6 ms·

I weigh those ads very negatively. Looking at you, Grammarly. Seriously, why do they play the same ad over and over again, one after the other, to the same view

I weigh those ads very negatively. Looking at you, Grammarly. Seriously, why do they play the same ad over and over again, one after the other, to the same viewer? What with all that AI and machine learning and deep neural networks, they can't tell the same session has been served that same ad 50,000 times already?

ryanwaggoner 9y ago
Haha, this made me laugh. It’s humorous that we’re living in a period where a vocal group of critics declares that ML, AI, and incredible amounts of data and tracking are being leveraged to push ads at me so skillfully and subtly that I’m helpless to resist. Meanwhile, like you said, I’m served the same handful of annoying ads over and over, for products I’d never consider buying. Where are all the ads for stuff that’s so desirable and targeted to me that I just can’t resist purchasing them?? Not saying that critics of advertising have no valid claims, but the juxtaposition is funny.
- hoopladler 9y ago
  I think it was always a bit like this. You can read what people thought about advertising in the 60's, and they had the same kind of paranoid fantasies we have today, although less focused on tech, more on psychology. In reality, advertising psychology then was much as it is now - basically quackery, with a side of 'thought leadership' by guys that really should have stuck to squash. That said, I think the reason why machine-driven advertising is so much better than its predecessors is simply that the predecessors were really awful. They used to do market research by installing double-sided mirrors in department stores then taking notes on what people looked at. It was absurd. Now, there's actually an even-odds chance that a targeted advert will meet somebody that might be vaguely interested - and that's absolutely orders of magnitude better than a billboard. And also, to be honest, this whole complaint about cost-performance indices is a bit absurd - since as far as I can gather, they were basically oneiromancy before Google and Facebook came along.
  - methodin 9y ago
    "They used to do market research by installing double-sided mirrors in department stores then taking notes on what people looked at." I'm not so sure we have progressed that much since then. You search for something on Google, swap to Facebook and an ad appears for that same exact thing on the sidebar - not really any different than using browsing as a determining factor for desire to purchase. A small aspect of ads, I know but I found it such a ridiculous truth that I can't imagine the rest of their systems are actually all that smart.
    - code_duck 9y ago
      We have progressed since then to the extent that now, stores use technology to observe the behavior of every individual shopper in detail, all over the store.
    - devjam 9y ago
      Furthermore, they continue to serve you the ad for the same products, even after you've purchased them.
      - imron 9y ago
        Internet advertising sounds horrible. I marvel that so many people still put up with it.
        C4stor 9y ago
        In my experience, it's because internet advertising is indeed globally horrible, but advertising on internet is often not about global effects. To give you a perspective, efficient "performance" (the kind which wants you to buy now) advertising is a click ratio of about half a percent on ads, which vastly outperforms the basic performance one, usually having a ratio of about a tenth of a percent. Of those fractions of a percent, a fraction of a percent will actually buy... That still means ads missed the target 995 times out of 1000, so are still globally horrible. Nevertheless, since ads on the internet are so cheap (prices are often negotiated by 1000 ads, to make it a bit more tangible, and we're talking like 5$ per 1000 ads here), it's still sometimes worth it. So yeah, the global experience is crap, but that's often not the point anyway.
- WmyEE0UsWAwC2i 9y ago
  It seems the ML's cost-reward function maximises profit for the platform.
  - maksimum 9y ago
    There was a great article posted here a few months about the internal market maker that Facebook uses to decide which ads to display. Long story short unless a particular platform is the only way to deliver ads to some group of people, the platform needs to keep its customers (the ad purchasers) happy with what they've bought.
- taneq 9y ago
  > I’m served the same handful of annoying ads over and over, for products I’d never consider buying. Or worse, for big-ticket items that you'd only buy infrequently. HEY THIS GUY BOUGHT A DRONE LETS SEND HIM DRONE ADS! WAIT NO NOW HE BOUGHT A CAR HE'S A CAR BUYER SEND CAR ADS. No, you silly equation, I just bought a car, that means I'm NOT in the market for a car.
  - mcbits 9y ago
    This strategy may actually work for drones. I know very few people who own a drone and don't also own five drones.
