If you are reading this article, you may have read an excellent article published by Elle this weekend, which records how a former Bloomberg journalist has long been the subject of her reporting-a professional tool-turned into a conviction After the securities fraudster, how to ruin her entire career Martin Shkreli. If you know that article, you probably know The Ad.

As Elle’s story goes viral on the Internet, it’s obvious that a large number of readers in the whole story have become the target, and they use specific advertisements...well, different people have different names for it, including buttless pajamas and One-piece suit with hips. In fact, the actual name is "Plain Functional Buttoned Flap Adults Pajamas" and they are sold by an e-commerce retailer called IVRose for a low price of $26.99

After I saw one-piece suit ads no less than six (!) times when I was reading Shkreli's love screed, my phone started buzzing for hours and hours, and other readers were bombarded with butts.

As someone who covers the worst part of the world of weird advertising targeting, I get flagged by Twitter users multiple times every minute, trying to understand the mystery of Onesie advertising. Then there are some DMs and text messages. It turns out that this advertisement not only swallowed Shkreli's story, but also swallowed people's hometown newspapers, recipe blogs, and almost any Internet corner that prepared usable real estate for the wrong advertisers.

After I spent more time carefully checking how this advertisement appeared everywhere, these strange advertisements began to look even more sinister. In fact, in the end, I began to believe that these bodysuit ads were related to bodysuit retailers that no one had heard of before, and more about how desperately broken the advertising technology ecosystem was.

Improve the quality of Zoom meetings. It has automatic light adjustment, multiple field of view options and a microphone with noise reduction.

This advertisement even eventually appeared on Elle, let alone in an article over and over again, this fact proves that this advertising technology ecosystem has been destroyed. Brand consultant Nandini Jammi points out that a popular theory that seems to be ubiquitous for bodysuit ads is that third-party “brand safety” techniques often used by large advertisers may incorrectly label Elle articles as “for high-end advertisers”. Is risky" or "unsafe". The absence of these brands leaves a vacuum that low-level advertisers (such as e-commerce brands that sell jumpsuits) may not care about being seen next to a little unsafe content to fill this vacuum.

To be sure, Shkreli's story involves some very adult topics: divorce, gas lamps, and the American judicial system, to name a few. But generally speaking, when advertisers talk about "adult" content, they are talking about core nudity, rather than a series of passages describing the husband's gradual loss of control over married women.

In order to clarify the truth of this matter, I summoned Dr. Krzysztof Franaszek, the founder of the advertising analysis platform Adalytics, who published his theory on the situation of Mysterious Onesie on Monday. Specifically, I hope he will help analyze the various signals that Shkreli's story sends to potential advertisers through the so-called "headline bid."

You may remember the term "headline bid" in the Google antitrust case that was recently withdrawn in Texas, but as a refresher: the tags passed from any website as part of these bids are usually designed to convey something about that website’s advertising space. Information may be held. If the content turns to areas that are not safe for the brand, sometimes bidding will disclose these details.

According to Franaszek's analysis, the bid from Shkreli's work tells us two things: This story comes from Elle's "life-love" vertical, which is a long story about interpersonal relationships. Oracle, a third-party brand safety vendor that Elle works with, marked this article as a lot of discussion of “laws,” but also pointed out that the story did not discuss “unsafe” topics such as coronavirus, or-strangely-"animal cruelty" ."

The bid data also allows us to look at brands—such as luxury retailer Montblanc—for some reason, marking Shkreli’s story as inappropriate for their advertising costs. Although it’s unclear what keywords tripped this particular player, it’s worth assuming that any brand related to a tailor-made groomsman gift might find it inappropriate to advertise next to Elle’s story .

In the absence of any big-name competition, IVRose has obviously invested a lot of money to let as many people as possible see Elle's story. Franaszek mentioned to CNBC that when he conducted a small test of Shkreli's story, it seemed that IVRose cost between 10 and 12 dollars per thousand ad impressions, which is a common benchmark used by most advertisers. Although this is only a few dollars more than what brands pay on platforms such as Facebook, when you target as many people as IVRose seems to be doing here (and so frequently), the money quickly Will increase.

