6 ms·

> by falsely convincing them that an ad view on a screen is worth 1,000 times less than an ad view on printed paper What makes you believe that this hypothetic

> by falsely convincing them that an ad view on a screen is worth 1,000 times less than an ad view on printed paper What makes you believe that this hypothetical comparison is false? The problem with traditional advertising is that everyone sees it, regardless of their interest in the subject matter or lack thereof. As an advertiser you have to pay to show your ad to a lot of people who aren't likely to be interested. What Google and Facebook brought to the game was targeting. If you can target your ads to people who are already interested in that subject -- or even just more likely to be interested than the average person -- then your ads will in fact be more effective dollar per dollar. You avoid paying to show the ad to everyone else who is unlikely to be interested. Some companies like Coca-Cola engage in brand advertising, where their goal is to build awareness and respect for their brand among everyone in the general population. This kind of advertising has less need for precise targeting. But not all companies need this kind of advertising. Plenty of smaller companies are looking to advertise to people who are likely to want their specific product, whether it's a video game or women's clothing or a product for parents of young children, etc. To give a made-up example, if you're trying to sell an indie video game, then you'll spend your small advertising budget much more effectively if you target your ads to people who enjoy video games, than if you target the general population. If you're selling a first-person shooter video game, then you'd like to target your ads to people who play first-person shooter video games (and not necessarily target video game players who only play Farmville or Bejeweled). It's very possible for me to imagine that highly targeted advertising to a segment of people who are interested in a product like that will be 1000 times more effective than traditional advertising that everyone sees. You're paying to show it to far fewer people, and each person is far more likely to act on it.