    - eropple 9y ago
      Can confirm, it works for cameras too. This brought to you by the menagerie of Panasonics now littering my office...
    - Vendan 9y ago
      or who own a drone and haven't crashed at least one drone
  - spupy 9y ago
    On some ads (Google?) you can click an X button to select a reason for not wanting to see that ad anymore. If I recall correctly one of the options is that you've already purchased that item. It actually worked in my case, but guess what - the advertiser now has even more info on you!
    - JetSpiegel 9y ago
      Not only Google slurps all your personal information to better target ads it shows you, you have to do extra work on top of that to keep them relevant. That's rich.
- jstarfish 9y ago
  The problem is that their models are so broken, they require an insatiable amount of invasive training data to try to correct for their erroneous conclusions. Their failures drive even more affronts to privacy. The cycle continues. Then they sell us household gadgets to sink their hooks deeper into our lives. Microphones listening to conversations won't be enough; soon we'll herald the coming of new "smart" appliances like the Google Toilet, which plays your favorite music, recommends better posture, sprays you off when done and stealthily analyzes your stool samples for markers to see if the Captain Crunch ads they bombarded you with over the last week led to a conversion. It doesn't work, but failure is clearly no impediment to progress.
- taurath 9y ago
  Any chance it’s actually all a house of cards and direct to consumer advertising doesn’t actually doesn’t do much to begin with?
  - taneq 9y ago
    "Half of all money spent on advertising is wasted - the problem is we don't know which half."
    - JetSpiegel 9y ago
      Cut ad spending in two (random choice) and put that money into product development, or just cut prices. Win win.
      - taneq 9y ago
        Genius! We should also throw a randomly selected 50% of job applicants' resumes in the bin. After all, we don't want to hire anyone who's unlucky!
- wolco 9y ago
  Those ads simply pay more and / or have more inventory to burn.
- aianus 9y ago
  Say what you will but I haven't seen a diaper or tampon ad in years so I'm pretty happy with the improvement over the untargeted advertising of the past. Grammarly is at least within the realm of things that have some possible use to me.
snr 9y ago
On facebook though, I actually disabled my ad blocker because I wanted to see the ads. However, I immediately skip over any videos that show ads. My general rule of thumb is if a video has an ad, I don't need to watch the video.
arel 9y ago
The single most annoying set of adverts on the internet. Hammy with extra ham on top.
CodeCube 9y ago
OMG yes!! I honestly really mostly kinda don't mind ads for media that I value (youtube, spotify, etc) ... however, when it comes down to it, when I get served the same freaking ad over and over and over and over, it just drives me up the wall! I'd go as far as to say that the end user would be more receptive to ads, if they filled ads with pro-bono charity ads promoting some charity or another ... then the user wouldn't start to hate ads, and they could probably write off the ads they donated.
prepend 9y ago
It’s because the message that the algorithm is trying to match you to ads you are interested in is BS. They are matching you to ads that will make you, and others like you buy. So they are ok with pissing off lots of people since it results in shares. The reality is that people don’t actually want enough to cover ad revenue, but ads make them buy more.
nitwit005 9y ago
Unfortunately, the repetition is probably intentional. It's like the old idea of constantly playing the company jingle. They hope to bludgeon the product into your brain through brute force. I'm sure it raises "brand awareness" measurements, at the cost of making people hate them.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
knicholes 9y ago
Sounds like the advertiser needs to create a progression of videos/display ads instead of showing the same one. I work for a company that provides tools to create such ads. Maybe they need me. :D We definitely know how many times we've shown ads to which people (even across devices).
- fjsolwmv 9y ago
  How is that possible. You don't know how many YouTube vids I am watching vs someone else who watches more or less per day.
  - knicholes 9y ago
    I was referring mostly to display advertising, but with video ads, VAST compliant players sent http requests to whichever endpoint specified based on different quantiles (start, 25%, 50%, 75%, video finish). This endpoint would be our servers so we can track which video and how much you've seen. The same is true for display, where we get an impression. You load the image which hits our ad servers, along with your cookie (who are you), and redirects to the actual image.
