[HN Gopher] Forget privacy: you're terrible at targeting anyway ...
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Forget privacy: you're terrible at targeting anyway (2019)
Author : bryanrasmussen
Score : 132 points
Date : 2021-08-28 09:52 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (apenwarr.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (apenwarr.ca)
| mynegation wrote:
| The thesis of the article might be true, but this is a reason to
| be more careful with private information, not less. If companies
| are sloppy in analyzing gathered data and do not value it enough,
| they might not very good at safeguarding it from bad actors who
| will use it to their advantage more "efficiently".
| seemcat wrote:
| Good point. But if trackers and profilers aren't that
| good/accurate at analyzing the data, what makes us think that
| bad actors are any better at it?
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > it will recommend you interview people with male, _white_
| -sounding names, because it turns out that's what your HR
| department already does
|
| His linked article (https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-
| com-jobs-automatio...) says nothing about white or white-sounding
| names. And I sincerely doubt that anybody's HR department is
| screening out non-white sounding names for technical roles.
| Certainly nowhere I've ever worked - I can't remember the last
| time I saw a resume that _wasn 't_ Indian, male or female.
| 542354234235 wrote:
| >We perform a field experiment to measure racial discrimination
| in the labor market. We respond with fictitious resumes to
| help-wanted ads in Boston and Chicago newspapers. To manipulate
| perception of race, each resume is assigned either a very
| African American sounding name or a very White sounding name.
| The results show significant discrimination against African-
| American names: White names receive 50 percent more callbacks
| for interviews. We also find that race affects the benefits of
| a better resume. For White names, a higher quality resume
| elicits 30 percent more callbacks whereas for African
| Americans, it elicits a far smaller increase.[1]
|
| >researchers created resumes for black and Asian applicants and
| sent them out for 1,600 entry-level jobs posted on job search
| websites in 16 metropolitan sections of the United States. Some
| of the resumes included information that clearly pointed out
| the applicants' minority status, while others were whitened, or
| scrubbed of racial clues...Twenty-five percent of black
| candidates received callbacks from their whitened resumes,
| while only 10 percent got calls when they left ethnic details
| intact. Among Asians, 21 percent got calls if they used
| whitened resumes, whereas only 11.5 percent heard back if they
| sent resumes with racial references[such as name changes,
| removing membership in organizations, scholarships, or
| achievements that might reveal race]. [2]
|
| >Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and
| the University of Chicago sent 83,000 fictitious applications
| for entry-level job postings to 108 Fortune 500 employers,
| using randomly assigned and racially distinctive names. They
| found that distinctively Black names on applications with
| reduced the likelihood of hearing back from an employer by 2.1
| percentage points relative to distinctively White names. But
| differences in contact rates varied substantially across firms.
| About 20% of the companies were responsible for roughly half of
| the discriminatory behavior in the experiment. [3]
|
| [1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w9873
|
| [2] https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-
| resumes...
|
| [3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-29/job-
| appli...
| fsflover wrote:
| This is completely missing the point of why one should fight
| surveillance. Surveillance harms journalism and activism, making
| the government too powerful and not accountable. If only
| activists and journalists will try to have the privacy, it will
| be much easier to target them. Everyone should have privacy to
| protect them. It's sort of like freedom of speech is necessary
| not just for journalists, but for everyone, even if you have
| nothing to say.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| I agree, but this is a compelling reason _for businesses_ as to
| why they should stop spending ( "wasting"?) the money and make
| their product worse.
|
| This article doesn't really compel individuals to act
| differently.
| truculent wrote:
| Some good complementary links on this topic:
|
| * "Ads Don't Work That Way" (https://meltingasphalt.com/ads-dont-
| work-that-way/)
|
| * "Why Online Ads Haven't Built Brands"
| (https://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/2019/01/why-online-ads-hav...)
|
| Both discussing theorems for how advertising actually works, and
| why targeted advertising is counter-productive (for medium-to-
| large brands, anyway).
|
| The basic premise is that advertising works by seeding common-
| knowledge within a society. It's important not just that I know
| that Nike makes cool sneakers, but also that I know that my peers
| know that. Otherwise, how can I be sure that my idea of cool
| sneakers is the same as everyone else's?
|
| Culture exists in the interactions between people; for brands,
| hyper-targeted ads risk focusing on individuals and not cultural
| influence.
| aeturnum wrote:
| > _See, the problem is there 's almost no way to know if you're
| right._
|
| It turns out that this doesn't matter a lot of the time. You only
| notice because the advertising to you is bad - but once you can
| notice the money has already changed hands.
|
| I've worked with people who work on what is variously called
| "data zombies" or "data shadows" or "data doubles" and the
| problem is that: they often get it wrong and they do not care and
| pretend it's correct. This is doubly-concerning in the security
| realm (i.e. the NSA is only supposed to read data streams of non-
| Americans so they have a lot of incentive to produce classifiers
| that guess that things are not from the US).
| pessimizer wrote:
| The only people good at targeting are the ad platforms, and they
| don't use an algorithm. What they do is slice up an audience into
| interesting enough sounding chunks in order to attract ad buyers,
| who are their actual customers. There's no reason to think,
| however, that the ad buyers would be particularly good at
| figuring out the audience for their product, or that a particular
| product necessarily even has an audience. So you would expect the
| vast majority of ads to be bad.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _The only people good at targeting are the ad platforms_
|
| Honestly, I don't see it. The ad tech industry keeps telling
| everyone that there are plenty of people out there who see
| advertisements that matter to them, and they're happier because
| of it. But my experience has been the opposite.
