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How it works
Write to [email protected]. A person reads everything. The best letters — the sharpest disagreements, the best corrections, the strangest true targeting stories — get published in a recurring Letters column on this page, and the ones that answer a specific essay get appended beneath it.
The desk is new and the column publishes when there are letters worth publishing. No letters will ever be invented to make the page look busy; an empty letters column is more honest than a fake one.
What we'd love to read
- Disagreements. If an essay got the economics, the mechanics, or the ethics wrong, say so and say why. The strongest counter-argument gets the space.
- Corrections. Every factual correction is checked, and confirmed ones are fixed in the essay with a dated note. Corrections outrank everything else in the queue.
- Field reports. The ad that followed you somewhere it shouldn't have; the inference that was eerily right or expensively wrong. Your feed is the field site.
- Industry mail. If you work in ad tech and we've flattened something you live inside, write in — anonymity is respected by default for industry letters.
The rules of the desk
- Permission, always. Nothing you send is published unless you say it can be. Tell us how to credit you: full name, first name, initials, or nothing.
- No third-party personal data. Don't send other people's names, screenshots with identifying details, or anything you wouldn't put on a postcard.
- Editing. Letters may be trimmed for length and clarity, never for teeth. If a cut would change your meaning, you'll be asked first.
- On-topic. Advertising, targeting, privacy, the attention economy. The desk cheerfully ignores everything else.
Why email, not a comment box
Comment sections on a site about advertising fill with exactly what you'd expect: advertising. A read-and-edited letters column keeps the conversation human, keeps out the bot traffic, and means nothing you write is stored by this site's servers at all — it stays in the mail, per the privacy policy.