In other words, the fact that we see wall jumpsuits in Elle's story shows that a company has almost bought out all the advertising space for cheap news features. But this strategy also has its own problems.

In other words, why would you spend tens of thousands of dollars (if not hundreds of thousands of dollars) to advertise a set of mid-range hip pajamas that are undeniably comfortable?

The only person with a clear answer to this puzzle works on the IVRose team-and the company did not respond to our (or indeed, any branch) request for comment.

Without their input, the best thing we can do is to read the tracking and locating tea leaves that IVRose has spread on its website. Thankfully, we have someone doing the dirty work for us. Zach Edwards, a blogger friend of Victory Medium, a business analytics consulting firm, posted a Twitter post explaining that every possible sign indicates that a bodysuit advertisement was never about bodysuits.

When you look at the advertising partner network that branched off from the IVRose website—and when you remember him saying “Ad network~Share~Data” on Twitter, it’s not hard to believe that IVRose is spending a lot of cash on advertising space. On the huge amount of super valuable data generated by Elle readers. Add the fact that these reader buckets may now be more valuable than usual, because the United States has historically spent its own cash buckets during the holidays.

As Edwards pointed out in his Twitter post, it is not impossible to figure out how IVRose plans to deal with large amounts of data that are almost certainly from potential Onesie customers. In fact, it has a technical phrase: "cookie synchronization". The easiest way to describe this process is a handshake between a group of cooperative advertising technology platforms, allowing people who arrange both sides to exchange specific user data sets back and forth. But this is the advertising technology we are talking about-which means that the process is unnecessarily complicated and may be the last thing any of us want to talk about at a party.

At the same time, this is also a very bad strategy, which guarantees that our clicks on those shameless pajamas-not a joke-may continue to haunt us for the rest of our digital lives.

According to Edwards, it all started with the landing page of the relevant jumpsuit. When the page loads, it triggers a specific tracking technology from a company called Clientgear, which itself is a subsidiary of YeaMobi, a popular advertising technology company based in China. Clientgear serves two purposes here: First, if you have never visited a site that happens to be one of its partners, it needs to create a unique Clientgear-specific ID for your specific device. After inserting a copy of the ID on its network (just in case you return to the onesie page and need to re-identify), the identifier will be broadcast to miscellaneous ad technology brokers, and YeeMobi happens to have some kind of business relationship with it. In this case, it seems that there are no less than 15 companies in the United States and China that meet this requirement.

In exchange for the shiny new user ID they just obtained from the onesie page, each of these partners will return their own identifier in exchange. Sometimes, if it’s a third party who happened to meet you at some point in the past, it already has a lot of data describing your identity. In any case, once Clientgear and the partner player on the other end formally "synchronize" their user ID for you, the usual plan is to continue to exchange any cookie-derived data, or someone can steal it from you until you tell them to log out. .

In some cases, even if you do tell them to opt out (for example, by clearing the browser’s cookie cache), researchers as early as 2014 have noticed that some of the more slender partners can use their own data storage and The combination of other basic data literally "regenerates" the cookie that once existed on the other end. If you are curious, the official term is "evercookie", and I promise, it's not as delicious as it sounds.

Besides, I hate to be the one who destroys it, but if you are afraid of the idea that these flannel pajamas will permanently track your thoughts in a certain shape or form, then you really can't do anything. Of course, you can deep clean your browser’s cookie cache, but any measurable impact can be quickly eliminated. As pointed out by the aforementioned research team, clearing cookies or any associated user IDs from the browser cache does not mean that any one of these dozen or so partners has any reason to do so. When you stumble upon a website trying to sync with one of their pre-existing tags, everything you try to clean up-including that cursed one-piece-will link back to any new ID you create, making you almost Go back to where you started.

So this is how a shameless one-piece ad can become the key, causing your data to be shuffled forever among a dozen shady technical players on multiple continents. Of course, it may be difficult to believe that such an infinitely memetic advertisement will turn around and bite our ass. But at least we have a set of ready-made equipment to deal with this situation.

Correction 12/23/30, 6:30 pm: Further analysis of header bidding data found that Chanel did not block Elle articles, as we incorrectly stated in an earlier version of this article. We regret the mistake.