From Amazing To Appalling

It was all going to be so amazing. It all sounded so great. Advertising was going to be amazing.

People weren't going to just look at online ads, they were going to interact with them.

People were going to go online and “join the conversation” about our brands and start their own conversations. And these conversations would grow virally and it wouldn't cost us a penny.

"If you can harness social media marketing, you don’t have to pay for advertising any more,” said a partner in Sequoia Capital.

It sounded so amazing. And it's turned out to be so appalling.

The online advertising "ecosystem" is a complete disaster.

• Ad fraud is out of control. The World Federation of Advertisers says that within eight years it could be the second largest source of criminal income in the world, after drug trafficking.

• The ANA says corruption within the agency media buying community is "pervasive."

• Viewability of online ads is reported to be below 50%.

• Interactivity with online ads is now reported to be about 5 clicks per 10,000 ads. You can't get much closer to zero.

• The public is so disgusted with online advertising that 600 million web-enabled devices are armed with ad blockers.

• Facebook and Google are reaping 77% of all online ad dollars in the U.S. and have become an arrogant duopoly who refuse to abide by long established standards of measurement and auditing.

• Online media continue to create preposterous metrics and foist them on credulous advertisers.

• The three-headed monster of tracking, surveillance marketing, and ad tech are endangering consumer privacy and undermining important principles of a free society.

• Quality online publishers are struggling for existence while the crappiest online sites - fed substantially by ad tech's data leakage - are stealing and monetizing their audiences.

• Fake news, also fed by the scourge of ad tech, has undermined the public's confidence in our news media.

• Foreign governments, encouraged by the online ad industry's irresponsible practices, have been caught trying to subvert the integrity of our electoral process.

If you set out to create an advertising medium that was a complete fiasco I'm not sure you could do much better.