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All Your Brains Are Belong to Us
Companies are now selling their users' brainwave data to target consumers with ads, and lawmakers are just now catching wind of it.
by Tod Maffin (LinkedIn • social media) |
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PRIVACY • New Law Restricts “Brain Targeting”
Yesterday, the American state of Colorado amended its privacy laws to make it harder for advertisers to use brain activity data for consumer targeting.
It is believed to be the first such legislation in the country to protect neural data.
And if you think “Well, I mean that’s not really a thing yet,” you’d be wrong.
The New York Times reported that brain data is indeed being collected and sold.
For instance, in 2023, Meta demo’ed a wristband with a neural interface used to control its smart glasses and unveiled an AI system that could be used to decode the mind.
In January, Elon Musk announced that Neuralink implanted its first brain chip in a human that can be used to control a device with their thoughts.
And just last month, Apple Insider reported that "Apple is working on technology that could turn the Apple Vision Pro into a brainwave reader to improve mental health, assist with training and workouts, and help with mindfulness."
Colorado's law doesn’t ban the collection of this data, of course, it only requires companies to get the consent of users to sell or use their neural data for ad targeting. That consent, of course, will probably be buried in a long Terms and Conditions list that nobody will read.
It also says the process to remove already collected neural data must be easy.
An ethics non-profit named Neurorights looked at the privacy policies and user agreements of 30 consumer neurotech companies — two-thirds were sharing the neural data of their users with third parties. Only four companies said they do not sell the brain data.
THREADS • Ad Placements Are On Their Way
Ads are soon making their way to Meta's Threads.
Industry insiders quoted by Digiday say ad placements on Threads could begin as early as the second half of this year. The focus of the discussions has apparently been more about the timing of the rollout rather than the specifics of how these ads will be integrated into the platform.
But, all things being equal, we can expect two main pushes:
An sponsored influencer disclosure system
Traditional ad placements bookable through the ads manager.
And of those placements, of course the in-feed slots will be there, but also expect placements in the trends section and carousels — which look similar to the ones on Instagram.
If the rollout of ads to Threads occurs as planned, it would mean that Meta is confident in achieving its ambitious goal of attracting one billion regular users to the app — a milestone it previously set as a prerequisite for introducing advertisements.
As it stands, the platform is still quite a way off from that number.
When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg provided an update on monthly users during the company’s earnings call in February, he reported a figure of 130 million. To meet the one billion user target in a condensed time frame, Threads would need to expand at a rate eight times faster than its growth over the previous months…
Nevertheless, reaching this milestone was more about having a clear audience before introducing ads.
That’s because in order to achieve more revenue, Meta has needed to find ways to increase ad impression volume and open up surface area — the latter in this case being Threads.
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TV ADS • Ads to Match the “Mood” of a Show
AI is all over our industry — making images, rewriting copy, making hiring decisions.
But one area we haven’t seen a lot of AI in has been in the Connected TV space. But that’s about to change.
Earlier this week, at an industry conference in Miami, executives from several companies talked about their work in using metadata from television shows to target consumers better.
For instance, the tech could determine from the closed captioning that the show ended on a sad cliffhanger, and would find ads in the auction that match that emotional tone.
For example, an episode of The Office could be a comedy or a romance depending on the scene...
Similarly, while Pillsbury might happily serve an ad during Shrek, it would want to avoid the scene where Lord Farquad throttles the Gingerbread Man.
By inferring the mood of a scene and serving a similarly toned ad, the technology ensures a higher level of relevance, a cornerstone of effective advertising.
This tech is being dropped into ad platforms as we speak — NBCUniversal’s ad system already uses similar tech to measure genre, tone and emotion.
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GOOGLE ADS • Ad Customizers Leaving
Google this week reminded advertisers that it would soon remove ad customizers for text ads, expanded text ads, and Dynamic Search Ads as of the end of next month.
Ad customizers have been around for a decade and they can insert more context into your copy — like how many hours left before a sale ends.
To be clear, if you’re still using customizers, your ad itself won’t stop running — only the customizers will. So if you’re using those, your ads will fall back to their default text.
Industry reaction on LinkedIn was mixed.
One person said it was no biggie to them, since they never liked the results.
In the same thread, another advertiser said:
Again, the end date for these will be May 31st.
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TIKTOK • Single Image Ads Are Coming Soon
Just a day after TikTok launched its image-only app, TikTok Notes, in a couple of test countries, the company is emailing advertisers about a new Single Image ad format soon to be available on their platform.
This would complement the existing Carousel Image ad format it has.
In the email, TikTok notes that some brands may find it challenging to create videos for every ad, and so this might make a good substitute.
If you don’t see Single Image Ads as an available format in your ads manager yet, you should expect to see it in the next week or so.
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