|
| Ever since "ad tech" became a thing, and online advertising
| started going after people and not context, it just seems to
| have gotten worse.
|
| Just in my open tabs right now:
|
| An ad for a food product I cannot consume for medical reasons.
|
| An ad for a local pizza joint in a city a thousand miles away.
|
| An ad for something to use on body parts that I don't possess
| because of my gender.
|
| Advertising was a solved problem. But as is often the case, a
| small group of people within the SV bubble decided to reinvent
| the wheel, and did so badly.
| [deleted]
| Supermancho wrote:
| Adtech isn't particularly complicated.
|
| Ad Targeting, broadly fits into these categories (with
| limited and over simplified descriptions):
|
| Geographic - Where are you viewing the ad from?
|
| Contextual - What is the content surrounding the ad?
|
| Demographic - What do we know about you based on context?
| (sites have demographics)
|
| Behavioral - What did you buy in the past?
|
| Appliance - what you are using to view the ad be it a toaster
| or Chrome on Windows?
|
| There are all sorts of possible reasons, to your observed
| targeting failures.
|
| > An ad for a food product I cannot consume for medical
| reasons.
|
| How would an ad company know that?
|
| > An ad for a local pizza joint in a city a thousand miles
| away.
|
| This is a geographic targeting failure, unless - you are on a
| VPN where the IP is misrepresented or you have purchased from
| the location before.
|
| > An ad for something to use on body parts that I don't
| possess because of my gender.
|
| This could be contextual or simply dumping impressions to
| meet a campaign run expiry.
|
| > a small group of people within the SV bubble decided to
| reinvent the wheel, and did so badly.
|
| Nope. So you are disappointed the heuristics don't have more
| concrete data about you? It's the same as it always was.
| Smaller and new(er) companies have different priorities for
| what to focus on, but it's all the same tech.
| reaperducer wrote:
| All I see are excuses, not successes.
|
| If the ad tech industry was as great as it tells the
| advertisers, none of these thing would happen.
|
| And, no. I'm not on a VPN. Even the most rudimentary what-
| is-my-ip sites correctly display my location. But I bet
| some ad tech company told that pizza joint its ads would be
| targeted. And probably charged extra for it.
| Supermancho wrote:
| > All I see are excuses, not successes.
|
| If that's what you want to see, you'll see it. This has
| no effect on how it's done.
|
| > If the ad tech industry was as great as it tells the
| advertisers, none of these thing would happen.
|
| How is that related to technical capabilities?
|
| > I'm not on a VPN. Even the most rudimentary what-is-my-
| ip sites correctly display my location.
|
| A real-time lookup is not timely. You generally want to
| have it pre-computed in a cache. If someone so much as
| spoofed your IP, it will poison your location. God forbid
| you leave a logged in browser session anywhere else.
| Computers are dumb, but you expect more and blame the
| adtech companies, I get it.
| cm2012 wrote:
| This is incredibly wrong. Google and Facebook are primarily
| algo driven ad platforms now, with all the best targeting being
| algorithmically derived. Large ad accounts on FB pretty much
| never use the "interesting sounding chunks" you're referring to
| anymore.
| helen___keller wrote:
| I briefly hit a period right around when I bought a home that the
| recommended ads on instagram were really really good. I bought a
| bed and a sofa from instagram recommendations, and looked at a
| whole bunch of other things that I didn't end up buying.
|
| Nowadays it's back to being garbage, but I have to imagine every
| now and then these algorithms hit a gold mine like they did with
| me.
| alexslobodnik wrote:
| Good targeting is acquiring customers at a profitable cost.
|
| Bad targeting is acquiring customers at an unprofitable cost.
|
| The difference can be 5% conversion for a segement of prospects
| vs. 10% for another.
|
| In both instances the majority of prospects are not interested.
| Or more charitable, not interested _right now_.
|
| Expectations for perfect ads and targeting is unreasonable.
| MarkMc wrote:
| This article is wrong to assume targeted advertising requires
| complex machine learning algorithms. Here are some personal
| examples where my ads have been poorly targeted:
|
| - I'm actively looking to buy a house for more than a million
| dollars, and I'm signed into my real estate app using my Google
| email address. Meanwhile YouTube is showing me ads for Candy
| Crush Saga.
|
| - A week ago I almost bought an iMac on Apple's website but
| bailed at the credit card payment screen. I had logged into my
| Apple account with my Google email address, yet since then I've
| not seen one ad to suggest I should buy that iMac (although I do
| see Apple ads for iPhone on Twitter)
|
| - Twitter kept showing me Disney Plus ads even after I signed up
|
| - In 2019 on holiday in Bali I saw YouTube ads in Indonesian,
| despite being logged in and being unable to speak that language
| [deleted]
| ahupp wrote:
| My Facebook ads are well targeted: I've bought tickets to a book
| signing for my daughter's favorite author, and awesome map, a
| couch (!!), and a great pair of underwear off fb ads. I'm sure
| there's other stuff I'm forgetting.
|
| You could imagine an alternate world where FB has total
| information about my online activity, and the ads are extremely
| useful because they know what I want before I do.
| thom wrote:
| I think it would help dispel the suspicion that the Facebook ad
| targeting algorithm itself wrote this, if you added a little
| disclaimer that you work(ed) there.
