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So what is the strongest plausible interpretation here? Because the article is full of body image issues and being jealous that somebody else in the ads looks b

by nukeop 9y ago

So what is the strongest plausible interpretation here? Because the article is full of body image issues and being jealous that somebody else in the ads looks better.

dang 9y ago
That's an exercise for the reader, and not a difficult one. I'm not here to argue the point so much as let you know that if you don't study the site rules and follow them properly, we will ban you.
MBCook 9y ago
So let’s take away the sexualized imagery aspect. If huge percentage of the ads you saw on Instagram were pictures of legs with varicose veins advertising some sort of treatment… would you want to see that all the time? Wouldn’t you start to get annoyed and grossed out that they keep shoving that in your face when you’re trying to look at pictures of cats/cars/landscapes/buildings/whatever? The author doesn’t seem to be complaining the ads exist, they seem to be complaining about the quantity/frequency of that kind of imagery.
nperez 9y ago
It's food for thought if you work in ad tech. Targeting based on tags/interests can be effective, but understanding the visual content of an ad and how it will be received by the user is a different problem that could result in better targeting if solved. Suppose all ads were tagged for their visual content and their ad-hiding functionality looked for categories of content that you frequently hide. That data could be used for better targeting and passed all the way back to creative agencies to influence design decisions. How is that not relevant to HN?
- tinymollusk 9y ago
  It is my belief that adtech companies' top priority is to make money. They do this by increasing clickthrough rate and cost per click. As long as they don't fall below some "trust" threshold (subjective emotional judgement from ill-informed customers pulling threads from obfuscated-at-best PR releases), they are golden. From that perspective, why would they want to "better" target using proxy metrics for the ones you really care about? Focusing on the CTR[0], why use tags or interests when you can use clickthrough rate itself? There are so many factors in what causes someone to click; it's a more effective strategy to treat all those factors as a black box, and optimize for the direct behavior you want to encourage. Added bonus, those black box / supercomplex problems can be efficiently optimized by ML. [0] CPC is driven by the advertiser side

by nukeop 9y ago

So what is the strongest plausible interpretation here? Because the article is full of body image issues and being jealous that somebody else in the ads looks better.

dang 9y ago

That's an exercise for the reader, and not a difficult one. I'm not here to argue the point so much as let you know that if you don't study the site rules and follow them properly, we will ban you.

MBCook 9y ago

So let’s take away the sexualized imagery aspect. If huge percentage of the ads you saw on Instagram were pictures of legs with varicose veins advertising some sort of treatment… would you want to see that all the time? Wouldn’t you start to get annoyed and grossed out that they keep shoving that in your face when you’re trying to look at pictures of cats/cars/landscapes/buildings/whatever? The author doesn’t seem to be complaining the ads exist, they seem to be complaining about the quantity/frequency of that kind of imagery.

nperez 9y ago

It's food for thought if you work in ad tech. Targeting based on tags/interests can be effective, but understanding the visual content of an ad and how it will be received by the user is a different problem that could result in better targeting if solved. Suppose all ads were tagged for their visual content and their ad-hiding functionality looked for categories of content that you frequently hide. That data could be used for better targeting and passed all the way back to creative agencies to influence design decisions. How is that not relevant to HN?

tinymollusk 9y ago
It is my belief that adtech companies' top priority is to make money. They do this by increasing clickthrough rate and cost per click. As long as they don't fall below some "trust" threshold (subjective emotional judgement from ill-informed customers pulling threads from obfuscated-at-best PR releases), they are golden. From that perspective, why would they want to "better" target using proxy metrics for the ones you really care about? Focusing on the CTR[0], why use tags or interests when you can use clickthrough rate itself? There are so many factors in what causes someone to click; it's a more effective strategy to treat all those factors as a black box, and optimize for the direct behavior you want to encourage. Added bonus, those black box / supercomplex problems can be efficiently optimized by ML. [0] CPC is driven by the advertiser side