Improving Web Advertising breakout -- 08 Nov 2017

<scribe> scribenick: npdoty

[very crowded room]

<wseltzer> Liam: how can we make advertising better on the web?

liam: kicking off a new business group for Web Advertising; problems we see in advertising, regarding accessibility, privacy, ad blocking, analytics, security, fingerprinting
... can we help advertisers with targeting ads on the page without users giving up more information than they want
... funding for web sites that depend on advertising
... ways to improve the ecosystem
... find technical areas where we can help the ecosystem run a bit more smoothly
... personally, I run a website and struggle with needing to show more ads as ad blocking increases

[overview of W3C]

<liam> https://www.w3.org/2017/11/2017-11-tpac-web-adv-bg.pdf

interest groups, community groups, business groups, working groups

liam: initial approach, a Business Group for oversight, not developing specs itself but exploring issues we've mentioned
... thinking about the wider issues at the business level
... from that, we hope for a 2-way conversation that can result in workshops and creating one or more working groups
... and working groups can liase with other existing working groups
... for example, an Advertising Working Group could collaborate with the Web Accessibility Initiative on accessibility in ads

<npdoty_> ... and a Business Group that isn't chartered to produce specs doesn't require intellectual property licensing

<npdoty_> liam: getting involved, you can join a Business Group without being a W3C Member, requires paying separate dues

<npdoty_> ... if there is significant work here that we identify, hope organizations will join W3C

<npdoty_> [introductions]

<wseltzer> JP_Abello: Nielsen

<wseltzer> Chunming: Beihang

<wseltzer> @@: Alibaba

<wseltzer> Jenny_Lee: Credibility coalition

<wseltzer> Bartek: Viacom

<wseltzer> Dan_Whaley: Hypothesis

<wseltzer> Tanya: Internet Academy

<wseltzer> Toru: Panasonic

<wseltzer> TLR: Google

<npdoty_> wseltzer: W3C

<wseltzer> Jun_Gamou: Voyager

<wseltzer> @@: Japan Commercial Broadcasters Assoc

<wseltzer> Dan_Sanicola: Penguin Random House

<wseltzer> John_Luther: JW Player

<wseltzer> Sandro: W3C

<wseltzer> John_Hazen: MS Edge

<wseltzer> @@: Apple

<wseltzer> Brendan: IAB Techlab

<npdoty_> [presentation from IAB Tech Lab]

<wseltzer> [lots more I didn't capture, sign-in sheet circulating]

<npdoty_> Brendan: spinoff from Internet Advertising Bureau

liam: learning from w3c how to bring to market standards-track consensus documents
... Open RTB, VAST/DAST (ad serving templates), ad interface definitions, most recently ads.txt (modeled after robots.txt)
... reference implementations, testing code, and services for compliance

Brendan: "bad advertising", we recognize that browsers are taking actions against what they interpret bad advertising is
... for example, Apple blocking more 3rd-party cookies, identifying the ability to track and retarget as the most problematic thing
... Firefox Focus, blocking the downloading of content in a specialized browser
... Chrome discussing the format, blocking excesses of quantified annoyance
... trying to work on ad-inserting toolbars, ads.txt files to prevent organizations from selling inventory that they don't own
... leading to more critical thinking from publishers and others about the supply chain
... developing methodology for quantifying how the ad experience impacts
... have consistent industry-supported advertising experience evaluation
... having anonymized results of advertising experience against publishers

(scribe not totally understanding these points, welcome additions)

Brendan: cryptographic signing in order to make it easier to trust ads prior to rendering
... Client Mediated Identity, all the workarounds to continue deliver cookies
... is one a markedly better experience for the user, or some hybrid

<wseltzer> [identity, preferences, and profile]

Brendan: User Information includes identity, preferences (like DNT), and profile (commercially interesting data)
... accessibility -- making more structured data, to enable automation, could achieve better accessibility for the client

cargill: the purpose is to make advertising palatable to the majority of Web users?

Brendan: an important part of your business is delivering content and including advertising, some sites are looking at alternative revenue models
... maintaining an advertising system that is healthy, and penalizing those who try to exploit it against everyone else

cargill: put the plumbing in place so that good ads are viable and exploitive ads are not viable

Anqing_Alibaba: how to collect the statistics of the user, especially with offline web pages. analytics of people's use of offline web pages

@@@@: what about serving ads offline?

Brendan: that's a fascinating space, historically have only measured ad impressions when the client can connect
... would like the industry to be able to trust a set of ad impressions delivered offline

cargill: why is that necessary from a business point of view?

