[HN Gopher] Scams upon scams: The data-driven advertising grift
___________________________________________________________________
Scams upon scams: The data-driven advertising grift
Author : headalgorithm
Score : 209 points
Date : 2023-07-08 12:12 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (anotherangrywoman.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (anotherangrywoman.com)
| reillyse wrote:
| So much of advertising is lies that I don't do any advertising
| online any more.
|
| I've pulled all my google ads, facebook ads, instagram ads and
| podcast ads.
|
| After about 10 years of doing ads (for my coffee club) and really
| attempting to track what was happening (from a technical point of
| view) I couldn't actually attribute any of it (the holy grail of
| digital marketing). "Word of mouth" is still our biggest channel.
| And all the time whenever I speak to "marketing" people it's the
| same low value analysis with zero mathematical or scientific
| vigor. They look at what happened (High CTR on this ad) and draw
| some conclusion from it, and then next week when CTR flatlines on
| the ad they have no comment and are busy looking at the non-
| significant noise coming from another ad.
|
| And that's before even talking about the pure lies coming from
| the podcast people who swear up and down they know exactly how
| far into a podcast someone plays, when the spec they quote
| explicitly states it doesn't really work on apple products and
| 90% of the listernship is Apple. So many lies. It is a grift
| built on grift. Somebody in the organization knows it's a pile of
| lies, but the sales people actually believe it I think or don't
| care.
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| Sorry for the hijack. What roast level do you do?
| reillyse wrote:
| Lol :) we are one of the pioneers of the super light nordic
| roast in the US.
| kamma4434 wrote:
| At some point we tried using a major network.... That predicted
| our target market to be 50% female, and heavily present in middle
| east. Had a laugh and moved on.
| Ozzie_osman wrote:
| The way to measure whether the data-driven ads are a scam is not
| by saying "this ad is irrelevant to me". It's by the advertiser
| looking at their ROAS (return on ad spend). If the algorithm is
| optimizing for showing you an ad, there's a pretty fair chance
| that the advertiser has done that math and decided that in a
| world of imperfect data and algorithms, you approximate enough
| the type of person who is worth showing an ad to...
| statistically.
|
| In fact, getting to a world where ads are perfectly targeted
| would be one hell of a privacy nightmare.
| Swizec wrote:
| > there's a pretty fair chance that the advertiser has done
| that math
|
| As an occasional admittedly naive experimenter with ads - it's
| far more likely that the platform has done the math and showing
| you the ad is profitable to them, not the advertiser.
|
| Google et al love nothing more than to burn your entire ad
| budget on cheap clicks from countries that will never buy
| anything. But the number of "ad conversions" looks high and
| graph go up!
|
| Getting these platforms to do what you want is a literal full-
| time job. Hell, in bigger companies you have entire teams doing
| nothing more than bending over backwards to get these platforms
| to do the useful thing instead of setting money on fire. The
| algorithms love setting money on fire. It's a lot like giving
| your 3 wishes to a genie, you have to be very specific.
| crobertsbmw wrote:
| I'm not sure this is true. Facebook makes a lot more money
| from me if my ads are converting, and I continue to spend
| money day after day. If they just burn my money and I'm not
| seeing enough conversions out of it, then I kill my ads and
| start trying my luck with Twitter or Pinterest ads..
| Swizec wrote:
| > I'm not sure this is true
|
| I can assure you it is very true that it takes a lot of
| skill to get ad platforms to do what you want. They do not
| care about you. The algorithm will make The Metric go up
| and that's a threat. It's _your_ job to make it a good
| metric.
| Supermancho wrote:
| While people relying on a 3rd party platform are under
| the whims and methodologies that an opaque 3rd party
| platform may provide, in first party AdServing (which I
| am involved with), the algorithm is not tailored to
| "your" metric. Data driven analysis is done by all major
| online retailers. It's quite effective and part of the
| reason that features and products seem to disappear, more
| often than supply chain disruption would indicate or the
| common perception might belie.
|
| While I'm sure some companies have some "reliable" 3rd
| party + 1st party metrics that affect their bottom line,
| they don't need more until the trends start to invert,
| and then they just don't have the data for marginal
| short-term experiments. This causes these companies to
| make sweeping changes that a 3rd party will not help tool
| around...leaving the company to decide the changes either
| 1) help climb returns (overall), 2) hurt returns, 3) most
| commonly, show nothing at all. It's flailing in the dark,
| hoping for an external force to turn things around. The
| company that is still relying on someone else's platform
| are dinosaurs and small players. Sometimes they are able
| to climb out of it due to externalities or developing
| their own platform.
| moneywoes wrote:
| Perhaps they optimize enough to give you the minimum
| conversions to stay
| nobody_nowhere wrote:
| There's one thing that advertisers agree on: ads work in the
| aggregate.
|
| You can tell by turning them all off. Ask Kraft Heinz.
|
| Beyond that it gets fuzzy. Is it inefficient? Yes. Does anyone
| agree on the actual mechanics? No. Is the data wildly inaccurate?
| Sure. Is there grift? Totally.
| jfengel wrote:
| What happened to Kraft Heinz?
| nobody_nowhere wrote:
| They cut advertising by 40% and lost a boatload of market
| share https://www.forbes.com/sites/avidan/2019/03/06/the-
| kraft-hei...
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| That is a poor comparison because its not a comparison with
| a single variable changed. Kraft and Heinz went from two
| independent companies to a single one controlled by new
| ownership engaged in organization-wide cost cutting. The
| world also did not stand still over that time, it probably
| also changed in many ways.
|
| Its probably impossibly to conclude with any confidence
| that the results were simply due to cuts to the ad budget,
| cuts to the budget and cuts to operations, or simply cuts
| to operations. Ads are also not commodities. An ads
| effectiveness is also not the result of pure spend, cheap
| ads can be very effective and expensive ones can also not
| be effective and vice versa.
| nobody_nowhere wrote:
| People also forget how inexpensive and ephemeral individual ads
| are. A display banner on a quality site costs less than a tenth
| of a penny.
|
| And it's like a room on a cruise ship -- the boat is gonna sail
| one way or another. So it has to be sold.
|
| Advertisers might choose to let Facebook arbitrage those
| impressions into a cost per click model -- at pennies per click
| instead of hundredths per view. Tradeoffs galore in that model.
|
| When you aggregate these numbers into a $600b industry, you
| start to see how sweating some of the finer details just
| doesn't matter.