reaperducer 8y ago
The problem with traditional advertising is that everyone sees it, regardless of their interest in the subject matter or lack thereof. This is false. The internet ad tech companies didn't invent marketing demographics. Advertisers who want to sell things to old people advertise on TV shows and in magazines that appeal to old people. Advertisers who want to sell Product X advertise in places where people who want to buy Product X might see it. No, traditional media doesn't have the granularity or seemingly instant feedback of online ads. But there's a reason that an ad in print has more gravitas and impact on the reader than an online ad. Digital ads are ephemeral, and are forgotten as quickly as they are seen. With the exception of writing an ad in the sand on a wave-washed beach, every single other advertising method has more impact than online ads. What Google and Facebook brought to the game was targeting. I wish that was true. If it was, then I wouldn't be bombarded by ads for things I have no interest in from companies in places I can't buy from. Right now on my Facebook feed: - Ad for a concert by a band I don't like in a city 600 miles away. - Ad for homeowners insurance for a house I don't own from an insurance company that doesn't operate in my state. - Ad for an Xbox video game. I don't own an Xbox, and don't play video games. - Ad for a business credit card for a business I don't own. Tell me again about how Silicon Valley's ad tech industry is benefiting both me, and the advertisers.
- chriswarbo 8y ago
  > But there's a reason that an ad in print has more gravitas and impact on the reader than an online ad. Digital ads are ephemeral, and are forgotten as quickly as they are seen. With the exception of writing an ad in the sand on a wave-washed beach, every single other advertising method has more impact than online ads. This seems to be an argument for "an ad view on a screen is worth 1,000 times less than an ad view on printed paper", which you seem to be arguiing against in parent comments...
  - logfromblammo 8y ago
    Every ad I see is writ across my retina. It fades as the photosensitive opsin chemicals replenish. Every ad I hear is injected into my phonological loop. It fades as the neural activity drops back to normal. An ad is an ad is an ad is an ad is an ad. It does not matter whether it reaches my brain from a computer monitor, a television screen, a radio speaker, or newsprint. I have the choice to attend to it, or not. The argument here is that ads viewed or heard by robots will probably never reach a human brain. The computer-delivered ads make different types of metering and targeting possible, but they also make the advertiser vulnerable to automated exploits and automated blocking. In print, you can extrapolate from statistical modeling and circulation numbers. In television and radio, the same can be done with ratings numbers. On the Internet, there are so many possible metrics. The problem is the advertisers started an arms race they cannot win, because they had to make themselves more useful than the media companies' internal advertising departments. Those guys could sell fractions of a page of static ads. Those ads get served with the same content, every time someone reads the paper. Any targeting has to be based on the predicted audience for the content itself. Men's razors advertised in the sports section; the exact same razors but marketed to women advertised in the lifestyle section. Car, boat, and RV dealers advertised in the business news section. If the online edition of newspapers embedded their own non-scripted copy of static print ads, served from their own servers, from the same places as their article images and stock photos, nobody would bother trying to block them. That's just what newspaper articles look like, to everyone that remembers when they were actual papers that got delivered by kids on bicycles. The ad services that sucker media companies into using them are worth 1000 times less than the ads served in-house, because of all their clever nonsense they attempted in order to trick the media-companies into using them. I don't need to block dumb ads; I might want to, but I don't need to. I do need to block ads that run scripts and set cookies, because they hijack my own resources to make my experience across the entire web worse. There is nothing inherent wrong with writing an article that has a permanent, static set of ads in it. Old media had the full-page, half-page, quarter-page, per-column-inch, and classified ads. A new media article can be pasted into a template, with a fixed number of advertising slots. Show the article template to your registered advertisers, who know your standards for the slots, and let them buy specific slots for specific articles, categories of article, or anywhere on the site. Paste the approved ads into the slots for them, and archive the article page. That's now what the site serves whenever the URL is requested, forevermore. It's the same as going to the library and looking up a newspaper microfiche page from October 15, 1985; the ads are still the same, and just got one more impression.
nradov 8y ago
If targeting works then why do I keep seeing ads for products that I've already purchased and have no intention of buying again any time soon?
- stickfigure 8y ago
  It doesn't run on telepathy. Some people do rebuy those products. And maybe this is just the best ad (of nothing great) that happened to be available at the time. If you want to have any idea of how well advertising works, you have to approach it from the perspective of an advertiser, not an ad target. Then you can get real data. You are a data point of one.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    I'd love to see that data, because my current pet theory is that adtech applies the same morals internally that they do externally - i.e. everyone tries to scam each other, pretending their tools work.
    - stickfigure 8y ago
      The people buying Facebook ads know if they work. You can track customers through every click to the sale. You can experiment with $10 if you want. Try it. I built a large print-on-demand apparel marketplace. Most of the sellers were driving traffic with facebook ads. It worked great. Unfortunately (for the sellers) so many people jumped into the game that they bid up the ad rates. Now Facebook makes most of the money in the tshirt business... but you can't say the system doesn't work.
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        > You can experiment with $10 if you want. Try it. Guess what, I actually thought about doing that just "for science" - setting up some nonsense page, launching a $5-10 ad campaign, and seeing what happens. I.e. measuring the impulse response of the system, in a way. To be clear, I source my distrust to adtech partly from personal experience as well. I worked at a company that also did social media marketing once, in particular it would run content marketing on Facebook for people. I had a first-hand look at "how the sausage is made", and my overall impression is: marketers having no clue about statistics dump some charts into a Word file and write a story about how that graph means things are great; customers having no more clue and no way to verify effectiveness believe that. Both sides are happy, and money changes hands. Also funny you mention print-on-demand, for two reasons. One, I'm building a side project in this space right now. Two, print-on-demand apparel are the ads that are pissing me off the most right now on Facebook (in particular a certain company that's named after a game animal saying "hello" in Hawaiian).

reaperducer 8y ago

The problem with traditional advertising is that everyone sees it, regardless of their interest in the subject matter or lack thereof. This is false. The internet ad tech companies didn't invent marketing demographics. Advertisers who want to sell things to old people advertise on TV shows and in magazines that appeal to old people. Advertisers who want to sell Product X advertise in places where people who want to buy Product X might see it. No, traditional media doesn't have the granularity or seemingly instant feedback of online ads. But there's a reason that an ad in print has more gravitas and impact on the reader than an online ad. Digital ads are ephemeral, and are forgotten as quickly as they are seen. With the exception of writing an ad in the sand on a wave-washed beach, every single other advertising method has more impact than online ads. What Google and Facebook brought to the game was targeting. I wish that was true. If it was, then I wouldn't be bombarded by ads for things I have no interest in from companies in places I can't buy from. Right now on my Facebook feed: - Ad for a concert by a band I don't like in a city 600 miles away. - Ad for homeowners insurance for a house I don't own from an insurance company that doesn't operate in my state. - Ad for an Xbox video game. I don't own an Xbox, and don't play video games. - Ad for a business credit card for a business I don't own. Tell me again about how Silicon Valley's ad tech industry is benefiting both me, and the advertisers.

