A cartoon butt clenching a bar of soap has invaded my online ads

According to my research, everyone has a butt. But that doesn't mean, when I'm imbibing my morning cuppa and reading up on the recent presidential debate, that I want to see an ad showing an illustrated derrière with a bar of soap clenched firmly between its two ripe cheeks.

Yet there it was, a riotous rump residing right in the middle of a New York Times article this week, causing me to reflect on just how far the Gray Lady has stooped to pick up those ad dollars lying in the gutter. It's not the first time this sort of thing has sullied the "paper of record." In 2022, I was forward-thinking enough to grab a screenshot of the Times helping to sell me some sort of wipe with the tagline: "When your butt doesn't smell like butt." It was also marketed as deodorant for "your pits and lady bits."

Not having any "lady bits" to deodorize, this was not particularly compelling, but the true high point of ass-related irrelevancy at the Times came when I was served an ad featuring a mournful-looking dog who pointed the business end of his hindquarters directly at the camera. "It's time to leave your dog's anal gland problems behind," I was told. I have never owned a dog, nor—to my children's continuing dissatisfaction—ever will. It was therefore left to Ars Technica's Managing Editor Eric Bangeman, who is a noted canine lover and a true "friend to all creatures, even rats," to explain to me just what this baffling advertisement meant.

Once you start looking for these oddly direct ads in self-consciously "classy" media outlets, you see them everywhere, including in The Atlantic, where a bidet ad once promised that it would make my "butt crack smile." (Perhaps this last ad can be blamed on my boss, who has spoken in such glowing terms about high-end Japanese toilet technology that I Googled it—probably marking myself as some kind of "ass man" for life.) Whatever the reason for seeing one of these ads, all of them looked cheap, and none of them felt relevant. I have nothing against the noble bidet, but having "holy s*** this thing's a gamechanger!!!" appear in the middle of my screen while pondering some chinstroker of an article was not exactly why I had visited The Atlantic.

The great irony of online advertising these days is that it's often claimed to be "targeted," mining our personal and demographic information to serve us the ads that we allegedly want to see. Wouldn't I prefer to view ads "relevant to my interests"? Maybe. But I can say with confidence that after two decades of being "extremely online" for work, the number of ads I have voluntarily and enthusiastically clicked upon must number in the low double digits. Instead, the engines powering these ad networks continue to bombard me with two kinds of ads: 1) those that are wholly irrelevant to my interests and 2) those that are relevant to my interests because they display the exact product I once looked at in some online store. Ad targeting companies may "know a lot about me," but they don't know me in any truly useful way. They don't know, for instance, why I looked at some product online, or if I already made a decision not to buy it (or to buy it elsewhere), or if I just wanted to better understand my boss's love of Japanese bidets. They don't know whether I have (or want) a dog. And they (clearly) don't know that I would be repulsed by an edible product shaped like a human ear and featuring both bite marks and Mike Tyson's name.

