The Influence of Sociological Variables on Users’ Feelings about Programmatic Advertising and the Use of Ad-Blockers

The evolution of digital advertising, which is aimed at a mass audience, to programmatic advertising, which is aimed at individual users depending on their profile, has raised concerns about the use of personal data and invasion of user privacy on the Internet. Concerned users install ad-blockers that prevent users from seeing ads and this has resulted in many companies using antiad-blockers. This study investigates the sociological variables that make users feel that advertising is annoying and then decide to use ad-blockers to avoid it. Our results provide useful information for companies to appropriately segment user profiles. To do this, data collected from Internet users (n = 19,973) about what makes online advertising annoying and why they decide to use ad-blockers are analyzed. First, the existing literature on the subject was reviewed and then the relevant sociological variables that influence users’ feelings about online advertising and the use of ad-blockers were investigated. This work contributes new information to the discussion about user privacy on the Internet. Some of the key findings suggest that Internet advertising can be very intrusive for many users and that all the variables investigated, except marital status and education, influence the users’opinions. It was also found that all the variables in this study are important when a user decides to use an ad-blocker. A clear and inverse correlation between age and opinion about advertising as annoying could be seen, along with a clear difference of opinion due to gender. The results suggest that users without children use ad-blockers the least, while retirees and housewives use them the most

Influence of adblockers on the future of mobile advertising industry

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the impact adblockers have on mobile advertising industry. The thesis aims at (1) examining mobile marketers’ willingness to react in response of adblock expansion, (2) finding ways for mobile market players to avoid negative effect of adblokers, and (3) forecasting the future of mobile advertising industry. To get deeper understanding of current situation of mobile advertising, several studies on mobile marketing and advertising avoidance were analyzed. Ad-block phenomenon, its origins and consequences were analyzed. In order to reach research objectives quantitative method was used. Author created two separate questionnaires. First was sent to publishers and second to mobile advertisers. The conclusion of the study is that both publishers and advertisers feel ad-blockers’ presence on their performance and revenue. Nevertheless, marketers are eager to take measures confronting adblock. The future of mobile advertising industry tends to be optimistic. However, marketers will probably choose to fight with adblock users rather have a peace with them

Programmatic advertising: An exegesis of consumer concerns

Programmatic advertising is a nascent and rapidly growing information technology phenomenon that reacts to, and impacts upon, consumers and their behavior. Despite its popularity and widespread use, research in the area remains scant and our current knowledge is based upon a preponderance of practitioner-generated literature. This study contributes to our understanding of this technology by unpacking the means by which it functions and interacts with consumers. The study draws upon paradox theory to deconstruct programmatic advertising's inherent tensions as dilemmas and dialectics. Adopting organisations are faced with the dilemma of pursuing the acquisition of increasingly detailed information in order to provide more personalized offerings, yet doing so increases the likelihood of creating a sense of fear and distrust among consumers. The automation of personalized advertising appears attractive yet presents the dilemma that adverts may be inappropriately placed. Finally, the true cost/benefit of programmatic advertising is unclear, and adopters, platform providers and developers need to engage in dialectic in order to fully understand and communicate its financial implications. Through identifying these fundamental constraints, the study affords pathways for programmatic system actors to ameliorate their, and their customers' concerns

GENERATION Z ATTITUDE TOWARDS TV ADVERTISING IN CROATIA

This paper aims to establish the values and attitudes of Generation Z on television advertising. The research is based on a validation of a theoretical model defined by Ducoffe. The model examines the impact of the variable\u27s informativeness, entertainment, irritation, and credibility on the perception of television ad value and the influence of entertainment, credibility, and perceived advertising value on attitude toward TV advertising. Postgraduate and graduate students in the Republic of Croatia, representing their Generation Z by their age, were used as a sample. For analysing structural relationship between variables in the model and testing hypotheses SEM statistic analyse was use. According to previous research, the results show that all variables, except irritation, have a significant effect on the value of TV ads. The perception of the value of TV ads has a direct effect on the formation of TV advertising attitude. In contrast, unexpectedly, irritation has no significant direct effect on the perception of TV advertising value as well as credibility on TV advertising attitude. Research findings can contribute to the creation and adaptation of marketing and communication strategies, according to Generation Z