dmix 9y ago
I believe `randyrand` was talking about weighing the advertising company based on the Youtube videos their ads play on, not which videos that ad company produces...
tomlock 9y ago
This struck a chord with me. I worked in AdTech for two years and wanted to pull my own eyes out because of this. The reason this happens is that nobody involved gets anything out of stopping this happening. Incoming extreme cynicism. First off, the marketers are still mostly using demographic segments - often a marketer will encounter a machine-learning model, and their first question is "who are these people" and when you can't explain how the model works, they revert to using demographic segments because they trust them more. This means they often do analysis demographically, and over target people in particular narrow age and gender demographics because they did better last month by chance. Second, management want to keep their budgets large so their resumes look good. Their desire is to increase the amount of people they can target, while simultaneously appearing to work on interesting tech. Since social and video have recently been en vogue, spend increases on these platforms, while projects focus less on increasing spend efficiency and more on taking credit for sales by tracking customers through the pipeline. This creates a weird scenario where everyone says they're using sophisticated machine learning models, but the contractors and consultants involved are glorified powerpoint factories. Third, the big silos, google and Facebook, probably have some incredibly sophisticated models of consumer behaviour that are incredibly efficient - but why would they want to give their advertising customers something that would reduce spend?
ransom1538 9y ago
I am not sure the advertising party has a say. You give a budget, put your media in, and start the campaign. I don't believe the obvious feature exists: "Only play my ad once per user". It definitely wouldn't be a money maker for google. Every advertising party could use this feature to cheaply sweep through all the unique eye balls.
- bcoates 9y ago
  At least Youtube and Facebook offer this feature. It's pretty standard. The problem is that a lot of their inventory is an inch wide and a mile deep. The rule is roughly "narrow targeting, cheap impressions, reasonable frequency, pick any one". A shady ad agency (but I repeat myself) will never pick "reasonable frequency" because their advertisers aren't sophisticated enough to ask if their ad is being sent to one person 50 times in a day. It only takes one buyer to not set the frequency control option to spam you with the same ad over and over -- everyone else is one-and-done.
mdani 9y ago
Its not what you want to see or buy - they’ll push the ad from a provider who’s bidding highest and providing them most revenue.
dorfsmay 9y ago
I'm always wondering who thinks it's a good idea to show me ads for a product I just bought, ad that I never saw before bought the item. Similarly, twitter showing ads for Mac/windows only product when my user-agent clearly says Linux!
fjsolwmv 9y ago
It's because grammarly is paying a boatload more than anyone else would
stevenh 9y ago
Grammarly's ad links directly to an immediate single-click-to-install page for their suspicious browser extension whose fine print asks for total access to look at your private webpage data, keystrokes, ability to inject mysterious scripts into every single page you visit, including email, banking, cryptocurrency exchange login pages, etc. With over 10 million active installations, they could easily use this absurd amount of power to profit in a shady manner. The ROI for their ad spend must be incredible because the average tech-naive person just has to fall for it once and then this extension is installed for the remaining lifetime of their computer. The whole thing has a stench similar to the Hola browser extension botnet incident.
IshKebab 9y ago
"Hi, I'm <E-list celebrity> and I made my own website..." Ugh. Seriously though I suspect it is because their algorithms have decided that you like X and therefore they only show you adverts about X, which is a small subset of all available adverts, so you get the same ones again and again. On TV they can't target so accurately so you basically get shown every advert. This means there are more to show and it is less repetitive. I also think advertisers don't mind showing the same person their advert a million times. It may be annoying but it works - name one competitor to Grammarly off the top of your head.
- fjsolwmv 9y ago
  My brain is a competitor to Grammarly
wastedhours 9y ago
Yep, Grammarly and Wix seem to be pervasive on the channels I watch. I have no interest in using either of them, they're usually out of context with the content I want to watch, and the only times I watch them is to make sure my favourite channels get the cash (although signalling that they should target me more...)