| somsak2 wrote:
| >it's like a room on a cruise ship -- the boat is gonna sail
| one way or another. So it has to be sold.
|
| super shaky reasoning. the less rooms that get sold, the less
| likely future ships are to sail or even be built. individual
| decisions matter in aggregate
| sega_sai wrote:
| Many here already pointed at the fact that likely P(buying
| mattress in the future|googled mattress) is much higher than
| P(buying mattress in the future) thus for an advertiser with a
| finite budget it makes perfect sense to target users who googled
| mattress irrespective of whether they bought it already or not.
| Kapura wrote:
| The author's point is that, with the data available to the
| platform owners, they could easily deduce the subset where that
| P value is nearly zero (having already bought the mattress).
|
| Places that would also make sense to advertise mattresses:
| around universities and dense rental housing, or new
| developments of single family houses. I required no spy
| networks to make this list.
| majormajor wrote:
| > The author's point is that, with the data available to the
| platform owners, they could easily deduce the subset where
| that P value is nearly zero (having already bought the
| mattress).
|
| Let's think carefully before we argue that Google and
| Facebook should expose (indirectly or not) _even more_ of the
| information they collect to third parties.
| tcbawo wrote:
| It seems that P(returning a bought mattress) is more than
| 10%, so it probably makes sense to continue advertising to
| those people. Also, there are probably people who buy
| multiple mattresses (eg. parents), that might buy a second
| mattress.
| [deleted]
| passion__desire wrote:
| Isn't it the case that you can't target specific individuals.
| Only big group sizes are allowed to be targetted through their
| portals.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| It only makes sense if you consider that the end all be all to
| target your customer. Maybe late night television ads are even
| more effective than google searches, because they are cheaper
| than prime time slots and are perhaps enriched for people with
| poor sleep. Maybe right now some subreddit is shilling mattress
| penny stocks and that is masking the true signal from your
| internet search data. You have no way of knowing that though,
| because you've reduced all of reality down to a single factor,
| an internet search, without considering how much of the
| observed variance could even be explained by this factor nor
| how the results might be confounded with other factors.
| alex_young wrote:
| Maybe advertisers don't actually get signals when people click
| pay in some third party site? I mean, why would that third party
| want to expose your purchase to the advertisers?
|
| So, you're left with this great signal that someone is shopping
| for a mattress. Seems like a very good reason to recommend other
| mattresses to them.
| masswerk wrote:
| > _Marketing theory is never tested rigorously. The_ <del>
| _common sense_ </del> _incredibly sound scientific view based on
| heaps of scientific evidence view - showing your ads to people
| more likely to buy your product is more efficient because they're
| more likely to buy your product anyway - is entirely untested._
|
| Before this, the classic life style segment in media analysis was
| magazine audiences aged 15-25. Notably, this was not the part of
| the population that could afford the goods advertised
| immediately, or even anywhere in the near future. The idea was
| that this would be formative, that this would effect in an
| invaluable baseline of expectations and anticipations that could
| not be competed with, when it came to real acquisitions. Well,
| nowadays it's all just-in-time, often even just-after-buy, which
| seems to be the most efficient.
| eduction wrote:
| I'm very curious what events she is seeing that exclude people
| over 30.
| jprete wrote:
| I can't speak to her specific observations, but a lot of Meetup
| events specify an age range of, roughly, 20 to somewhere
| between 30 and 40. I think most of them are implicitly (or
| explicitly) dating events, although there are group-interest
| events that do it too, which I'd think would be less picky
| about who attends.
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| I was curious and started looking at Meetup lately...
|
| At first I was amazed at the number of interesting local
| groups and their member counts. I felt I missed out on so
| much, but activity seems to have not recovered since 2019.
|
| Then after browsing around, I realized that there a huge
| number of single women living in the region, in their
| 20s-40s, whose main interests are hiking, real estate, and
| *Kubernetes*.
|
| This seems incredibly odd since I do not live in
| California...
|
| The dating scene must be brutal for "on-prem" kinds of
| people...
| zoogeny wrote:
| This entire essay is just full of ideas I disagree with.
|
| First is the old chestnut: Why does _company_ keep advertising
| _product_ to me after I 've already bought it!? This is one of
| those child-like criticisms that keeps rearing it's ignorant
| head. Literally, you are _ignorant_ as to why they are doing it.
| Your ignorance as to why doesn 't imply their stupidity. Amazon
| does it. Google does it. I'm sure Facebook does it. So either
| three of the biggest companies in the world are full of stupid
| idiots or perhaps you are just ignorant to the reason they are
| doing it.
|
| > Their ethos is that if a human can do a task, a machine can do
| that task better, and not cost them anything such as salary,
| pensions or or a basic level of respect
|
| No, their ethos is - we can't possibly have any reasonable number
| of humans do the task. In what universe could we imagine hiring a
| sufficient number of humans to sift through the data Google has
| collected? They have immense data on literal billions of humans.
| How much time would it take any person to understand you as a
| person sufficiently by painstakingly reviewing your data so that
| Google could send you perfect ads? The very premise of this is
| ridiculous beyond reason.
|
| So the conclusion is based on the premise that having humans do
| the task is impossible. We have no other option than to use
| machines and algorithms to attempt the task because it is the
| only viable alternative.
|
| > Advertisers, then, are getting served a steaming turd on a
| plate rather than the medium-rare filet mignon they were
| promised.
|
| Advertisers are making a value judgement based on the options
| they have available to them. They can advertise on TV, radio, or
| magazines. They can advertise on podcasts, YouTube channels or
| Instagram feeds by directly contacting the creators and doing
| sponsored content. They can put up billboards and wrap public
| buses. They can put people in public squares and hand out flyers,
| do personal demos and offer prizes. I couldn't even scratch the
| surface of what is available to modern companies for promotional
| purposes. The fact that Facebook, Amazon and Google are as large
| as they are suggest there is _some_ value being derived by
| companies given that they have plenty of alternate options
| available to them.
|
| > There isn't any evidence to suggest that an ad targeted to 35
| year old men with children with an interest in football is any
| more likely to result in sales of Football Dad socks than a
| poster for Football Dad socks at a bus stop. But an entire
| industry is based on pretending that this is the case.
|
| I really don't think they are. But let's compare the idea to the
| other advertising avenues I listed. TV ads are broadly targeted
| based on the time of day the show runs at as well as the content
| of the show. Magazine ads are broadly targeted based on the
| content of the magazine. Junk mail and flyers are broadly
| targeted to people living in a particular geographic area.
|
| But I guess this MSc in marketing knows more than the entire
| industry they claim to be from.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > Amazon does it. Google does it. I'm sure Facebook does it. So
| either three of the biggest companies in the world are full of
| stupid idiots
|
| This fallacy is called appeal to authority, and its the worst
| kind at that - its based on wealth rather than competence.
| zoogeny wrote:
| > This fallacy is called appeal to authority
|
| I think of it as an appeal to consensus but if you want to
| dismiss an argument based on some debate bro tactics then at
| least be more substantive than naming some so-called fallacy
| and leaving it at that.
|
| The organizations that have the data and that are using that
| data to sell advertising to the largest number of buyers are
| doing a particular thing. Traditional media, as I point out,
| is doing a softer form of targeting as well. So who is right,
| the person who flashes their MSc in Psychology as if that
| grants them authority? Or do we instead look at the
| overwhelming evidence based on the behavior of the entire
| industry?