| ahupp wrote:
| Fair enough: I did work there, though never on ads, and it's
| been a few years.
|
| To be clear, I realize the privacy tradeoffs are probably
| unacceptable and I'm not seriously proposing the FB
| panopticon. But I do think it's an interesting thought
| experiment to consider how good this could be without
| constraints.
| jamestanderson wrote:
| >they know what I want before I do.
|
| Or did they tell you what to want?
| blunte wrote:
| Targeted ads have been useful to me about 1 time in the last 5
| years. Being generous, maybe as many as 5 times. The other 99999
| ads I've had to endure have either been for something I just do
| not care about, or more frustratingly for something I already own
| or currently pay for.
|
| If targeted ads worked at least 25% of the time, I might even
| appreciate them. But they are virtually worthless. People paying
| to run ads are suckers, because there's no way their ads get much
| real, useful business. Social marketing and other approaches just
| must be more effective.
| changoplatanero wrote:
| Have you considered that the targeted ads might have worked on
| you without you realizing it? You might have clicked on an ad
| and it was such a non event for you that it never made it into
| your long term memory.
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| I think you're describing adverts disguised as content.
|
| They can be either context or target based, scummy in either
| case.
| blunte wrote:
| I very much doubt that I have fallen for a ruse like this.
|
| However, with all the cookie and newsletter popups, it has
| happened that an object moved on screen as I was clicking,
| and I ended up clicking some stupid ad. I don't count that
| since it wasn't my intention nor my mistake.
| 2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote:
| I can't help but feel that the whole advertisement and "ad
| targeting" business is built upon quite a few lies and a dose
| of misinformation to make the whole thing seem way more
| effective than it is.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Targeted ads have been _very_ useful to me, but I do game the
| system a bit. When I start seeing targeted ads for irrelevant
| things, I just do some searches for things I like to look at,
| and shortly thereafter, all of the ads I get are for things I
| like to look at. It 's a few minutes of effort once every
| couple of weeks, but I feel the results are a lot less
| intrusive.
| JohnFen wrote:
| How are they less intrusive? Perhaps they're more "accurate",
| but that's a different thing.
| Jensson wrote:
| Targeted ads isn't about targeting people who are very likely
| to buy the product, they just target people who are slightly
| more likely than average to buy the product.
|
| Take the classical example "I just bought a vacuum cleaner, why
| do I get lots of vacuum cleaner ads?", well the reason is that
| people who just bought a vacuum cleaner sometimes are unhappy
| with the purchase and buy another one. The probability isn't
| high, but still higher than the probability that a random
| person would want to buy one. It might still feel like just
| noise to the person seeing the ads, but to the advertiser
| getting 20% higher conversion rate is huge (or whatever number
| they are getting).
| SamirNP wrote:
| i think your camera photos seem to be the hottest cake.to get
| cool ads move your cool images(downloaded or created) to the
| camera folder in your.AI will "think" you are visiting "these
| cool places" and "snapping lambos,jets,rubber banded cash" like
| some really rich person. suddenly i bet you will start seeing the
| rich traveler's ads. not your damn activity mirror
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| Tangentially related but getting on my nerves a lot recently:
|
| Ad targeting for stuff that I've just bought. Worst offender:
| Remarkable - really good product, love mine, but I'm still seeing
| their ads everywhere. I'm not going to buy a second one.
|
| It's almost confidence-inspiring. Like how evil-overlord can this
| be if they can't even get this basic stuff right?
| jklinger410 wrote:
| I always exclude purchasers from my ads, but ironically,
| privacy protections make this harder to do.
| nemo1618 wrote:
| > It's almost confidence-inspiring. Like how evil-overlord can
| this be if they can't even get this basic stuff right?
|
| In the same vein, consider that ad agencies have spent millions
| of man-hours and many billions of dollars essentially trying to
| control your brain, and _this_ (the status quo) is the best
| they 've come up with. All of that effort, and they can't even
| get me to buy a 12-pack of Coke when I shop for groceries,
| _even though I like Coke!_
| zo1 wrote:
| Meta-take on it: Maybe you as the consumer aren't their
| target. Maybe it's the businesses that they've successfully
| "tricked" into thinking that advertising works.
|
| For that to work, they need lots of "metrics", "knobs and
| dials", graphs, "conversion funnels" and a myriad of other
| doo-dads that can be used to give the impression that they're
| doing something useful. Hence the focus on tracking, I'd
| argue.
| marcinzm wrote:
| >I'm not going to buy a second one.
|
| I suspect the % of people who buy a second one for themselves,
| their spouse, kids, friends, etc. (or recommend someone else to
| buy one) is higher than the % of other people who buy one for
| the first time. Neither number is large but as long as the
| former one is slightly larger it makes sense to pay money for
| that advertising.
| cronix wrote:
| I don't know, maybe if the product is subpar to begin with
| additional "reminders" help? If I buy something and I like
| it, or especially really like it, I usually tell everyone I
| know who I think might like it or benefit from it as well -
| for free. And if I like it I usually don't have to be
| reminded of it. It's already in the "good stuff" section of
| my brain. I've already been sold. I really don't see ads as
| helpful for things you've already been sold on and use. At
| that point, at least for me and I assume the poster you're
| responding to, the opposite effect starts happening and it
| taints the product negatively, even if you like it.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| Dude, come on: after I've bought a new dinner table, I am not
| going to buy another one just because. Or buy it for my
| friend. Seriously. It's similar to how people don't generally
| go around recommending OSes to their friends and relatives.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Or fridges, or vacuum cleaners you usually keep one per
| household. One of my friends was being haunted by vacuum
| cleaners for months.