Measuring and Mitigating Potential Risks of Third-party Resource Inclusions

In today's computer services, developers commonly use third-party resources like libraries, hosting infrastructure and advertisements. Using third-party components improves the efficiency and enhances the quality of developing custom applications. However, while using third-party resources adopts their benefits, it adopts their vulnerabilities, as well. Unfortunately, developers are uninformed about the risks, as a result of which, the services are susceptible to various attacks. There has been a lot of work on how to develop first-hand secure services. The key focus in my thesis is quantifying the risks in the inclusion of third-party resources and looking into possible ways of mitigating them. Based on the fundamental ways that risks arise, we broadly classify them into Direct and Indirect Risks. Direct risk is the risk that comes with invoking the third-party resource incorrectly—even if the third party is otherwise trustworthy whereas indirect risk is the risk that comes with the third-party resource potentially acting in an untrustworthy manner—even if it were invoked correctly. To understand the security related direct risks in third-party inclusions, we study cryptographic frameworks. Developers often use these frameworks incorrectly and introduce security vulnerabilities. This is because current cryptographic frameworks erode abstraction boundaries, as they do not encapsulate all the framework-specific knowledge and expect developers to understand security attacks and defenses. Starting from the documented misuse cases of cryptographic APIs, we infer five developer needs and we show that a good API design would address these needs only partially. Building on this observation, we propose APIs that are semantically meaningful for developers. We show how these interfaces can be implemented consistently on top of existing frameworks using novel and known design patterns, and we propose build management hooks for isolating security workarounds needed during the development and test phases. To understand the performance related direct risks in third-party inclusions, we study resource hints in webpage HTML. Today's websites involve loading a large number of resources, resulting in a considerable amount of time issuing DNS requests, requesting resources, and waiting for responses. As an optimization for these time sinks, websites may load resource hints, such as DNS prefetch, preconnect, preload, pre-render, and prefetch tags in their HTML files to cause clients to initiate DNS queries and resource fetches early in their web-page downloads before encountering the precise resource to download. We explore whether websites are making effective use of resource hints using techniques based on the tool we developed to obtain a complete snapshot of a webpage at a given point in time. We find that many popular websites are highly ineffective in their use of resource hints, causing clients to query and connect to extraneous domains, download unnecessary data, and may even use resource hints to bypass ad blockers. To evaluate the indirect risks, we study the web topology. Users who visit benign, popular websites are unfortunately bombarded with malicious popups, malware- loading sites, and phishing sites. The questions we want to address here are: Which domains are responsible for such malicious activity? At what point in the process of loading a popular, trusted website does the trust break down to loading dangerous content? To answer these questions, we first understand what third-party resources websites load (both directly and indirectly). I present a tool that constructs the most complete map of a website’s resource-level topology to date. This is surprisingly nontrivial; most prior work used only a single run of a single tool (e.g., Puppeteer or Selenium), but I show that this misses a significant fraction of resources. I then apply my tool to collect the resource topology graphs of 20,000 websites from the Alexa ranking, and analyze them to understand which third-party resource inclusions lead to malicious resources. I believe that these third-party inclusions are not always constant or blocked by existing Ad-blockers. We argue that greater accountability of these third parties can lead to a safer web

Privacy Preserving Corpus Linguistics: Investigating the Trajectories of Public Health Messaging Online

The Coronavirus Discourses project supports public health partners Public Health Wales, Public Health England, and NHS Education for Scotland in addressing key challenges that the coronavirus pandemic presents in terms of understanding the flow and impact of public health messages in public and private communications.In this report, we outline a set of guiding principles for privacy- preserving research for researchers and professionals, which applies to a new approach we have developed, mainly relating to the development of PriPA (Privacy Preserving Analytics).Next, we introduce the PriPA (Privacy Preserving Analytics) Extension. The PriPA extension is a digital tool designed for anyone to use on their personal devices. It safely retrieves information about individual language use for analysis. The advantage of this browser extension is that users have full control over what information they want to share