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| The Global Homeopathic Medicine Market size was estimated
| at USD 25.85 billion in 2022, USD 30.95 billion in 2023,
| and is projected to grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate
| (CAGR) of 19.89% to reach USD 110.41 billion by 2030.
|
| We have absolute proof that homeopathy is grift. But by
| your logic, You ask people engaging in grift whether they
| have consensus
| soared wrote:
| Woman who knows nothing about digital marketing claims an entire
| multiple-billion dollar industry is scam, nice.
| kryz wrote:
| Exactly. As someone who operates within this industry. This
| piece read like it could be wholly made up
| RistrettoMike wrote:
| (But they mention that they work in marketing.)
| soared wrote:
| I can't find her LinkedIn and the about page has no info, but
| with this blog post she definitely does not work in digital
| marketing as she has no idea how it functions. It's just wild
| baseless claims that everyone is marketing is either dumb or
| not trying at all.
| Skunkleton wrote:
| I have a friend with a business in a niche market. His business
| is driven almost entirely by ads place with google. He's tried
| other platforms and had much worse results. Something must be
| working.
| ncr100 wrote:
| I do dislike digital ads refining their profile of me, via my
| involuntary contributions to their models. Definitely feels like
| I'm being spied upon.
| _gllen wrote:
| It's possible that an audience that is very likely to buy a
| mattress are recent mattress buyers.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Well, according to Douglas Adams, somewhere in the Galaxy is a
| swampy planet populated by sentient mattresses named Zem:
|
| "No one really knows what mattresses are meant to gain from
| their lives either. They are large, friendly, pocket-sprung
| creatures that live quiet private lives in the marshes of
| Sqornshellous Zeta. Many of them get caught, slaughtered, dried
| out, shipped out and slept on. None of them seems to mind this
| and all of them are called Zem."
|
| Maybe we should boycott mattress ads for the sake of preserving
| the species.
| 867-5309 wrote:
| but they no longer need a mattress..
| achr2 wrote:
| I am willing to bet that statistically (with the number of
| mattress companies offering X night returns) that a recent
| mattress purchaser is more likely to purchase a different
| mattress within X days than the random public.
| fullshark wrote:
| Some % of the population buys more than one mattress in a 3
| month period, intentionally. Perhaps they are landlords, or
| have 2nd homes, or want to stock their new home with new
| furniture.
| jaclaz wrote:
| Maybe, but (thank goodness) the mattress ads bombarding
| does not last 3 months, only a week or so, after 2 and 3/4
| months have passed that % of population will either look
| where they bought the previous one (if they are satified
| with it) or make a new google search, in both cases the
| week long targeted campaign won't have much effect.
| avidiax wrote:
| It's good to point out this possibility, but outside of an
| institutional purchaser, people don't buy 2 mattresses with the
| purchases separated by a week.
|
| Knowing that you bought a mattress is useful for the ML to find
| the mattress-purchase-likely cohort. Filtering those people out
| just saves the advertisers money. Hence the grift.
| multiplegeorges wrote:
| > Filtering those people out just saves the advertisers
| money.
|
| Google Ads specifically has a feature to exclude targeting of
| customer's you've said have made purchases, ie. only target
| net new customers.
|
| The platforms aren't as dumb as the post author thinks they
| are.
| dazc wrote:
| I think the post was being sarcastic?
|
| People who have recently bought a mattress will see a lot
| of ads for mattresses.
| jaclaz wrote:
| >The platforms aren't as dumb as the post author thinks
| they are.
|
| Maybe the platforms are not that dumb, it is the mattress
| seller that doesn't properly make use of that feature, or
| there could be other reasons why they insist on suggesting
| over and over again a mattress.
|
| The experience described has happened to everyone for _any_
| (not very often replaced) item bought online, be it a
| printer, a wash machine or whatever, so if the platform is
| not dumb, it lacks data and the sellers are dumb, in any
| case the final effect of this "targeted" ads is 0 added
| sales.
| nobody_nowhere wrote:
| The ads are so inexpensive that just one repeat buyer pays
| for all the waste.
|
| Think of it -- some people have a second home. Or a short
| term rental. Or a guest bedroom.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Or they returned the mattress or the data is not perfect
| and they're still shopping etc
| Manfred wrote:
| What if they bought a mattress and found out they didn't like
| it after one night? A lot of stores let you return them if
| you don't like them within a number of days. That would mean
| they are in the market for another one.
|
| I'm not saying it's likely, but there are scenarios.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _people don 't buy 2 mattresses with the purchases
| separated by a week_
|
| I did this. It's because I'm incompetent. But I bought stuff
| for each room one at a time. Use an ad blocker, so no clue if
| it caught.
| _gllen wrote:
| Really 0%? It seems like some of the buyers would return
| their mattress and buy another. If 10% return and 90% of
| those buy another brand, that seems to me like an above
| average audience to market mattresses to.
| dools wrote:
| It's more likely that the mattress company couldn't be bothered
| creating a separate segment from their purchase order
| completion page and then excluding that from ads, because 95%
| of people who come to the page don't buy a mattress, and 95% of
| people who have bought a mattress don't click on ads when you
| show them, and the cost for AdRoll retargeting is per click not
| per impression.
| adrr wrote:
| > Marketing theory is never tested rigorously.
|
| Of course its tested "rigorously". Performance marketing is
| always about testing and optimizing CAC/CPA. It can make or break
| your company. If you can acquire customers at 10% lower rate(at
| the same volumes) than you competitors and you have similar COGS,
| you will dominate them and will ultimately will be the market
| leader. Monetary incentives are there to ensure efficiency just
| like there are incentives around COGS for efficiency.
