Upton Sinclair: ‘It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends on His Not Understanding It’

I’ve mentioned this quote from Upton Sinclair a few times over the years, but it’s certainly apt once again with the current debate over ad blocking. A few readers have asked, in light of yesterday’s link to Randall Rothenberg’s AdAge op-ed advising the industry to start making better and less-user-hostile ads, why it took so long for the industry to wake up to this. Why did they wait until after ad-blockers came to iOS to start thinking about how to respond?

The answer is that they should have seen this coming years ago, but remained blind or in denial because the entire mainstream online ad industry depends upon all this “programmatic advertising” crap, and programmatic advertising is a fundamentally flawed idea.

★ Thursday, 24 September 2015