used onion-skinning to help “line up” the actress with herself as I composited her onto the bed in a single unified video of 7-second blocks.
An additional challenge was that in the original binary, the audio files were stored separately from the video clips… and slightly longer than them! A little experimentation revealed
that the ends of each clip lined up, presumably something to do with how Flash preloads and synchronises media streams. Luckily for me, the audio clips were numbered such that
they mostly mapped to the order in which the videos appeared.
Once I had a video file suitable for use on the web (you can watch the entire clip here, if you really want to), it was time to
write some code.
It feels slightly wasteful that over 50% of the resulting video clip is a freeze-frame, but modern video compression algorithms like H.264 reduce the impact considerably and the
resulting video file is about the same size as its more-optimised predecessor.
Regular old engineering
The theory was simple: web page, video, loop the first seven seconds until you click on it, then animate the cursor (a feather) and jump to another seven-second block before jumping
back or, in some cases, on to a completely new seven second block. Simple!
Of course, any serious web development is always a little more complex than you first anticipate.
I extracted from the .swf 34 distinct animated clips, which I numbered 0 through 33. 6 and 30 appeared to be duplicates of others. 0 and 33 are each two “idling” states
from which interaction can lead to other states. Note that my interpretation of the order and relationship of animation sequences differs from the original.
For example: nowadays, putting a video on a web page is as easy as a <video> tag. But, in an effort to prevent background web pages from annoying you with unexpected
audio, modern browsers won’t let a video play sound unless user interaction is the reason that the video starts playing (or unmutes, if it was playing-but-muted to
begin with). Broadly-speaking, that means that a definitive user action like a “click” event has to be in the call stack when your code makes the video play/unmute.
But changing the .currentTime of a video to force it into a loop: that’s fine! So I set the video to autoplay muted on page load, with a script to make it loop
within its first seven-second block. The actress doesn’t make any sound in block 0 (position A) anyway; so I can unmute the video when the user interacts with a hotspot.
For best performance, I used window.requestAnimationFrame to synchronise my non-interactive events (video loops, virtual cursor repositioning). This posed a slight problem
in that animationframes wouldn’t be triggered if the tab was moved to the background: the video would play through each seven-second block and into the next! Fortunately the
visibilitychange event came to the rescue and I was able to pause the video when it wasn’t being actively watched.
I originally hoped to use the cursor: CSS directive to make the “feather” cursor, but there’d be no nice way to
animate it. Comet Cursor may have been able to use animated GIFs
as cursors back in 1997 (when it wasn’t busy selling all your personal information to advertisers, back when that kind of thing used to attract widespread controversy), but modern
browsers don’t… presumably because it would be super annoying. They also don’t all respect cursor: none, so I used the old trick of using cursor: url(null.png),
none (where null.png is an almost-entirely transparent 1×1 pixel image) to hide the original cursor, then position an image dynamically. I
usegetBoundingClientRect() to allow the video to resize dynamically in CSS and convert coordinates on it represented
as percentages into actual pixel values and vice-versa: this allows it to react responsively to any screen size without breakpoints or excessive code.
Once I’d gone that far I was able to drop the GIF idea entirely and used a CSS animation for the “tickling” motion.
The hotspot overlay was added as a debugging feature but I left it in the final version. Hold the space bar to highlight hit areas.
I added a transparent <canvas> element on top of the <video> on which the hit areas are dynamically drawn to help me test the “hotspots” and tweak
their position. I briefly considered implementing a visual tool to help me draw the hotspots, but figured it wasn’t quite worth the time it would take.
As I implemented more and more of the game, I remembered one feature from the original that I’d missed: the “blowaway”. If you trigger block 31 – a result of tickling the woman’s nose –
she’ll blow your cursor off the screen. It’s particularly fun because it subverts the player’s expectations of their user interface: once you’ve got past the surprise of your
cursor being a feather, you quickly settle in to it moving like a regular cursor… but then control’s stolen from you and the cursor vanishes! (Well I thought it was cool… 16 years ago.)
Sometimes tickling her nose will make her blow your feather off the screen. That’ll show you.
It’s a clicker quest of purging banners from your homepage!
Push through dozens of banners and upgrade various web-tools to grow your ad-blocking power.
Hone your clicking skills – matters are in your own fingers hands!
There’s no time for idling, show these ads their place!
I quite enjoyed this progressive game: it’s a little bit different than most, the theming is fun, it lends itself to multiple strategies, and it’s not geared towards making you wait for
longer and longer intervals (as is common in this genre): there’s always something you can be doing to get closer to your goal.
A new email-based extortion scheme apparently is making the rounds, targeting Web site owners serving banner ads through Google’s AdSense program. In this scam, the
fraudsters demand bitcoin in exchange for a promise not to flood the publisher’s ads with so much bot and junk traffic that Google’s automated anti-fraud systems suspend the user’s
AdSense account for suspicious traffic.
…
The shape of our digital world grows increasingly strange. As anti-DoS techniques grow better and more and more uptime-critical
websites hide behind edge caches, zombie network operators remain one step ahead and find new and imaginative ways to extort money from their victims. In this new attack, the criminal
demands payment (in cryptocurrency) under threat that, if it’s not delivered, they’ll unleash an army of bots to act like the victim trying to scam their advertising network,
thereby getting the victim’s site demonetised.
Last week I happened to be at an unveiling/premiere event for the new Renault Clio. That’s a coincidence: I was actually there to see the new Zoe, because we’re hoping to be among the
first people to get the right-hand-drive version of the new model when it starts rolling off the production line in 2020.