| mcpackieh wrote:
| Remember, the primary job of an advertiser is to sell their
| advertising services to companies, not to sell a company's
| products to consumers. That comes second and is only done insofar
| as it facilitates the first.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Same is true for consultancies. They effectively offshore the
| brainstorming for you, but the ideas they sell you on don't
| have to work and the consultants usually aren't even
| incentivized for it to work after the duration of the contract.
|
| I wonder if there are any good books out there for these sorts
| of businesses in modern times, doing a kind of shovel selling
| during a gold rush sort of business plan, not really caring if
| the ore vein is even real, just serving the lemmings their
| desires.
| [deleted]
| erehweb wrote:
| We can argue about whether data-driven ads work for the OP or for
| buying an extra mattress, but in aggregate they absolutely work.
| Contra OP's anecdote, if FB ad targeting stopped working, then FB
| would notice the difference in engagement within a day - probably
| within the hour.
| izzydata wrote:
| I really hope in the near future there is some shift in the
| advertising business where they realize the ridiculous amounts of
| money they are lighting on fire and decimates the ad driven
| internet as we know it.
| pm90 wrote:
| The only evidence the author offers are her personal experiences.
| While Im no fan of advertising and question its efficacy as well,
| I don't really think this is a convincing argument against them.
|
| Statistically, these advertising segments will be very fuzzy and
| there will be outliers (probably many of them?).
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > Statistically, these advertising segments will be very fuzzy
| and there will be outliers (probably many of them?).
|
| Someone who goggled matresses and then bought one is hardly an
| "outlier" - it's probably more common than someone who googled
| mattresses and hasn't yet bought one. I guess the ad-tech
| companies don't let their advertisers de-select prospects that
| have already shot their load?
| axlee wrote:
| Since June 2022, we have stopped sending conversion signals
| back to our Google Ads account, and have completely
| disconnected Analytics and any Google-related tracking code
| from our site. We also started a new Ads property and retired
| the old, "enriched" one, starting 100% fresh (we were worried
| about breaking things, so we isolated the move and were ready
| to rollback quick).
|
| We have a yearly Gads budget around ~$5-$6M, of which is 95%
| SEA. We are selling an unchanged service in a very stable,
| slowly declining market with heavy ads competition for the top
| keywords. Roughly 60-65% of our customers are paid and come
| from Google.
|
| Since then, our ROI on that spending has not changed
| whatsoever. Paid traffic remains stable. Our CAC and conversion
| rates are virtually the same (even slightly better). Our new
| customer's LTV has increased compared to the previous cohorts
| as well, so it seems we're actually getting better quality
| leads (though I wouldn't attribute it necessarily to Google).
|
| So if reporting more data to Google was supposed to help us
| target our users more cost-efficiently, it did a piss poor job
| at it. In hindsight, we have wasted so much time trying to help
| Google make "smarter" decisions by providing it with more and
| more data (hello server-side tracking), while the most
| efficient thing to do would likely have been to do nothing at
| all. We have been working with GAds selling the the same
| service for more than 8 years now, so we have a large basis of
| comparison to be able to make that case.
|
| Maybe we're lucky, maybe this will turn out badly, but since
| then I have stopped blindly believing whatever the ads
| platforms are pretending to do behind the scenes with all this
| data. If they do anything with it, it doesn't seem to be for
| the advertiser.
|
| Our next step will be to gradually cut our SEA spending and
| follow the impact.
|
| And don't get me starting on Facebook's borderline fraudulent
| ad performance reporting that doesn't match our reality...
| moneywoes wrote:
| So effectively you stopped reporting back to google whether
| their ads traffic converted and you've noticed no difference
| in conversions?
| axlee wrote:
| Correct, we stopped giving them any sort of feedback
| (conversion or otherwise, due to removing Analytics as
| well) on the ads we were running.
| cwalv wrote:
| Maybe they're just working off the baseline/old/stale
| data?
| axlee wrote:
| Doubt it, we've started a fresh property as well which
| should theoretically guarantee isolation. Time will tell.
| Euphorbium wrote:
| Before reddit shit the bed, I wanted to advertise there, only to
| learn that the subreddits I wanted to target were too small to be
| able to be targeted. So much data wasted.
| neilv wrote:
| Meanwhile, in some subreddits, your competitors are doing some
| combination of:
|
| * participating in the subs in good faith, with full
| disclosure;
|
| * astroturfing the posts&comments;
|
| * rigging upvotes/downvotes;
|
| * building relationships with (maybe bribing) the mods; and/or
|
| * entirely running the sub already.
| kthejoker2 wrote:
| _cough cough_ Snowflake and /r/dataengineering
| moneywoes wrote:
| Anything else in the Reddit playbook?
| lencastre wrote:
| It's funny because it's true. Often one needs to check the
| dedicated sub and a more general one to get unbiased
| takes/reviews, e.g. ubiquiti and networking
| [deleted]
| notjoemama wrote:
| Can I call it ideological infiltration?
|
| Whether by social group principals (grassroots), or self
| interest promotion (corporate), this is the thing that has
| been infecting the Reddit platform for years making it less
| fun to use.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Small subreddit targeting is just a matter of shilling. I've
| seen it on certain niche subreddits, brands becoming the
| subreddit darlings and added to the faq and wiki and sidebars,
| constantly recommended in the comments under any "what do I buy
| for x" thread. Even if its a junk product. Sometimes the brand
| even has an account active on the subreddit giving away coupons
| or free stickers and such.
| seydor wrote:
| Their job is to sell advertising to advertisers, not to please
| their users.
|
| I thought it was common knowledge. The more complicated and
| graph-filled the dashboard is, the more work that the advertiser
| can claim to have done to their bosses
| angarg12 wrote:
| So OP claims that data-driven ads are a scam using the anecdata
| that she is getting served irrelevant ads.
|
| I'm not going to argue about whether ads are "worth it", but
| working on the other side (serving and optimizing ads), I can
| tell that yes, we run the numbers, and the math (mostly) works
| out.
|
| As per your examples, we have run experiments by applying
| targeting ads based on narrow segments, and others without. As it
| turns out the data shows that "casting a wider net" works better,
| statistically.
|
| Make of it what you will.
| yarekt wrote:
| Hmm, I feel like this analysis comes from trying to rationalise
| what's happening. From my experience the truth is simpler, and
| much more disappointing: Advertising is about statistics, and if
| some wonky new data model creates better conversions the
| advertisers don't care how it's underlying rule sets work.
