2 ms·

> It doesn't satisfactorily make the case that targeting the audience rather than the topic-related websites doesn't work or make sense. I've been saying this

> It doesn't satisfactorily make the case that targeting the audience rather than the topic-related websites doesn't work or make sense. I've been saying this needs investigating for a long time. From my understanding of things like triggers, priming, threshold for action, etc -- you're probably doing yourself a disservice having out of context advertising. When you advertise in context, you get constructive interference between the context and your message, leading to a more powerful effect -- your buyer was ready to hear what you wanted to sell; when you advertise out of context, you get destructive interference between the context and your message, leading to muddled or even negative effects -- advertising roast beef on a porn site is probably bad for all three parties! (No matter how much the person viewing porn likes roast beef.) "Targeted" rather than topic based advertising ignores basic facets of human psychology (eg, that we're very context based animals) in order to pump up ad stock and sell more volume of a diluted product -- because all of the "targeting" is fundamentally a worse replacement for the signal shown by visiting a topical website. It's about inventory fluffing, not efficiency. That said, the article didn't do the best job supporting that point.

TeMPOraL 9y ago
Here's my view: advertising industry, being mostly about manipulating and scamming people, is even better at doing that to itself than to people outside. Between customers and the company that seeks them, there's so many ad-industry providers now that it's easier for them to manipulate tooling and metrics than to actually deliver in an efficient manner. The ways I've personally seen this happen mostly boil down to marketing people with absolutely no understanding of statistics showing "metrics" to their customer, which "show" that they're indeed doing a great job. But since the customer has no fucking clue about statistics either (why should they, that's why they're hiring a marketing company, right?), they believe that - and they have no direct way to verify the effectiveness anyway. I.e. incompetent party selling bullshit to another incompetent party, but as long as both parties believe things are going in a good direction, money changes hands, and everyone is happy. And that's just double incompetence. I suppose you can excuse people doing divination from whale charts. But how many similar things happen when the marketing provider party just straight exploits their clueless customers? Also some thoughts on this topic from the times of Optimizely debacle: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10873226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10873226.

TeMPOraL 9y ago

Here's my view: advertising industry, being mostly about manipulating and scamming people, is even better at doing that to itself than to people outside. Between customers and the company that seeks them, there's so many ad-industry providers now that it's easier for them to manipulate tooling and metrics than to actually deliver in an efficient manner. The ways I've personally seen this happen mostly boil down to marketing people with absolutely no understanding of statistics showing "metrics" to their customer, which "show" that they're indeed doing a great job. But since the customer has no fucking clue about statistics either (why should they, that's why they're hiring a marketing company, right?), they believe that - and they have no direct way to verify the effectiveness anyway. I.e. incompetent party selling bullshit to another incompetent party, but as long as both parties believe things are going in a good direction, money changes hands, and everyone is happy. And that's just double incompetence. I suppose you can excuse people doing divination from whale charts. But how many similar things happen when the marketing provider party just straight exploits their clueless customers? Also some thoughts on this topic from the times of Optimizely debacle: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10873226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10873226.