| mountainb wrote:
| It's easier to set up remarketing than it is to manage the
| remarketing ads to put people who have purchased on a
| blacklist or to put a frequency cap on the ads. Lots of times
| companies just turn it on without configuring anything,
| making more money for the platform and wasting spending on
| showing the same ad to the same user 800 times.
| danShumway wrote:
| I strongly suspect you're correct, but I still think it's
| terrible targeting. The "sell to people who already bought
| one" approach is only better when compared against awful
| targeting techniques. And it kind of misses the point anyway.
| For a niche product, a market that already knows about you is
| pretty much always going to be more likely to buy from you
| than a market that has never heard of you. But part of the
| job of an advertiser is to _expand_ the market that has heard
| of you, not just wallow in it.
|
| Think of it this way: if I'm building a video recommendation
| system, I guarantee I can get much better click rates over
| random recommendations if instead I recommend you random
| videos only from your watch history. Heck, honestly I can
| probably boost click rates over almost any existing
| recommendation system by taking that system and filtering it
| so it _only_ shows suggestions from channels in your watch
| history. People are repetitive.
|
| But is that system good? Is it innovative or useful for a
| recommendation be constantly asking you to re-watch videos
| from your history? Is that actually fulfilling any of the
| promises that the recommendation system was sold on? No, not
| really. I definitely wouldn't call that a 'smart' system.
|
| And if I had a company that had invested years of research
| into building an ad targeting system, and the result was just
| "sometimes people repeat themselves" -- that seems like a ton
| of wasted effort in order to get a pretty underwhelming
| result.
|
| Targeted ads are sold to consumers as an unobtrusive way to
| learn about new products (whether that's an honest
| representation of the system is a separate question). So
| targeting of this nature is still a pretty big failure, even
| if it does increase clicks.
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| While I agree that much of targeted advertising is very
| intrusive and not accurate, it's still very much cost
| efficient compared to anything. Initially, acquisition cost
| are there, either by generating SEO content or marketing or
| lead generation. Retargeting is one step beyond that, off
| course if you get ads for a car you've just bought, it's
| pretty bad. The ads should display aftermarket parts for
| that car or insurance offers, but these wouldn't come from
| the same vendor. At least it leaves some branding impact.
| Or if it's food items, it had led me to buy the same things
| a few times again. Source, very good friend is head of
| online advertising in a company.
|
| He swears up and down, it can be a very good product if you
| have a large online audience.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| > But is that system good? Is it innovative or useful for a
| recommendation be constantly asking you to re-watch videos
| from your history? Is that actually fulfilling any of the
| promises that the recommendation system was sold on? No,
| not really. I definitely wouldn't call that a 'smart'
| system.
|
| It seems to work well enough for Netflix. I probably end up
| watching stuff in the "Watch it Again" list almost as often
| as I do anything else.
| danShumway wrote:
| That's what I mean: it works in the sense that it does
| the strict job it was designed to do. It definitely
| _works_ , strictly speaking.
|
| But is it working in a way that gives you any value? Are
| you happy that you're just clicking "Watch it Again", or
| did you want a system that would actually find new shows
| for you and let you know about new release that you'd be
| likely to enjoy?
|
| If you are happy with that, then from an engineering
| perspective, was it necessary to build a complicated
| algorithm to show you a "Watch it Again" list, or could
| we have used a single database query and about a hundred
| lines of code instead?
|
| There are lots of simple heuristics to make a
| recommendation engine have better success rates. I can
| build a pretty good movie recommendation engine by just
| recommending every single Marvel movie that comes out:
| they're already popular so on average people will click
| on them. That's not hard. But that's also not the promise
| that we were sold when companies started
| proposing/building these systems into their products.
| marcinzm wrote:
| >But part of the job of an advertiser is to expand the
| market that has heard of you, not just wallow in it.
|
| Why do you assume so strongly that they're not doing both.
| Advertising isn't a zero sum game or something you can only
| do a limited quantity of. You advertise on all channels
| that bring you a positive ROI. The ROI is based on the cost
| of advertising, effort of advertising (ie: $ spent on human
| labor) and the generated profit from advertising. Assuming
| that number is positive you should advertise with that
| channel on top of everything else you do.
| danShumway wrote:
| > Why do you assume so strongly that they're not doing
| both.
|
| That's a good question. I guess I do assume they're doing
| both, but the extreme degree to which they lean on repeat
| targeting, to the point where it's this noticeable, and
| to the point where repeat targeting overwhelms other
| advertisers to this degree, still means that they're
| incredibly _bad_ at expanding their market.
|
| Let's look at Youtube again. Youtube can both recommend
| new videos and old videos. It can do both at the same
| time. But if the majority of my feed is recommending
| repeat videos, that signifies to me that they're not very
| confident about the main part I care about as a consumer:
| showing me knew things.
|
| Looking back at what OP says in the linked article:
|
| > I don't mind letting your programs see my private data
| as long as I get something useful in exchange. But that's
| not what happens.