But I’ll tell you what, if they’d have shown me this video instead of showing me the advertising stuff they did, last week, I’d have been all: sure thing, Clio it is,
SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY! I’ve watched this ad four times now and seen more things in it every single time. (I even managed to not-cry at it on the fourth watch-through, too; hurrah!).
For a philosopher, Helen Nissenbaum is a surprisingly active participant in shaping how we collect,
use, and protect personal data. Nissenbaum, who earned her PhD from Stanford, is a professor of information science at Cornell Tech, New York City, where she focuses on the
intersection of politics, ethics, and values in technology and digital media — the hard stuff. Her framework for understanding digital privacy has deeply influenced
real-world policy.
In addition to several books and countless papers, she’s also coauthored privacy plug-ins for web browsers including TrackMeNot, AdNauseum, and Adnostic. Nissenbaum views these pieces
of code as small efforts at rationalizing a marketplace where opaque consent agreements give consumers little bargaining power against data collectors as they extract as much
information, and value from this information, as they can. Meanwhile, these practices offer an indefinite value proposition to consumers while compromising the integrity of digital
media, social institutions, and individual security.
I’ve been, in the past, a firm distruster of ad blocking software. I still am, to a large extent. I don’t trust any company whose finance model is based on inserting exceptions for
advertisers they like. But I installed Ghostery, whose model is to use the stats of what gets blocked to offer consultancy to companies to make their adverts less horrific. I like
this idea, so I support it. My Ghostery install is fairly open, blocking only sites that offer page-takeover, popups, autoplaying videos, and other stuff that annoys me a lot. So I
get a bit annoyed when I’m scrolling through a Wired article and get something
like this:
Fine. I don’t disagree with the sentiment, but I don’t read Wired often enough to care about being a member, so yeah, ad supported isn’t unreasonable. Do you know what’s unreasonable,
Wired? This is what happens when I whitelist your site:
…
I’ve gone full-nuclear these last few years and I just keep Javascript disabled for most domains, most of the time (I’m using uMatrix).
The Web is a lot faster, for it, and I can just enable it for domains that “need” it as-and-when. I also keep a userscript to-hand that I can tweak as-and-when to block
anti-ad-blocker scripts, so that enabling Javascript on your domain (but not the domains of your dozen trackers/advertisers) doesn’t mean that I see your anti-ad-blocker popups either.
If your site nags gently (e.g. by mentioning where ads would be that they’re blocked, perhaps with a sad face emoticon) I’ll consider adding the ads, if your site has
value. But more likely, if your site’s good, I’ll be looking for the donate link. You can make more money out of me with donations than you ever would be showing me ads: I’m more than
happy to pay for the Web… I’m not happy to have 75% of the work my computer does when I’m reading your content be about your advertising partners tracking me nor about trying
to “block” me from seeing your content.
The full article helps show how bad the Web’s gotten. When it starts to get better again,
perhaps I’ll stop blocking ads and trackers so aggressively.
The ANAR Foundation and Grey Group Spain have created a unique advertising campaign that only kids can see. The ad campaign uses lenticular printing to show individuals below a
certain height — children, in this case — a certain image, while taller people see a different image. Children looking at the ad see a photo of an abused boy, a help hotline, and
the message ‘if somebody hurts you, phone us and we’ll help you,’ while adults can only see an unbruised photo of the boy with the text ‘Sometimes child abuse is only visible to the
child suffering it.’
The ANAR Foundation and Grey Group Spain have created a unique advertising campaign that only kids can see. The ad campaign uses lenticular printing to show individuals below a certain height — children, in this case
— a certain image, while taller people see a different image. Children looking at the ad see a photo of an abused boy, a help hotline, and the message “if somebody hurts you, phone us
and we’ll help you,” while adults can only see an unbruised photo of the boy with the text “Sometimes child abuse is only visible to the child suffering it.”
It feels like most of the time I’ve spent in a car this year, so far, has been for travel related to somebody’s recent death. And so it was that yesterday, Ruth, JTA and I zipped up and down the motorway to attend
the funeral of Ruth’s grandmother.
It went really well, but what I wanted to share with you today was two photos that I took at service stations along the the way.
A sign I discovered at a motorway service station.
This one confuses me a lot. If I buy alcohol from this service area, I can’t drink it either inside… or outside… the premises. Are they unlicensed, perhaps, and so the only way they’re
allowed to sell us alcohol is if we promise not to drink it? Or is it perhaps the case that they expect us only to consume it when we’re in a parallel dimension?
Costa have decided to cut down on graffiti by writing all over their own walls.
It’s hard to see in the second photo without clicking (to see it in large-o-vision), but the sign on the opposite wall in this Costa Coffee implies the possibility of being an
“Americano Addict”. And there was something about that particular marketing tack that made me cringe.
Imagine that this was not a café but a bar, and substitute the names of coffees with the names of alcoholic beverages. Would it be cool to advertise your products to the “wine addicts”
or the “beer addicts” of the world? No: because alcoholism isn’t hip and funny… but caffeine addiction is? Let’s not forget that caffiene is
among the most-addictive drugs in the world. Sure, caffeine addiction won’t wreck your liver like alcohol will or give you cancer like smoking tobacco (the most-popular way to
consume nicotine) will, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that there are many people for whom a dependency upon caffeine is a very real part of their everyday life.
Is it really okay to make light of this by using such a strong word as “addict” in Costa’s marketing? Even if we’re sticking with alliteration to fit in with the rest of their
marketing, wouldn’t “admirer” or “aficionado” be better? And at least that way, Costa wouldn’t leave me with a bitter taste in my mouth.