(Fortunately, you can completely opt out of ads at some sites, including Ars Technica, by subscribing for a few bucks a month—and contributing directly to our bottom line.) This is partly because ads are not always all that "targeted." The sorts of keister-related ads I've been talking about here aren't the big, splashy, customized campaigns that a brand might design specifically for (and sometimes with) the Times or The Atlantic or my own employer, Condé Nast. Such deals may be done directly between the advertiser and publisher, so everyone knows what the ads look like and where they will run. These ads are generally expensive and look great—or at least interesting—even when the product they are pitching is of no personal interest to me. Not to put too fine a point upon it, but they rarely shove a dog's butthole in my face. At the other extreme, there are the hyper-targeted ads on, say, Facebook, which can be directed at SUV owners in ZIP code 17023 who browse social media after midnight and like to dye their hair orange. These ads might be cheap-looking and weird, but they can still be worth a lot of money because of just how precisely they can be delivered. The butt ads I'm talking about live in the space between these two worlds. Most appear to be some kind of "programmatic" material, often sold through real-time automated auctioning and used to fill space where more expensive ads aren't going to run. They don't bring in big bucks, and publishers don't know what they will say or show, but they do generate some cash at a time when journalism is hurting. The danger is that these ads may inject asinine (dare I say "asstastic"?) content right onto the pages of "premium" brands—thus making them look a lot less premium. There are ways to control this. Programmatic ads are often displayed based on site size and demographics, not individual targeting data. The networks that sell them often provide categories of material that publishers can choose to block, such as adult content ads, ads from competitors, "unsafe" ads, religious ads, and even "low-quality" ads. Not every publisher takes advantage of these controls, and even among those who do, weird or off-putting ads still slip through. Here at Ars, we take the time to hunt down and block offensive or inappropriate programmatic ads when we see them or when our readers report them—but this takes time and can be difficult. Many sites don't bother. The result can be really low-rent stuff appearing on a publisher's pages. One would think, for instance, that the Times's own reputation could not possibly be worth whatever the paper is getting paid to run clickbait about the "Dumbest States in America—Ranked." And yet here we are.

How well does any of this even work?

This is not simply a personal complaint. Online ads have long been subject to a debate about just how well they actually work and whether turning all of this over to machines is actually good for effectiveness, brand safety, and reader engagement. The Harvard Business Review opened its 2021 piece on digital advertising with the striking claim that online ads are often believed to be highly effective—but they might not be.

The effectiveness of digital ads is wildly oversold. A large-scale study of ads on eBay found that brand search ad effectiveness was overestimated by up to 4,100%. A similar analysis of Facebook ads threw up a number of 4,000%. For all the data we have, it seems like companies still don't have an answer to a question first posed by the famous 19th century retailer John Wanamaker: Which half of my company's advertising budget is wasted?

Even ads that are more targeted, using the reams of data captured and sold by publishers and data brokers, are often criticized for being very bad indeed. A 2021 piece in the Financial Times Magazine summed up the online ad problem with the headline, "If Big Tech has our data, why are targeted ads so terrible?" In it, the author complained with particular vehemence about the "quality" of Facebook's advertising:

According to Facebook, my advertiser-friendly interests include rugby union, family, greetings cards, and Gothic fashion. Beyond family—and who isn't interested in their family?—these are all wide of the mark. Nobody likes greetings cards that much. I have been using Facebook platforms for more than a decade. The company has had the opportunity to track my movements and scrape information for years. Yet the end result is a random, largely inaccurate overview. If I were an advertiser, I would want my money back.

A Facebook product manager even noted, in a memo later revealed in a court case, that "more than half the time, we're showing ads to someone other than the advertisers' intended audience." When coupled with the privacy concerns that often arise in these discussions, people sometimes find themselves asking "Why Don't We Just Ban Targeted Advertising?"—as our sister publication WIRED did in 2020. (Critics argue that such restrictions on data collection and targeting will result in less advertising and therefore more paywalls, making such plans a national tax that the poor can least afford to pay.)

The horrors of the world

But I'm a simple man. I don't want to wade into complex technical and policy debates about data privacy laws and targeted advertising and programmatic ad auctions. I just want to know why, when sipping my morning cup of tea, the world's many horrors must be further compounded by staring at a cartoon person jamming a bar of soap into the crack of its bahookie. Really, at a time in which so many startups claim that they want to help change the world, fixing this doesn't seem like a big ask. Publishers have their part to play in the situation. Stupid, off-putting ads that actually lower the perceived value of your brand are not just a concern over at X; publishers can (and perhaps should) exert more control over the garbage that can appear even on owned-and-operated news sites and apps. If I can adopt for a moment the scolding tone so prevalent on social media, I would use it to say to the advertising and publishing industries: Be better. Or, if you can't, maybe assign an intern to watch your programmatic ad streams for the sight of a soapy cartoon fundament being shoved into the unsuspecting faces of your readers.