|
| The cost of pushing ads to people who already have mattresses is
| insignificant to capturing those that are about to buy them,
| statistically speaking.
|
| The disappointing thing about this trend is that even if the rule
| sets are obviously wrong, yet still provide positive results
| means that their operators have little reason to change them.
| Statistics don't work for individuals.
|
| Case in point is credit rating and insurance underwriting
| api wrote:
| There are a whole class of fallacious modes of thinking that
| revolve around assuming the world is smarter than it actually
| is and that people are more competent than they actually are.
|
| The most common these days is "conspiracy theory," which is
| really an optimistic view that starts with the assumption that
| someone understands what is happening and can coherently
| control it. If these conspiracies were true it would mean that
| all we'd have to do to fix major problems is get "them" out of
| power or convince "them" to become the good guys. Very, very
| optimistic.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Some theories of mass propaganda rely on the fact that people
| who are complicit in it are merely acting on the nth higher
| level of incentives for themselves, and the end results we
| see reflect the pileups of these incentives. Its much harder
| to deincentivise an industry from certain behaviors they've
| organically grown into, than it is to even turn over the
| entire executive staff. It almost doesn't matter who or what
| the company is if the incentives are still in tact, they will
| fill the untapped niche like a new species in an environment.
| DropInIn wrote:
| I'd say the conspiracy stuff is more that either the
| individuals are ignorant of Hanlons Razor or simply refuse to
| accept it's applicability.
|
| Combined with supremacist beliefs ( _They_ are superior which
| gives them insight others can 't possess) and we get pretty
| much all the conspiracy theories.
|
| Sadly, there are plenty of very real conspiracies in this
| world, doing immense harms, yet those are seemingly actively
| ignored by the theorists... Which I often presume to be a
| result of the inability for the theorist to hold the "special
| knowledge" card as any who looks at the evidence would come
| to the same position and thus the promulgation of such
| legitimate theories are "too mainstream" for those seeking to
| further thier self delusion of supremacy.
| klabb3 wrote:
| This is a popular meta-conspiracy theory. "It takes too many
| too keep a secret". Yes, but not everyone has to stay silent.
| If you have a _lot_ of resources you can buy silence, it is
| literally a product for purchase (not perfect, but close
| enough). How do you think Harvey Weinstein got his victims to
| shut up? How did numerous large companies suppress their own
| research that their products were harmful, for decades? How
| did Jeffrey Epstein build a jetset trafficking empire without
| getting caught (and when he did get caught - the first time -
| he got a slap on the wrist and no media coverage)?
|
| Worst case, if someone refuses to stay silent, you can just
| label them "disgruntled", question their character, their
| mental well-being, claim that they're in cahoots by some
| known evil agent, etc etc.
|
| Point is.. many conspiracies don't require perfectly
| competent agents with perfect knowledge.
|
| > If these conspiracies were true
|
| Well, quite obviously all theories are not true. The bulk of
| random conspiracy theories are most certainly bogus, just
| like most low-effort theorizing by laymen in general. But
| aggregates don't make conspiracies impossible.
| blowski wrote:
| Those advertisers are responding to signals in the junk data
| the OP is talking about. You're both right.
| aCoreyJ wrote:
| Yup this is addressed in the article, it seems there isn't
| actually data backing up the idea that this way is better
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yep, in the past they would advertise in newspapers or
| magazines or TV or radio where the vast majority of the
| audience had zero interest in buying a mattress anytime soon.
| Narrowing that down to "people who have recently searched for a
| mattress" is a win, even if that includes some people who
| already bought one. Despite what people think about Google
| being all-knowing, it's less likely that they know you bought a
| mattress than they know you searched for one.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| There's no central repository of purchases, whereas there is
| for views. That's why this keeps happening.
|
| Also, the incentives of the advertising platforms and the
| advertisers mitigate against efficiency.
| AJ007 wrote:
| This is yet another of the recurring "online advertising
| doesn't work" articles, which have been published regularly for
| the past 20 years.
| chowells wrote:
| No, it's not. It never claims advertising doesn't work. It
| claims that data-driven targeting is a scam on multiple
| levels. That isn't to say advertising doesn't work, just that
| "data-driven" doesn't improve its results.
| raincole wrote:
| Some people are just so confident.
|
| All the companies, from startups to giants, across different
| countries and cultures, must be wrong.
|
| Only few (and they all write blogs) can see through the vile
| of disguise and tell the readers how online advertising
| doesn't work.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| All the oil companies investing billions into destroying
| ecosystem we depend on can't be wrong!
| danaris wrote:
| So much of the time of the ad boom has been the period of 0
| interest rates.
|
| So many of the adtech dollars have come from venture
| capitalists pouring money into startups that will be
| profitable any year now, they swear.
|
| So much of the advertising business has _always_ been about
| convincing the entire rest of the economy that they
| _desperately_ need more advertising in order to compete,
| regardless of any actual stats on ROI.
|
| Is online advertising--and in particular, the hyper-
| targeted advertising that fuels the industry's insatiable
| hunger for every last drop of personal data--worthwhile?
|
| _We don 't know._
|
| You don't know. I don't know. The adtech companies don't
| know (but they assiduously avoid acknowledging that fact,
| often even to themselves). Their customers don't know.
|
| Me, I'm comfortable with my educated guess that it's
| nowhere near as worthwhile as they want to make us believe
| it is.
| lancesells wrote:
| > So much of the advertising business has always been
| about convincing the entire rest of the economy that they
| desperately need more advertising in order to compete,
| regardless of any actual stats on ROI.
|
| I've never worked with anyone that doesn't measure ROI or
| ROAS. I'm not arguing that some companies don't need to
| spend so much on advertising or that it's not needed for
| some but there's a pretty clear measure.
|
| > Is online advertising--and in particular, the hyper-
| targeted advertising that fuels the industry's insatiable
| hunger for every last drop of personal data--worthwhile?
|
| In my experience in eCommerce marketing is that both Meta
| and Google are steering advertisers towards massive
| audience campaigns that aren't hyper-targeted. They might
| be doing hyper-targeted advertising but it's no longer as
| recommended as it once was.
|
| All that said, I use ad blockers and I think data should
| not be hoovered up without consent or awareness and sold
| without consent. On my personal site and even my online
| shop I don't use GA or any other third party tool (hosted
| on Shopify so they inject some things).