ryanwaggoner 9y ago

Haha, this made me laugh. It’s humorous that we’re living in a period where a vocal group of critics declares that ML, AI, and incredible amounts of data and tracking are being leveraged to push ads at me so skillfully and subtly that I’m helpless to resist. Meanwhile, like you said, I’m served the same handful of annoying ads over and over, for products I’d never consider buying. Where are all the ads for stuff that’s so desirable and targeted to me that I just can’t resist purchasing them?? Not saying that critics of advertising have no valid claims, but the juxtaposition is funny.

hoopladler 9y ago
I think it was always a bit like this. You can read what people thought about advertising in the 60's, and they had the same kind of paranoid fantasies we have today, although less focused on tech, more on psychology. In reality, advertising psychology then was much as it is now - basically quackery, with a side of 'thought leadership' by guys that really should have stuck to squash. That said, I think the reason why machine-driven advertising is so much better than its predecessors is simply that the predecessors were really awful. They used to do market research by installing double-sided mirrors in department stores then taking notes on what people looked at. It was absurd. Now, there's actually an even-odds chance that a targeted advert will meet somebody that might be vaguely interested - and that's absolutely orders of magnitude better than a billboard. And also, to be honest, this whole complaint about cost-performance indices is a bit absurd - since as far as I can gather, they were basically oneiromancy before Google and Facebook came along.
- methodin 9y ago
  "They used to do market research by installing double-sided mirrors in department stores then taking notes on what people looked at." I'm not so sure we have progressed that much since then. You search for something on Google, swap to Facebook and an ad appears for that same exact thing on the sidebar - not really any different than using browsing as a determining factor for desire to purchase. A small aspect of ads, I know but I found it such a ridiculous truth that I can't imagine the rest of their systems are actually all that smart.
  - code_duck 9y ago
    We have progressed since then to the extent that now, stores use technology to observe the behavior of every individual shopper in detail, all over the store.
  - devjam 9y ago
    Furthermore, they continue to serve you the ad for the same products, even after you've purchased them.
    - imron 9y ago
      Internet advertising sounds horrible. I marvel that so many people still put up with it.
      - C4stor 9y ago
        In my experience, it's because internet advertising is indeed globally horrible, but advertising on internet is often not about global effects. To give you a perspective, efficient "performance" (the kind which wants you to buy now) advertising is a click ratio of about half a percent on ads, which vastly outperforms the basic performance one, usually having a ratio of about a tenth of a percent. Of those fractions of a percent, a fraction of a percent will actually buy... That still means ads missed the target 995 times out of 1000, so are still globally horrible. Nevertheless, since ads on the internet are so cheap (prices are often negotiated by 1000 ads, to make it a bit more tangible, and we're talking like 5$ per 1000 ads here), it's still sometimes worth it. So yeah, the global experience is crap, but that's often not the point anyway.
WmyEE0UsWAwC2i 9y ago
It seems the ML's cost-reward function maximises profit for the platform.
- maksimum 9y ago
  There was a great article posted here a few months about the internal market maker that Facebook uses to decide which ads to display. Long story short unless a particular platform is the only way to deliver ads to some group of people, the platform needs to keep its customers (the ad purchasers) happy with what they've bought.
taneq 9y ago
> I’m served the same handful of annoying ads over and over, for products I’d never consider buying. Or worse, for big-ticket items that you'd only buy infrequently. HEY THIS GUY BOUGHT A DRONE LETS SEND HIM DRONE ADS! WAIT NO NOW HE BOUGHT A CAR HE'S A CAR BUYER SEND CAR ADS. No, you silly equation, I just bought a car, that means I'm NOT in the market for a car.
- mcbits 9y ago
  This strategy may actually work for drones. I know very few people who own a drone and don't also own five drones.
  - eropple 9y ago
    Can confirm, it works for cameras too. This brought to you by the menagerie of Panasonics now littering my office...
  - Vendan 9y ago
    or who own a drone and haven't crashed at least one drone
- spupy 9y ago
  On some ads (Google?) you can click an X button to select a reason for not wanting to see that ad anymore. If I recall correctly one of the options is that you've already purchased that item. It actually worked in my case, but guess what - the advertiser now has even more info on you!
  - JetSpiegel 9y ago
    Not only Google slurps all your personal information to better target ads it shows you, you have to do extra work on top of that to keep them relevant. That's rich.
jstarfish 9y ago
The problem is that their models are so broken, they require an insatiable amount of invasive training data to try to correct for their erroneous conclusions. Their failures drive even more affronts to privacy. The cycle continues. Then they sell us household gadgets to sink their hooks deeper into our lives. Microphones listening to conversations won't be enough; soon we'll herald the coming of new "smart" appliances like the Google Toilet, which plays your favorite music, recommends better posture, sprays you off when done and stealthily analyzes your stool samples for markers to see if the Captain Crunch ads they bombarded you with over the last week led to a conversion. It doesn't work, but failure is clearly no impediment to progress.
taurath 9y ago
Any chance it’s actually all a house of cards and direct to consumer advertising doesn’t actually doesn’t do much to begin with?
- taneq 9y ago
  "Half of all money spent on advertising is wasted - the problem is we don't know which half."
  - JetSpiegel 9y ago
    Cut ad spending in two (random choice) and put that money into product development, or just cut prices. Win win.
    - taneq 9y ago
      Genius! We should also throw a randomly selected 50% of job applicants' resumes in the bin. After all, we don't want to hire anyone who's unlucky!
wolco 9y ago
Those ads simply pay more and / or have more inventory to burn.
aianus 9y ago
Say what you will but I haven't seen a diaper or tampon ad in years so I'm pretty happy with the improvement over the untargeted advertising of the past. Grammarly is at least within the realm of things that have some possible use to me.

