Response from Costco re: breitbart advertising

[politicat]

Dear {user}

Thank you for contacting Costco.com. Although we take no position as to the content of breitbart.com, Costco has not paid for advertising or partnered with them in any way. If you have seen Costco content on their site, we would appreciate getting the details or, even better, a screen-shot so that we can investigate the source.

We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience.

Thank you,

{Responder}

So screenshot ads, recognize that if they are there, it's probably a cookie-driven follow by the ad service rather than intentional on the part of the vendor, and Costco looks clear.

[cilla4progress]

1. I got the same email!

I NEVER look at Breitbart so I was just going on what others here told me.

Glad there have been numbers of us calling/complaining.

I would hate to lose my confidence in them.

[bettyellen]

2. They can get that service to ban any site - so push back, with that screen shot if possible!

[msongs]

3. costco sells a ton of books by right wing nutters. the usual extremists nutters nt

[politicat]

6. ... That's bulk book sales. It's the same thing that Scientology does to boost sales.

This is inside baseball for publishing, but bulk book sales are massively depreciated on best seller calculations now (because the Scientologists did this) and bulk books are cheap at the wholesale price (10%-25% of cover). They're definitely a "buy low, sell for whatever the market will bear" merchandise, and books are not their major focus.

It's also very regional -- I have two Costcos within easy distance, one that is on my usual daily orbit and one that was in my orbit when my grandmother was in assisted living. My daily orbit is a royal blue county in a royal blue band; the other store is in a red congressional district that's trending purple, and will likely be blue by 2018 or 2020. My daily orbit store -- I never see RWNJ books because they just won't sell there. At the reddish-purpose store? Yeah, they're sometimes there. Less frequently, though, as time passes.

Costco is very conscious of their sales data and responds to it.

[truebluegreen]

8. Just do what I do:

Flip the offending titles/authors over and cover with something else. I started doing that way back when we lived in ID and continued when we moved to CO. Was pleased as punch to discover l Was Not Alone in that: a couple of times someone else got there first.

[dembotoz]

10. hobby of mine as well

[Iggo]

4. They're clear when they stop their ads from appearing on Breitbart, that's when they're clear.

[politicat]

7. This is actually harder than it sounds when it comes to internet ad marketing.

At extreme high level, there are usually about 6 layers between the ad purchaser (in this case, Costco) and the ad server level (the entity that shows ads in your specific browser.)

There's a lot going on in the background. The issue is the technology that we use to fund the web -- we went with the ad driven model instead of alternatives because ad driven was easier and cheaper and possible to implement when we made the decision 15 years ago -- is inherently flawed and difficult to un-implement.

Yes, in theory, there are services that prevent an ad buy from showing up where the purchaser doesn't want it. It's not actually very effective, and to work at all, it relies on the ad showing up where it doesn't belong, being noticed, and reported. Which is where we are now. The tech is improving rapidly, but it's definitely a Moore's Law issue -- the tech improves at about the same pace that processing improves.

Web advertising is not at all like broadcast or print media advertising, where every copy of the magazine or every regional broadcast plays a set of ads that are perceived by everyone on that channel at that moment. Web advertising is very tailored, based on cookies, security level of the user, which ad blocks are in place, location services and other proprietary factors at each level of the service. You and I could both go to the same site at the same time, and our ads would likely be very different, based on where we had been before, where we are physically located (or where our VPN says we're physically located) and how often we've been to the page.

The only way to keep an ad off a page entirely is to not advertise at all, and the only way to not see ads is to comprehensively block and turn off JavaScript and Flash. Which are baseline security measures, but not everyone's willing to do so.

[MANative]

5. I got the same email just about an hour ago. nt

[SeattleVet]

9. It definitely wasn't a Costco ad; it was from a clickbait scam site.

You can see in the screen capture that someone linked to in another post about this:

Link to tweet

/photo/1

It is actually just a link to SpotGlory, a clickbait aggregation site, pointing to one of their articles, allegedly about Costco (I was unable to find the actual article referenced on the site, though.)

Costco had nothing to do with this; these scammers are using the Costco logo to illustrate the link to their site.

You can forward that image/link to Costco, and I have a feeling that the their lawyers will have a very nice little letter sent out to SpotGlory.

(Just looking at the link that was published you can tell it is a fake; Costco will be offering free samples only to female shoppers? WTF??)