| danaris wrote:
| There are ways to estimate advertising ROI, but so much
| of what ads are attempting to do is inherently
| unmeasurable without a tightly controlled study,
| particularly given the highly chaotic nature of the
| economy and people's behavior.
|
| Fundamentally, there are two "sides" of advertising ROI
| you can try to measure: the individual, and the
| aggregate. They each have serious challenges.
|
| At the individual level: sure, some people see an ad, say
| "hey, I want that!" and go buy it. But that's definitely
| nowhere close to the majority of purchases--even online--
| and it's very unlikely to be a very high percentage of
| ad-influenced purchases. Much more often, the ad gets the
| product into your brain, and then later, when you're
| shopping, you see it and say, "hm, maybe I should get
| it," never consciously realizing that the ad caused or
| contributed to that. Thus, any kind of consumer survey
| will be unable to capture more than a tiny fraction of
| ad-influenced purchasing.
|
| At the aggregate level: what you're trying to measure
| here is simply your sales numbers over time. And except
| for the _very_ largest of companies, sales numbers will
| be pretty noisy. That means it 's very hard to tell for
| sure whether this ad or that one worked, or if any of
| them had any direct effect on sales at all. (That's
| particularly true for the subtly-influenced purchases I
| described above; those might happen months after an ad
| campaign starts.)
|
| Is it totally impossible to measure ROI? No, it's not.
| But it takes a lot of work, and has a fairly high degree
| of inherent uncertainty. The old saw "half of all
| advertising dollars are wasted--we just don't know which
| half" is very relevant here.
| wincy wrote:
| I mean there were a few people correct that mortgage backed
| securities were much higher risk than they were classified
| as. Just because a bunch of smart people agree on something
| doesn't necessarily mean it's correct. But it can take a
| long time for people with a lot of money to go broke.
| zarathustreal wrote:
| Exactly. Kind of similar to how everyone in a Hacker News
| thread can agree, downvote, and even flag something and
| it can still be true!
| mint2 wrote:
| Except a big part of downvoting has nothing to do with
| the truth of a statement - yes factual inaccuracies and
| misinformation will be downvoted but that's just
| scratching the surface.
|
| If people are rude or posting something completely
| unhelpful that's a downvote even if the statement is
| overall true.
| zarathustreal wrote:
| That's a rather unhelpful way to use a voting system,
| considering no two people have the same sensibilities
| toward rudeness or the same purpose for reading a thread.
| At least voting based on truth has universal utility. In
| fact, downvoting true information could be actively
| harmful in many (most?) situations as many (most?)
| platforms boost or suppress content based on those votes
|
| I also find it a bit.. idk what the word is, egotistical?
| Self-centered? Judgemental? To vote based on subjective
| qualities like perceived rudeness or helpfulness (toward
| one's own goals or one's own understanding of a stated
| goal)
| LocalH wrote:
| Then talk to dang and attempt to convince him that the
| voting system needs to be purely based on the truth (or
| lack thereof) contained within a comment. As it stands,
| the voting system is primarily intended to surface
| comments and posts that foster the discussion of
| interesting things.
|
| Considering that things like attacking the messenger and
| bad-faith discourse (via insults, etc) are counter to the
| stated HN ethos, I don't feel it's unhelpful to downvote
| assholish comments for the sake of being assholish, _even
| if the comment has accurate factual information that is
| relevant_.
| [deleted]
| raverbashing wrote:
| "Work" is loosely correlated with "Make money out of it"
| (especially for the ad seller)
|
| The buyer of ads does (usually) keep track of conversion
| (as correctly pointed in the article, also the seller) and
| when optimizing their strategy they're usually ok with the
| results they get from it (because they sell and they have
| sales attributable to the online ads)
|
| But here's the catch, making a more efficient ad probably
| doesn't make the sellers more money.
| mgsouth wrote:
| Marketing VP to CEO:
|
| "Hey boss, I spent $40 milion on a targeted ad campaign
| with this fancy new agency. They sent us a report showing
| 2.5% uplift, but I ran it by our in-house stat nerds and
| they say it's bogus."
|
| vs.
|
| "Hey boss, I spent $40 million on a targeted ad campaign.
| The agency proves we got a 2.5% uplift. That's $300
| million! Ain't I terrific!? Where's my bonus?"
|
| Edit: and...
|
| CEO to board: "We tried a new targetted ad campaign but it
| didn't make any difference."
|
| vs.
|
| CEO to board: "Last quarter the industry suffered increased
| competition, and our uptake through traditional advertising
| channels suffered. Fortunately I had the forsight to direct
| Marketting to open up to new, inovative methods. I'm
| pleased to report that it paid off, to the tune of $300 MM,
| completely offseting the drop from traditional campaigns."
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| I think I've outlined this before on HN, but I've worked with a
| proper sleazy DSP, who I found out were basically targeting
| vulnerable folks with ads. These guys have zero ethics and less
| morals and have an attitude of "if it works it works, and to
| hell with the consequences".
| oAlbe wrote:
| Would you be willing to share their name? Even privately?
| KnobbleMcKnees wrote:
| > The cost of pushing ads to people who already have mattresses
| is insignificant to capturing those that are about to buy them,
| statistically speaking.
|
| This is called _conversion rate_ and for some businesses it can
| be surprisingly tiny while still making that business
| completely viable.
|
| I would hazard that rates in the mattress industry are almost
| preposterously low (<5%) but margins are so high that it
| doesn't matter in the slightest
| tmpz22 wrote:
| The lower the conversion rate the lower the profit margin
| influencing the company to cut additional corners that they
| may be able to get away with.
|
| This whole ad driven philosophy encourages the absolute bare
| minimal product that the customer will still pay for.
|
| As a consumer that is bad for me.
|
| Ultimately "voting with your wallet" becomes an inefficient
| communication method with all the layers of bullshit in
| between.
| failuser wrote:
| The whole point of targeted advertisement is to avoid this.
| The old-school blanket approach had this issue as well, but
| did not promise to know if the if the potential customer had
| a mattress already.
| [deleted]
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| 5% is low? You mean that having 1/20 people buy your product
| after seeing an ad is a bad outcome? If I sold just about
| anything, I bet that having a 1% conversion rate would be a
| money printing machine
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| The denominator is people who land on your site, i.e. those
| who clicked the ad, not those who saw the ad.
| nucleardog wrote:
| Click through rate (CTR) is `people clicked ad / people
| shown ad`. Conversion rate is `people bought thing / people
| clicked ad`.