snr 9y ago

On facebook though, I actually disabled my ad blocker because I wanted to see the ads. However, I immediately skip over any videos that show ads. My general rule of thumb is if a video has an ad, I don't need to watch the video.

arel 9y ago

The single most annoying set of adverts on the internet. Hammy with extra ham on top.

CodeCube 9y ago

OMG yes!! I honestly really mostly kinda don't mind ads for media that I value (youtube, spotify, etc) ... however, when it comes down to it, when I get served the same freaking ad over and over and over and over, it just drives me up the wall! I'd go as far as to say that the end user would be more receptive to ads, if they filled ads with pro-bono charity ads promoting some charity or another ... then the user wouldn't start to hate ads, and they could probably write off the ads they donated.

prepend 9y ago

It’s because the message that the algorithm is trying to match you to ads you are interested in is BS. They are matching you to ads that will make you, and others like you buy. So they are ok with pissing off lots of people since it results in shares. The reality is that people don’t actually want enough to cover ad revenue, but ads make them buy more.

nitwit005 9y ago

Unfortunately, the repetition is probably intentional. It's like the old idea of constantly playing the company jingle. They hope to bludgeon the product into your brain through brute force. I'm sure it raises "brand awareness" measurements, at the cost of making people hate them.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

knicholes 9y ago

Sounds like the advertiser needs to create a progression of videos/display ads instead of showing the same one. I work for a company that provides tools to create such ads. Maybe they need me. :D We definitely know how many times we've shown ads to which people (even across devices).

fjsolwmv 9y ago
How is that possible. You don't know how many YouTube vids I am watching vs someone else who watches more or less per day.
- knicholes 9y ago
  I was referring mostly to display advertising, but with video ads, VAST compliant players sent http requests to whichever endpoint specified based on different quantiles (start, 25%, 50%, 75%, video finish). This endpoint would be our servers so we can track which video and how much you've seen. The same is true for display, where we get an impression. You load the image which hits our ad servers, along with your cookie (who are you), and redirects to the actual image.