|
| > the dirty secret of the machine learning movement:
| almost everything produced by ML could have been
| produced, more cheaply, using a very dumb heuristic you
| coded up by hand, because mostly the ML is trained by
| feeding it examples of what humans did while following a
| very dumb heuristic. There's no magic here.
|
| I still don't think it's all that impressive to increase
| ROI using this kind of simplistic heuristic. More than
| that, I don't think it justifies the incredibly large
| amount of money and infrastructure that gets devoted to
| ad targeting online. If some of the most prominent parts
| of a gigantic system can be replicated by a couple of
| purchasing history lookups in a database.
|
| It would be impressive for them to increase advertising
| ROI in a way that increases value for consumers, or that
| justifies the tracking mechanisms or the extensive
| research and AI poured into the system, or in a way that
| is giving _better_ ROI than ridiculously naive
| approaches, but repeat targeting doesn 't seem to do any
| of that as far as I can tell.
|
| TLDR I assume they're trying to do both, but the
| proportion of repeat advertising indicates to me that
| it's giving them a lot better results than more
| sophisticated methods, which (to me) indicates that their
| sophisticated methods are all bad. If better targeting
| methods existed, repeat targeting wouldn't be so
| prominent and obvious because it would be getting crowded
| out by other targeting techniques.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > I guess I do assume they're doing both, but the extreme
| degree to which they lean on repeat targeting, to the
| point where it's this noticeable, and to the point where
| repeat targeting overwhelms other advertisers to this
| degree, still means that they're incredibly bad at
| expanding their market.
|
| > TLDR I assume they're trying to do both, but the
| proportion of repeat advertising indicates to me that
| it's giving them a lot better results than more
| sophisticated methods
|
| I don't think you can conclude anything about how they
| are "leaning" or what "proportion" of their ad budget is
| being spent on different things, if the only evidence you
| have is the portion of ads _shown to you_.
|
| The fact that their "post-sales targeting" can overwhelm
| other advertisers who are just doing "market expansion"
| targeting doesn't tell you much at all, because the
| number of people who would be eligible for post-sales
| targeting would obviously be vastly smaller than the
| number of people eligible for market expansion targeting.
| It seems very reasonable that the company you just spent
| hundreds of dollars at would be willing to bid more for
| an ad on your timeline than the thousands of other
| companies who want to show you an ad about something
| you've never heard of.
| danShumway wrote:
| > The fact that their "post-sales targeting" can
| overwhelm other advertisers who are just doing "market
| expansion" targeting doesn't tell you much at all
|
| It shows me that the simplistic method of "advertise to
| people who have already bought our product" performs
| vastly better than any of the other sophisticated
| targeting that advertisers like to tout.
|
| To clarify -- I'm not talking about the proportion of an
| individual company's budget -- I'm talking about the
| proportion of the overall market for that product. Every
| time that someone is shown an ad, that ad is the result
| of a bidding war. If a large proportion of those ads are
| retargeted that means the market has decided that the
| vast majority of advertisers are less confident about
| their targeting systems then they are about a simplistic,
| vaguely annoying heuristic.
|
| We can make an assumption about the market as a whole
| because we believe that the market is at least somewhat
| efficient. If advanced, targeted advertising that used
| tons of demographic data and personal information was
| competitive with these naive targeting techniques, then a
| higher proportion of those ads would outbid retargeted
| ads on any given page.
|
| > doesn't tell you much at all
|
| I also want to broaden out a little bit here. In the OP's
| article, the main complaint being made is not that
| advertising has zero ROI (although the author is critical
| of the effectiveness as well). The criticism is that the
| ads provide no benefit to the user, that they're annoying
| and reductionist, and that they fail to live up to the
| promises of companies like Facebook that claim targeted
| ads connect people to new products that they'll love.
|
| Independent of whether or not we can be critical of the
| effectiveness of ads for companies, the proportion of
| retargeted ads also tells us that advertisers broadly, as
| a market, are incapable of delivering on their promises
| to consumers and are incapable of building a system that
| is mutually beneficial to both companies and consumers.
|
| See also some of the authors criticism of recommendation
| algorithms, which fall into the same boat. Who cares if
| Netflix's recommendation algorithm increases clicks?
| Consumers don't sign up for Netflix out of charity, they
| want a system that serves _their_ interests, not just the
| company 's. For advertisers to try and make the case that
| access to private data is good for consumers, they need
| to have something to show that's better than this.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > It shows me that the simplistic method of "advertise to
| people who have already bought our product" performs
| vastly better than any of the other sophisticated
| targeting that advertisers like to tout.
|
| Well, yes, it performs better, but _only to people who
| have already bought the product_. It 's not surprising
| that this would perform better than whatever
| sophisticated ML-based targeting system they use over the
| general population.
|
| > If a large proportion of those ads are retargeted that
| means the market has decided that the vast majority of
| advertisers are less confident about their targeting
| systems then they are about a simplistic, vaguely
| annoying heuristic.
|
| Again, this isn't surprising, and I don't think it leads
| to the conclusion you're making. I think you're getting
| tripped up because you're not considering the
| _denominator_ here. There 's nothing odd about the fact
| that a single ad impression shown to a recent purchaser
| of your product would perform better than a single ad
| impression shown to someone who has never heard of your
| product (but perhaps is targeted using something more
| sophisticated based on their Internet traffic). It's also
| not odd that the ad publisher would pay a lot more for
| the former impression than the latter impression (and
| thus recent purchasers would see a lot of the former
| type). What's important to note is that the ad publisher
| is most likely showing _orders of magnitude more_
| impressions of the latter type than of the former.