|
| For Google search ads pretty good CTR would be about 8%,
| and a pretty good conversion rate would be about 5%. So
| it's more like 1/250 buying if you're doing pretty well. At
| average costs, that'll be one conversion for something like
| $40 in ad spend. More average would be like 2% and 3% so
| more like 1/1700 and like $70 per conversion.
|
| (Display ads are more like 0.3% and 0.6%. So more like
| 1/50,000. Costs are cheaper.)
|
| Those prices are _average_. There's no flat rate for these
| --they're an auction. So generally your higher margin
| items, especially in industries with higher average
| click/conversion rates, are going to end up with higher
| bids and higher costs.
|
| A bank will pay a lot more to convert someone to a mortgage
| customer than a restaurant will pay to convert them. You
| may end up paying $30 per click for someone searching for
| mortgage refinancing. Assuming the same "good" search
| conversion rates, you're paying $600 for the conversion at
| a $30 CPC. (I suspect the conversion rate on something like
| mortgage refinancing is probably lower.)
|
| It's been a few years since I was forced to live in the
| advertising world but (1) no it's not a money printing
| machine (except for the ad networks) and in fact (2) I've
| literally never seen a directly attributable positive ROI.
| Mostly the gap is explained away as "well, it's building
| _brand awareness_". Most of the positive results I've seen
| were... questionable. Usually "you didn't acquire new
| customers, you took existing ones or existing leads and
| funneled them into your advertising pipeline and attributed
| them there". Think advertising on your own company's name--
| people searching for your company by name were almost
| definitely going to end up there anyway.
| pmcgrathm wrote:
| Contrary to the belief that advertising is less data-driven, the
| complexity and dependency on feature-rich data sets has increased
| over time. Redundant targeting sometimes happens due to the ad
| objective of maximizing expected revenue over cost. However, it's
| more nuanced in practice.
|
| Advertisers aim to optimize expected revenue over cost within a
| 'payback period', which is typically 1-3 years for large
| advertisers. This is calculated through customer acquisition
| cost, retention, and incrementality (the probability of an ad
| causing conversion).
|
| Only advertisers themselves can effectively calculate
| incrementality due to access to their specific
| conversion/retention metrics. This incrementality, along with the
| optimal mix of channels and ad spend, is the ongoing challenge
| for sophisticated advertisers. It involves multi-objective
| optimization across millions of ad assets, campaigns, and
| targeting criteria.
|
| Privacy regulations since 2015 and subsequent laws like GDPR and
| CCPA have led to more reliance on probabilistic modeling for
| targeting. The entire pipeline of targeting, engagement,
| conversion, and retention forecasts are now based on
| probabilistic models.
|
| While ad networks offer simplified scaling solutions like 'target
| roas' and 'campaign budget optimization', they're more useful for
| average advertisers with limited internal resources - eg, they
| can't justify hiring ML SWEs, quant traders, technical PMs, etc.
|
| Advertising has become even _more_ data-driven and arbitrage
| gains for sophistication have _increased_. Profound gains can be
| made with investments in marketing and forecasting science,
| similar to the operations of a quant trading firm.
|
| Source: I've managed $10B+ through automated ad spend systems
| since 2012.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| How much more effective would ad spend be if ads were solely
| served to people with a decent bit of disposable income? I
| would guess the return on investment is almost all due to
| buyers with cash to spend more than anything, and those 40% of
| Americans with like $400 in the bank (if those popular stats
| are to be believed) are merely an expense serving them
| advertising content for products they are unlikely to ever buy.
|
| You already see this with some goods so its certainly at least
| somewhat effective, e.g. luxury watch ads in beverly hills
| contrasted with military recruitment billboards in south LA.
| thethethethe wrote:
| Ehh I find it hard to believe that a multi-trillion dollar
| industry is a grift based on this single person's collection of
| anecdotes. If online ads didn't result in measurable customer
| conversions, I have a feeling that the millions of business using
| them would stop.
|
| Disc: Google employee, not ads though
| agentgumshoe wrote:
| Perhaps, people are sold on the idea that it works even if it
| doesn't at all, and so the people selling those ideas make lots
| of money. Like gambling.
| thethethethe wrote:
| Again, it seems unlikely that millions of people running
| businesses are that stupid.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| It seems even more unlikely that millions of business
| owners would be sufficiently knowledgable in statistics to
| even test these things.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > I find it hard to believe that a multi-trillion dollar
| industry is a grift
|
| Have you ever seen a real estate agent?
| thethethethe wrote:
| Yeah I have and they provided guidance and knowledge
| surrounding financing, bidding, regulations, etc that I did
| not have.
|
| Can we build a society without the need for real estate
| agents? Perhaps. Would that society be better? Probably. But
| saying they are simply a grift is obviously untrue
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| Okay Homeopathy is a better example -it's great businesses
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| There are so many industries that exist like this. The concept
| of a car dealership was obviated in a few short years once car
| manufacturers grew enough to bear the burden of production as
| well as sales and service, so car dealers essentially got their
| business protected by law in many states. Something the horse
| stable owners were never able to do.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I always feel that a good deal of data-driven anything is
| basically modern divination. The median data-driven decision
| might as well have been based on haruspicy.
|
| You can construct experiments to demonstrate damn near anything
| is true, and without (or even with) a rigorous background in
| statistics and scientific methodology, it's very hard to examine
| the supposed evidence.
|
| I know I say this a lot, but constructing solid experiments is
| time consuming and difficult. It's hard even if you you're trying
| to be fair. Professors routinely get this wrong despite a literal
| decade of formal training in the scientific method and half a
| lifetime of practical experience with this exact craft; despite
| how fucking up puts their career, reputation and livelihood in
| jeopardy. Not only does this happen _a lot_ , bad science
| routinely slips through peer review as well.
|
| That's the state of affairs in the spaces that in general aren't
| extremely adversarial, where the people involved in constructing
| the experiments in general don't have a a vested interest in
| trying to mislead you. (Scientific fraud still happens of course,
| but Jan Hendrik Schon is the exception and not the rule)
| stemlord wrote:
| One doesn't even need to observe all this to recognize the
| simple fact that craigslist is much nicer to use than twitter,
| reddit, tiktok and craigslist hasn't changed in decades I dont
| think.
| sealeck wrote:
| If this is true, then why do more people use EBay, etc?
|
| Is it only their marketing power, or perhaps something about
| the platform better?