dmix 9y ago

I believe `randyrand` was talking about weighing the advertising company based on the Youtube videos their ads play on, not which videos that ad company produces...

tomlock 9y ago

This struck a chord with me. I worked in AdTech for two years and wanted to pull my own eyes out because of this. The reason this happens is that nobody involved gets anything out of stopping this happening. Incoming extreme cynicism. First off, the marketers are still mostly using demographic segments - often a marketer will encounter a machine-learning model, and their first question is "who are these people" and when you can't explain how the model works, they revert to using demographic segments because they trust them more. This means they often do analysis demographically, and over target people in particular narrow age and gender demographics because they did better last month by chance. Second, management want to keep their budgets large so their resumes look good. Their desire is to increase the amount of people they can target, while simultaneously appearing to work on interesting tech. Since social and video have recently been en vogue, spend increases on these platforms, while projects focus less on increasing spend efficiency and more on taking credit for sales by tracking customers through the pipeline. This creates a weird scenario where everyone says they're using sophisticated machine learning models, but the contractors and consultants involved are glorified powerpoint factories. Third, the big silos, google and Facebook, probably have some incredibly sophisticated models of consumer behaviour that are incredibly efficient - but why would they want to give their advertising customers something that would reduce spend?

ransom1538 9y ago

I am not sure the advertising party has a say. You give a budget, put your media in, and start the campaign. I don't believe the obvious feature exists: "Only play my ad once per user". It definitely wouldn't be a money maker for google. Every advertising party could use this feature to cheaply sweep through all the unique eye balls.

bcoates 9y ago
At least Youtube and Facebook offer this feature. It's pretty standard. The problem is that a lot of their inventory is an inch wide and a mile deep. The rule is roughly "narrow targeting, cheap impressions, reasonable frequency, pick any one". A shady ad agency (but I repeat myself) will never pick "reasonable frequency" because their advertisers aren't sophisticated enough to ask if their ad is being sent to one person 50 times in a day. It only takes one buyer to not set the frequency control option to spam you with the same ad over and over -- everyone else is one-and-done.

mdani 9y ago

Its not what you want to see or buy - they’ll push the ad from a provider who’s bidding highest and providing them most revenue.

dorfsmay 9y ago

I'm always wondering who thinks it's a good idea to show me ads for a product I just bought, ad that I never saw before bought the item. Similarly, twitter showing ads for Mac/windows only product when my user-agent clearly says Linux!

fjsolwmv 9y ago

It's because grammarly is paying a boatload more than anyone else would

stevenh 9y ago

Grammarly's ad links directly to an immediate single-click-to-install page for their suspicious browser extension whose fine print asks for total access to look at your private webpage data, keystrokes, ability to inject mysterious scripts into every single page you visit, including email, banking, cryptocurrency exchange login pages, etc. With over 10 million active installations, they could easily use this absurd amount of power to profit in a shady manner. The ROI for their ad spend must be incredible because the average tech-naive person just has to fall for it once and then this extension is installed for the remaining lifetime of their computer. The whole thing has a stench similar to the Hola browser extension botnet incident.

IshKebab 9y ago

"Hi, I'm <E-list celebrity> and I made my own website..." Ugh. Seriously though I suspect it is because their algorithms have decided that you like X and therefore they only show you adverts about X, which is a small subset of all available adverts, so you get the same ones again and again. On TV they can't target so accurately so you basically get shown every advert. This means there are more to show and it is less repetitive. I also think advertisers don't mind showing the same person their advert a million times. It may be annoying but it works - name one competitor to Grammarly off the top of your head.

fjsolwmv 9y ago
My brain is a competitor to Grammarly

wastedhours 9y ago

Yep, Grammarly and Wix seem to be pervasive on the channels I watch. I have no interest in using either of them, they're usually out of context with the content I want to watch, and the only times I watch them is to make sure my favourite channels get the cash (although signalling that they should target me more...)