| mountainb wrote:
| No one thinks that showing the same ad to the same person
| 100 times is effective. It does, however, make more money
| for the ad seller for ad customers to waste spending.
|
| Much of ad targeting is not automatic, but manually
| configured by advertisers in one way or another. Many of
| these users manually configure their ads poorly. If I
| tell the system "show this ad to everyone in this
| geography with no restriction on frequency" the only
| 'smart' targeting is the stuff that restricts it to users
| that appear to be in that geography. Everything else is
| the 'dumb' method specified by the user.
|
| I think also the purely automated methods are not
| necessarily incented to provide better targeting for the
| ad buyer. Their incentive is to spend all the budget and
| to try to get the user to refill the budget. For large
| sectors of this spending, there isn't that much
| sensitivity to waste so long as the people responsible
| for wasting the money don't lose their jobs. You wouldn't
| believe it just as an ordinary smart person but people do
| waste billions of dollars a year on this stuff. The
| 'smarts' of the system is dedicated to parting fools from
| their money repeatedly while giving them enough
| justification with 'greedy' attribution metrics to keep
| filling up the budget.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >No one thinks that showing the same ad to the same
| person 100 times is effective.
|
| That depends on what you consider "effective"
| advertising. Keeping a brand in your (and others') face
| is a key goal of advertising.
|
| In fact, two (of many) of those goals for advertisers are
| "top-of-mind awareness"[0]: In
| marketing, "top-of-mind awareness" refers to a
| brand or specific product being first in
| customers' minds when thinking of a particular
| industry or category.
|
| and "unaided awareness"[1]: Brand recall
| is also known as unaided recall or spontaneous
| recall and refers to the ability of the consumer
| to correctly generate a brand from memory when
| prompted by a product category.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-of-mind_awareness
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand_awareness
| pixl97 wrote:
| >No one thinks that showing the same ad to the same
| person 100 times is effective.
|
| No one told that to Coca-Cola
| xmprt wrote:
| Because after making the purchase, the number of ads for
| the item INCREASE. I don't mind seeing a handful of ads
| for something I've already bought but what usually
| happens is that about 30-50% of ads that I see suddenly
| become ads for the item I just bought.
| tshaddox wrote:
| > Because after making the purchase, the number of ads
| for the item INCREASE.
|
| Even if you've actually measured this and it's true (and
| not frequency illusion), that still doesn't mean they're
| not doing both.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| it's stupid though.
|
| Like, they are normally my top ad in Facebook, and have been
| since well before I bought it.
|
| And I did buy it, so score 1 for them. And then i recommended
| it to everyone I know who likes technical PDF's (which was a
| lot of people, it turns out).
|
| But now, it's just wasted inventory (for FB), and a minor
| annoyance (for me), along with a bunch of money (for
| Remarkable).
| WalterBright wrote:
| > get this basic stuff right?
|
| I bought the cheaper Kindle with the ads enabled. They were
| supposed to be targeted ads, but were usually for feminine
| hygiene products. I have no idea how any reasonable targeting
| algorithm would have decided to pitch that stuff to me.
|
| I also enabled for a time context sensitive Amazon ads on my
| programming web site. What did I get? Endless ads for the
| Batman movie. Google would do slightly better, they'd show the
| same ad for a C++ training course over and over and over and
| over.
|
| I abandoned both of them.
|
| I also have a site on the American Revolution. Google's context
| sensitive ads showed ads for travel agencies.
|
| Context sensitive ads are so pathetically bad. I can't recall
| ever seeing one that I even wanted to click on, let alone buy.
|
| There is a simple fix, that nobody does. Allow me, the website
| designer, to list the categories for the ads. I know my
| audience far better than Google/Amazon, why don't they allow a
| little human guidance? Geez, maybe I should patent this idea.
| ajb wrote:
| 3% is a good conversion rate for a selling page. So 97%+ of
| people who looked at the buying page were interested but didn't
| buy. Getting those people to come back is a major target and
| most companies don't care about the 3% loss in re-targeting
| those who actually bought.
|
| So re-advertising to people who already bought is not evidence
| that they aren't "evil-overlord". Evil overlords only care
| about what benefits them.
| 053227420 wrote:
| > Like how evil-overlord can this be if they can't even get
| this basic stuff right?
|
| Imagine living with schizophrenia in this era. It's a
| nightmare.
|
| You're primed to see connections (and threats), even when there
| is no plausible mechanism to create the connection. In earlier
| years you could reason yourself out of it by saying "that is
| not technologically possible" or "that is not cost effective".
|
| Nowadays you can end up with _insane_ ideas like, "my forum
| posts are being de-anonymized via stylometry and someone is
| broadcasting threatening messages using language that mirrors
| my recent post." It's insane and unrealistic, but
| technologically possible. That makes it harder for a
| schizophrenic to dismiss.
|
| When websites adapt to your behavior, it just gets worse. A/B
| testing isn't just annoying, it feels threatening. That's why
| HN is great.
|
| Using anonymizing tools is one way to cope. It helps you avoid
| feeling "targeted".
| bilekas wrote:
| This seems quite intense and you've described it really
| well..
|
| I wonder does the current online climate nurture
| schizophrenia a bit more than would naturally.