|
| Not trying to be confrontational, just interested in finding
| out why.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > If this is true, then why do more people use EBay
|
| To be honest Ebay, just like Craigslist, didn't change much
| in the last 20 years.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| If you want to take a lot of a thousand products from
| aliexpress and sell them globally on the internet, ebay is
| your platform. If you want to sell something of yours
| locally or rent a local apartment, craigslist is your
| platform. These platforms reflect these usages when you
| browse them. Local results from people who just want to
| move a single item in their home vs some global drop
| shipping arbitrage opportunity will always be of higher
| quality.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Local results from people who just want to move a
| single item in their home vs some global drop shipping
| arbitrage opportunity will always be of higher quality.
|
| Sometimes you want one of those Chinese paper cutters, or
| reasonably priced leather tools. Ebay is mostly good,
| despite itself. They've also barely changed the UI in my
| memory, and I've got a 20 year old account.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| eBay is still useful for finding obscure, secondhand
| objects. The geographical reach is an asset vs Craigslist.
| detourdog wrote:
| eBay is my main shopping site. If a vendor doesn't
| maintain their own web store I usual can find it on eBay.
| The eBay vendor may have their own web store and I use
| that.
| User23 wrote:
| > You can construct experiments to demonstrate damn near
| anything is true, and without (or even with) a rigorous
| background in statistics and scientific methodology, it's very
| hard to examine the supposed evidence.
|
| One time I was at this silly daylong corporate team building
| event where they assigned us to groups and had us do
| "experiments." As it happened one of my group members has a PhD
| in Particle Physics and the look on his face was something
| else. Needless to say he didn't bother telling the take charge
| type that her experiment design was entirely nonsensical,
| because why bother, but I was amused.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| ANOVA is that PBS show right?
| specialist wrote:
| > _...don 't have a a vested interest in trying to mislead
| you._
|
| I witnessed this.
|
| I briefly worked on the recommendations team for a fashion
| retailer, doing yeoman plumbing and maintenance. Basically an
| in-house equiv of RichRelevance.com.
|
| So, so much data and logging.
|
| Alas, after cutting out all the obfuscation layers and steps,
| the "lift" attributed to the team's exquisite algos proved
| illusory. Some >80% of the conversions came from the "recently
| viewed" rule. Whereas the conversation attributed to the algos
| consuming most of our dev and compute resources was basically
| noise.
|
| I wouldn't say our (very smart) data scientists were fooling
| themselves, necessarily. More like the feedback loops were
| never fully validated. (Familiar story of non-programmer domain
| experts hoisting a POC, which then was promoted to production.
| Maintenance hell.)
|
| Coincidentally, FWIW, my bro has worked in ad tech (Avenue
| A/Microsoft, RichRelevance, others?). He's got a math skillset.
| Was a true believer. It took a long time, but he eventually
| lost his "faith" that digital advertising (as they were doing
| it) was effective, on the balance.
|
| Also FWIW, during my brief stint, I advocated
| "personalization". What I imagine StitchFix is doing. I'd love
| to know, for real, how they're doing. Like the split between
| algos and human "style consultants".
| goodcharles wrote:
| Meanwhile, people with no scientific training are entrusted to
| run A/B tests and other web experiments.
|
| Practically all web marketing experiments and analysis is
| invalid, and not replicable. But it pays the bills for everyone
| to pretend its legitimate.
| akiselev wrote:
| I've worked at several startups now where the people in
| charge of A/B testing couldn't design a single A/B test that
| returned statistically significant results out of dozens of
| attempts each. Not. A. Single. One. Even the so called
| experts. And that's using their own calculations, which were
| already poorly designed attempts at p hacking.
|
| The worst part is that some of the tests were still used to
| justify decisions to and by management. _SMH_
| parpfish wrote:
| Is that the fault of the experiment? Or was it a weak
| manipulation and no-result was correct (e.g., changing the
| purchase button to a slightly different shade of green and
| expecting a higher conversion rate)?
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| There's always the famous case of Uber made 120M cuts[2] in
| their 150M adspend, nothing absolutely changed in their app
| installs. [1]
|
| [1] https://thehustle.co/01072021-uber-ad-spend/
|
| [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/01/02/when-
| bi...
| kurthr wrote:
| Which explains why I've been getting ads for brides' maid
| dresses.
|
| However, it also seems as if a tuned LLM could look at the
| corpus of my on-line profile (mail, FB, HN) and produce a model
| of my attention and commentary (positive/negative). Then that
| model (or several models) could be tested against various ads
| to determine which are more likely to produce positive
| responses. Right now I think that would be too expensive except
| for very high value ads/targets, but perhaps pricing will come
| down and non-keyword based advertising might appear.
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| Absolutely not. Advertising is applied sociology, not
| psychology. Ads don't care about your personal wants or
| desires, they only care about Bayesian probabilities across
| broad target audience groups. (E.g. "dog lovers are X more
| likely to Y than cat lovers".)
|
| LLMs are useless in this domain.
| hakfoo wrote:
| That makes sense if we're looking at broad-scope
| advertising.
|
| I always figured there are some verticals where the value
| per acquisition was high enough, and the product narrowly-
| scoped enough, where it might make sense to microtarget
| individual customers-- profiling them individually and
| building custom messages for each of them.
|
| The obvious target would be the narrow-scope prescription
| drugs-- all those ads that say "If you have XYZ-positive,
| PDQ-negative Exploding Sphincter Syndrome Type XVI with
| Sprinkles and Cheese Sauce". Presumably there are only a
| few hundred people with that condition in the country, but
| you're spending a lot of money to reach _everyone else_ to
| try to catch them in your net.
|
| Super-premium luxury goods might also fit there, but I
| wonder if the brand risk would be too high. Rolls Royce
| probably knows the 200 customers most likely to buy their
| new model, but it might not fit their brand to actually put
| together a campaign that seemed like they were actually
| TRYING to sell cars.
| kurthr wrote:
| If the cost is reasonable enough, it doesn't even have to
| be crafted for the individual, simply target them with
| one of multiple ads, which are modeled to have the
| highest (positive) effect... If you're not going to
| interact with it showing it to you has minimal effect. If
| one is modeled to have 5x higher interactivity, that's
| the one you want to show.
|
| I think there are high value customers for whom this
| probably makes sense, but only if those doing the
| targeting make money from it. Right now you're the
| product, but the supplier is the one doing the targeting
| (or not) and the customer doesn't know enough about their
| potential customers to target. The suppliers don't really
| make money by effective targeting.
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