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From The New York Times: Opinion | I Used Google Ads for Social Engineering. It Worked.
Ad campaigns that manipulate searchers’ behavior are frighteningly easy for anyone to run.
[...]Kevin Hines had one thought as he plummeted toward the Pacific Ocean: I can change anything in my life except the fact that I just jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge.
“One sentence could have stopped me,” Kevin wrote. “Had any one of the hundreds of passers-by engaged with me, it would … potentially have showed me that I had the ability to choose life.”
No person stopped Kevin from trying to kill himself. Could a Google ad have?
[...]Could Kevin have been redirected? Could he have been persuaded — by a few lines of ad copy and a persuasive landing page — not to jump? I wondered if I could redirect the next Kevin Hines. The goal of my first redirect campaign was to sway the ideology of suicidal people.
The problem my campaign addressed: Suicidal people are underserved on Google. In 2010, Google started making the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline the top result of certain searches relating to suicide. It also forced autocomplete not to finish such searches.
The weakness of Google’s initiative is that not enough variations of searches trigger the hotline. A search for “I am suicidal” will result in the hotline. But a search for “I’m going to end it” won’t always. “I intend to die” won’t ever. A lot of “higher-funnel” searches don’t trigger the hotline.
I hoped my redirect campaign would fill the gap in Google’s suicide algorithm. I would measure my campaign’s success by how many suicidal searchers clicked my ad and then called the number on my website, which forwarded to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
Nine days after my campaign began, the ads were accepted by Google. My ad was the first result across the United States when someone Googled with suicidal intent. I showed unique ads to suicidal people who were physically located around the Golden Gate Bridge.
Nearly one in three searchers who clicked my ad dialed the hotline — a conversion rate of 28 percent. The average Google Ads conversion rate is 4 percent.
The campaign’s 28 percent conversion rate was met in the first week. Not counting people who thought I was associated with lifeline or who did not read the ad or language on my website, that leaves a rate suggesting there’s a need in this ad space that is not being met.
[...]Mr. Berlinquette is a Google certified partner, and the founder of the search engine marketing consulting firm Berlin SEM.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday July 11 2019, @01:00PM (4 children)
Did you read TFA? Did you get to the end? Well, here's the conclusion:
Yes, the author is involved in advertising. He is also writing an opinion piece about the dangers of advertising, how we need better abilities to see the differences between ads and search results ("to use Google defensively"), and how advertising can exploit us when tied into search engines. As a hook, he used a story about an arguably "good" use of these tools, but one that surprised him in how (disturbingly) effective it seemed to be.
So, this is a guy who tried to prevent suicides (and school shootings, if you read TFA), and then wrote an opinion piece in a prominent newspaper arguing that advertising in search engines is ripe for abuse. Is this really just "self-serving shite"?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 11 2019, @03:01PM (3 children)
Yes. Regular people don't get their sappy opinion pieces into the NYT. I would be interested to find out if this guy was Jewish.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 11 2019, @03:48PM (2 children)
Well we found out what kind of person you are. Trash.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 11 2019, @04:05PM (1 child)
Not as trashy as being a money making middleman on other's misfortunes.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday July 11 2019, @10:42PM
Correct. You're trashier than that.
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