| lmkg wrote:
| While the trope is "relevant XKCD," sometimes SMBC is the
| webcomic with the on-point reference.
|
| https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/right
| pjc50 wrote:
| > "my forum posts are being de-anonymized via stylometry and
| someone is broadcasting threatening messages using language
| that mirrors my recent post
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if that's actually happened to
| someone, given how intense forum wars and stalkers can get.
| Especially if it's a group targeting an individual.
|
| There is however the effect that people who leap straight to
| extraordinary claims for which they get publicity are almost
| certainly wrong, while the stalking victim to which this
| stuff has actually happened cannot get anyone to listen.
| dheera wrote:
| > Ad targeting for stuff that I've just bought. Worst offender:
| Remarkable
|
| In all honesty Remarkable isn't at fault for your ad targeting,
| Google and Facebook are.
|
| If you stop buying Remarkable and start buying farm fresh
| produce online you'll start getting ads for local produce.
| singlow wrote:
| No - Remarkable has a lot of control over how Google and
| Facebook target you. Maybe they could offer better tools, but
| those tools already let Remarkable remove you from audience
| lists after purchase, if they chose to do so.
| dheera wrote:
| I mean, to be fair, maybe they _aren 't_ using those tools
| to remove you individually and that's a good thing.
|
| FWIW I get tons of Remarkable ads as well and I don't own a
| Remarkable, so it just means they're NOT differentiating
| between you and me. If they did differentiate on the basis
| that you have a Remarkable then that is a step in the
| direction of violating privacy.
| singlow wrote:
| I don't really know what Remarkable is. I might google
| them now just to find out. I don't think I am on their
| audience list yet, because I haven't seen many ads. But
| if they ever add me to an audience list based on some
| action I take online, I would not view it as more/less
| egregious for them to then remove me after I am a
| customer. In fact, if I were to voluntarily associate
| myself as a customer, I would expect a more customized
| experience, depending on the nature of their product,
| whatever it is.
| singlow wrote:
| I googled (incognito) and see that I do remember them
| now. Surprised I am not in their audience list as I have
| read several articles about them and gone to their
| website a few times, in addition to having researched
| similar products.
| larrik wrote:
| This was explicitly covered in the article, actually.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| >Like how evil-overlord can this be if they can't even get this
| basic stuff right?
|
| I'd recommend a read of some Kafka to get a picture of how it
| could turn out...
| reaperducer wrote:
| Not the same, but equally stupid: Amazon asking me to subscribe
| to every single thing I put in my cart.
|
| No, Amazon, nobody needs another bird feeder every month. We're
| not feeding pterodactyls.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| You're forgetting the incentives here, of course it's in the ad
| companies interest to keep showing you ads even if they can
| discern a signal that you've probably already made the
| purchase...
| Jenk wrote:
| BMW (or maybe a design/ad agency at their behest I think) once
| said that the BMW car adverts are not for people who don't yet
| own a BMW, they are to reassure the people who have just bought
| a BMW that they have made the right choice.
|
| In reality I suspect there is a whole spectrum of audience
| coverage in the results from those who don't have one and never
| thought about getting one before seeing the ad, to encouraging
| existing owners to promote the brand to others, but I thought
| it was a poignant point at the time.
| nerdponx wrote:
| _Like how evil-overlord can this be if they can 't even get
| this basic stuff right?_
|
| The problem is not that the data is being used for ads, but
| that it exists at all. Google isn't what makes it scary that
| Google collects data. The scary part is hackers, state
| governments, and malicious authorized Google personnel.
| xenonite wrote:
| On the contrary: Actually I guess they get it absolutely right.
| This way, they address buyer's remorse. To ensure you really
| like the product and spread the word, don't return it, and
| ensure that after few years time you do buy the followup
| product.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| How is rubbing the decision in someone's face with retargeted
| ads a way to address buyer's remorse?
| willis936 wrote:
| >how evil-overlord can this be if they can't even get this
| basic stuff right?
|
| The same style of speculation works the other way too. If the
| advertisee thinks the advertiser is incompetent then they will
| lower their guard and be more influenced by ads. Perhaps they
| are maximum evil-overlord and projecting incompetence is a
| minimum-energy state.
| dazc wrote:
| Ironically, I didn't know what 'Remarkable' was so had to
| search for it.
| new_guy wrote:
| Strangely enough I only heard about them the other day, and
| now I'm constantly getting ads for them on FB and seeing them
| mentioned everywhere.
| kgwxd wrote:
| They just got you to advertise for them.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| hehe, true. I'm OK with that for this case.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| At least is not targeted with user data.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| I get the same thing, but for the engagement ring I bought my
| (now) wife. I feel like this signals one of two things: either
| the advertisers are incompetent (most likely), or they have
| very low confidence in my marriage (less likely, but funnier).
| soared wrote:
| Or if you shop for a ring on two sites, but purchase from
| one, the other site doesn't get data about your purchase on
| the other site. So the site you shopped at but didn't buy
| from doesn't know you made a purchase.
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| You should buy another diamond ring at every 10 year
| anniversary, to show that you still love her.
|
| -- This comment was totally not sponsored by De Beers
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| https://mattguzzardo23.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/debeers.
| j...
|
| Checkerboard Nightmare seems to have vanished off the face
| of the internet, despite the author maintaining an active
| presence, but this gem lives on in random corners.
| handrous wrote:
| The idea that you should upgrade your "wedding set"
| periodically is, in fact, fairly common. Which is pretty
| sharply at-odds with diamonds being forever, but then none
| of this makes much sense to me, so what do I know.
