Author Ken Auletta on Advertising's Near-Death Experience
*By Conor White*
Digital technologies have transformed media, and the disruption of the advertising business will fundamentally alter the way Americans listen, read, and watch media in the future, according to the writer and media critic Ken Auletta.
"I was writing about the media for years, both in books and The New Yorker," Auletta said. "But if you follow the money, as is the old Watergate adage, advertising is supplying all the money."
In his new book, "Frenemies: The Epic Disruption Of The Ad Business (And Everything Else)," Auletta details how that money is drying up, and with it, the futures of advertising and ad-supported businesses like magazines and newspapers.
Some of the culprits were easy to identify: programmatic ads courtesy of Google and Facebook.
In an interview Wednesday with Cheddar's CEO Jon Steinberg, Auletta said the tech companies' efforts to collect all the available data on their users is the foundation of their business and the reason their efforts have raised alarm, including the European Union's new General Data Protection Rule.
"They've been selling the argument for many years, which I follow in the book, the more we know about you, the more we can target ads at you and give you ads that don't feel interruptive, but feel like a service," Auletta said.
But it's a trade off.
"As targeting goes up, privacy protection goes down," he added. "As privacy protection goes up, targeting goes down."
Though programmatic ads have severely wounded the traditional advertising business, Auletta said advertising isn't dead, and the industries that rely on ad dollars to survive ー including social media ー will have to adapt as the ad market shifts.
"If advertising dies, newspapers die, magazines die, much of television dies," Auletta warned. "Google and Facebook, which are almost totally dependent, die."
For the full interview, [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/keep-your-frenemies-close).
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