Anqing_Alibaba: not sure the statistics, but since different mobile devices have different capabilities, hard to use universal analytics systems
... if there were a standard web api, would be helpful

Brendan: scenarios including digital-out-of-home, mobile-offline

liam: as a historical example, printed ads within books date to the 16th century
... ebook readers could be part of the Web platform as well

@@@@@: IAB leadership has spoken about misinformation on the Web. this is much-needed effort to make ads more palatable

scribe: what are you doing to address incentives for higher-quality content?
... credibility standards work could connect by making it less palatable to place ads onto content that is targeted misinformation

Brendan: ads.txt, authorized digital seller, current expected model is that if a publisher publishes an authorized list, buyers should only buy from those, to prevent toolbars and others that are spoofing
... hopefully soon, recommend only buy authorized ads model
... could do large-scale analysis of who is buying from whom
... the purpose of TAG is consistent, persistent identities of parties you do business with, so that lower quality participants can be identified

liam: good sign that presentations overlap because of consistent interests

<astearns> TAG: Trustworthy Accountability Group

liam: we've heard interest in some specific changes and the concept of the Business Group

<wseltzer> IMPROVING WEB ADVERTISING BUSINESS GROUP

liam: web advertising is out there, but goal is to improve the ecosystem for everyone involved

<wseltzer> [[The mission of the Improving Web Advertising Business Group is to identify areas where standards and changes in the Web itself can improve the ecosystem and experience for users, advertisers, publishers, distributors, ad networks, agencies and others, and to oversee liaison with existing Working Groups and to create new Working Groups as needed

<wseltzer> ]]

<wseltzer> ^ draft mission

cargill: concerned about policy issues
... would like this group to give government a viable solution, rather than coming up with options on their own, given that this group has expertise

wseltzer: should focus on areas where we can build collaborative solutions with the people in this room, already a lot of stakeholders here that want a better ads system
... if we can get a few little pieces that make that shared goal work better, that doesn't need to involve regulators or the threat of regulatory action

jeff: Jeff Jaffe, W3C. the way to get both is that we can have lots of different groups, including separate Community Groups, for example focused on regulatory issues

liam: the mere fact that an industry standards organization is doing work in an area, legislation may be delayed, administrations change, and people may have more time to look at the problem
... ads used in recent US Election for example, have attracted regulatory interest
... targeting based on political views and collected social media data
... goes back to privacy, giving away less information about yourself
... also, who is paying for the ads?
... who is interested in joining the business group to talk about it more?

should w3c do more technical work in this area?

[getting positive shows of hands to these questions]

<liam> BG https://www.w3.org/community/web-adv/

Jenny_Lee: how do W3C and IAB interact?

Brendan: we are also a member-driven resource-constrained organization
... for interaction with other w3c groups/web features, it would be helpful to have a place
... and some of those technical ad questions may be generalized (for example, in performance or accessibility), those would be great questions to hand off (to W3C technical groups)

liam: haven't been as much effort for advertising groups to change Web features
... one example would be sandbox attribute on iframes for untrusted content that might occur often in embedded ads
... server-side advertising typically doesn't use iframes, but might still be untrusted, and could benefit from sandboxing

Jenny_Lee: so advertising and web people would be playing together more?

yes, although some participation in the past in Tracking Protection Working Group

Next Steps

liam: figure out scope and charter in more detail
... figure out who is interested in joining this work

cargill: what are our first/next steps?

liam: interested in appointing co-chairs for the Business Group

<wseltzer> liam: propose we treat this as the first meeting of the BG, with many observers

liam: Brendan and JP could be our co-chairs if acceptable to others

Ed: concern about machine learning and that all data is typically identifiable in some ways

Brendan: concern about a duopoly of walled gardens that have detailed insight into consumer behavior, which can be a threat to diversity and open Internet
... maintain an opportunity for new participants

<sandro> (Ed Bice, Meedan)

<liam> Improving Web Advertising Business Group - https://www.w3.org/community/web-adv/

wseltzer: if you're interested in participating there, can sign up for Business Group conversation now
... will let people who signed in know, but that won't be a permanent list
... what are some short-term achievable goals?
... and what are we looking at longer-term? existing groups where we could make changes? and broader, what would we love to see happen with more reengineering?
... next step could be holding a workshop and get a program committee to scope out ideas we want to request

liam: encourage anyone with interest to join the BG, IPR not a problematic constraint
... let us know if you know other people who should be around the table

Chunming__: currently blocking of ads is not just in the browser, lots of debate about the ethics of blocking advertising
... are we involving those kinds of stakeholders?

liam: certainly have some of those groups in the room already

cargill: should consider ad blockers a symptom, rather than a separate threat
... how do we make advertising palatable? ads in the newspaper didn't offend you, people can use ads if they want to

JP: one idea, all about the application layer, the industry has flourished without having advertising in the browser by design, but could make a lot more progress that way if that was designed into the browser

cargill: if we could make it an international standard, that would be the best

JP: we see lots of consumer frustration about the time involved in loading a page because of the ads
... browser could solve delivery, browser doesn't have Ad ID and so we have to handle tons of cookies

liam: and in a way that doesn't make the privacy situation worse, but instead make it better
... thanks all for coming
... and JP and Brendan for volunteering as chairs

[adjourned]

<wseltzer> i[lots more|IAB Tech Lab presentation

- DRAFT -

Improving Web Advertising breakout

08 Nov 2017

Attendees

Contents

Next Steps

Summary of Action Items

Summary of Resolutions

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