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| Diamonds being forever only means that you shouldn't sell
| yours. Can't have a flourishing market for used diamonds
| if we want to sell many overpriced new ones, can we?
| selectout wrote:
| Could also be that if you only purchase 1 item from a store
| you might forget the stores name, but referrals for large
| purchases are likely a big driver of their business so they
| want to make sure you do remember where you got this from in
| the hopes you can refer one person to make a purchase.
|
| A multi-thousand dollar purchase is likely worth it for an
| extra $15 in targeted ads to somebody.
| paulsutter wrote:
| This is no more than Sturgeon's law (90% of everything is crap).
|
| Beyond that no, you cant do GPT-3 or Yolo or even MNIST[1][2]
| with a dumb heuristic.
|
| > almost everything produced by ML could have been produced, more
| cheaply, using a very dumb heuristic you coded up by hand,
| because mostly the ML is trained by feeding it examples of what
| humans did while following a very dumb heuristic
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MNIST_database
|
| [2] http://vision.stanford.edu/cs598_spring07/papers/Lecun98.pdf
| vmoore wrote:
| What (nob obvious) ways do people avoid leaving a huge data
| trail?
|
| I'm not talking about the obvious stuff, like not carrying a
| smartphone, using an AD blocker, choosing privacy-aware operating
| systems and apps etc
|
| I mean, what non-obvious ways are there which people employ to
| avoid getting their data harvested for AD targeting?
| nicbou wrote:
| I think that you covered most bases already. I'd add these: pay
| with cash, use throwaway emails for everything, scramble
| anything that can be used to fingerprint you, give false
| information unless you have a reason not to, move to a cabin in
| the woods, speak in code, wear a wig.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Your purchase history is probably the largest, most useful, and
| most difficult-to-hide signal.
|
| It can be directly accessed through credit and debit payments,
| as well as contactless payment mechanisms. It's increasingly
| possible through facial and other biometrics data. It is
| specifically associated with spending patterns.
|
| Travel data are available through licence plate scanners,
| tollway tokens, and transit passes, as well as, again,
| biometrics.
|
| Anything online leaves a very fat and wide trail, of course.
|
| Your employer's payroll processor would be another data
| channel. That's going to be available to other prospective
| employers, increasingly.
|
| Utilities data might also be available.
|
| Auto repair and smog-station data are collected and reported,
| and often sold to insurance companies for rating purposes.
| (Distance driven correlates strongly to risk.)
| [deleted]
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time:
|
| _Forget privacy: you 're terrible at targeting anyway_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19055119 - Feb 2019 (109
| comments)
| woliveirajr wrote:
| Once I was searching for a surprise vacation for family. After
| buying it, ads began to pop not only in my notebook but at any
| device at home, no matter who was using wich device.
| [deleted]
| ericholscher wrote:
| This has been our experience running an ad network that only does
| content-based targeting (https://www.ethicalads.io/). As noted in
| the article, simple heuristics and topics are plenty to target
| ads, and provide great value for both advertisers and publishers.
| We're also cutting out all the ad tech middlemen who take a cut,
| keeping the value in the developer ecosystem, and keeping the web
| more private & secure.
|
| We basically let someone like Sentry or Twilio target JS
| developers with a specific ad about their JS integrations. They
| can link to JS-specific landing pages with sample code, etc. It
| works super well, and doesn't require anything beyond knowing the
| content of a page.
| float4 wrote:
| Very inspiring stuff!
|
| Given that "simple heuristics and topics are plenty to target
| ads", is it correct to assume that your payout/cost is similar
| for publishers/advertisers compared to networks that target
| users?
| ericholscher wrote:
| That's the goal! It definitely varies by audience & location,
| but generally we're pretty competitive.
| cormacrelf wrote:
| > _Let 's be clear: the best targeted ads I will ever see are the
| ones I get from a search engine when it serves an ad for exactly
| the thing I was searching for. Everybody wins: I find what I
| wanted, the vendor helps me buy their thing, and the search
| engine gets paid for connecting us. I don't know anybody who
| complains about this sort of ad. It's a good ad._
|
| Not the point of the article, but it's typically the vendors who
| complain. Other vendors can and do buy up ad space on their
| keywords, pushing the thing you were searching for further down
| the page. Search for Miele vacuums, get an ad for Dyson. Now
| Miele has to buy up ad space for the keyword "miele", which it
| worked hard to get name recognition for. Some people think this
| is a bit like extortion, but really it's just the cost of people
| being able to find your product in 0.00045s. The search engine is
| just charging the vendor for the service.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| Great article :)
|
| "Embarrassingly, the trackers themselves don't even need to cause
| a slowdown, but they always do, because their developers are
| invariably idiots who each need to load thousands of lines of
| javascript to do what could be done in two"
| seemcat wrote:
| Haha yeah, I'd really like to hear this story.
| Jiro wrote:
| Data that is incorrectly analyzed much of the time is still a
| privacy threat, and sometimes a bigger privacy threat. It's bad
| enough if your purchases are correlated with being a terrorist,
| but having your purchases sometimes incorrectly correlated with
| being a terrorist is worse.
| NoImmatureAdHom wrote:
| I am amazed that, in 2021, people who read HN are seeing ads.
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