chriswarbo 8y ago
> But there's a reason that an ad in print has more gravitas and impact on the reader than an online ad. Digital ads are ephemeral, and are forgotten as quickly as they are seen. With the exception of writing an ad in the sand on a wave-washed beach, every single other advertising method has more impact than online ads. This seems to be an argument for "an ad view on a screen is worth 1,000 times less than an ad view on printed paper", which you seem to be arguiing against in parent comments...
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  Every ad I see is writ across my retina. It fades as the photosensitive opsin chemicals replenish. Every ad I hear is injected into my phonological loop. It fades as the neural activity drops back to normal. An ad is an ad is an ad is an ad is an ad. It does not matter whether it reaches my brain from a computer monitor, a television screen, a radio speaker, or newsprint. I have the choice to attend to it, or not. The argument here is that ads viewed or heard by robots will probably never reach a human brain. The computer-delivered ads make different types of metering and targeting possible, but they also make the advertiser vulnerable to automated exploits and automated blocking. In print, you can extrapolate from statistical modeling and circulation numbers. In television and radio, the same can be done with ratings numbers. On the Internet, there are so many possible metrics. The problem is the advertisers started an arms race they cannot win, because they had to make themselves more useful than the media companies' internal advertising departments. Those guys could sell fractions of a page of static ads. Those ads get served with the same content, every time someone reads the paper. Any targeting has to be based on the predicted audience for the content itself. Men's razors advertised in the sports section; the exact same razors but marketed to women advertised in the lifestyle section. Car, boat, and RV dealers advertised in the business news section. If the online edition of newspapers embedded their own non-scripted copy of static print ads, served from their own servers, from the same places as their article images and stock photos, nobody would bother trying to block them. That's just what newspaper articles look like, to everyone that remembers when they were actual papers that got delivered by kids on bicycles. The ad services that sucker media companies into using them are worth 1000 times less than the ads served in-house, because of all their clever nonsense they attempted in order to trick the media-companies into using them. I don't need to block dumb ads; I might want to, but I don't need to. I do need to block ads that run scripts and set cookies, because they hijack my own resources to make my experience across the entire web worse. There is nothing inherent wrong with writing an article that has a permanent, static set of ads in it. Old media had the full-page, half-page, quarter-page, per-column-inch, and classified ads. A new media article can be pasted into a template, with a fixed number of advertising slots. Show the article template to your registered advertisers, who know your standards for the slots, and let them buy specific slots for specific articles, categories of article, or anywhere on the site. Paste the approved ads into the slots for them, and archive the article page. That's now what the site serves whenever the URL is requested, forevermore. It's the same as going to the library and looking up a newspaper microfiche page from October 15, 1985; the ads are still the same, and just got one more impression.

nradov 8y ago

If targeting works then why do I keep seeing ads for products that I've already purchased and have no intention of buying again any time soon?

stickfigure 8y ago
It doesn't run on telepathy. Some people do rebuy those products. And maybe this is just the best ad (of nothing great) that happened to be available at the time. If you want to have any idea of how well advertising works, you have to approach it from the perspective of an advertiser, not an ad target. Then you can get real data. You are a data point of one.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  I'd love to see that data, because my current pet theory is that adtech applies the same morals internally that they do externally - i.e. everyone tries to scam each other, pretending their tools work.
  - stickfigure 8y ago
    The people buying Facebook ads know if they work. You can track customers through every click to the sale. You can experiment with $10 if you want. Try it. I built a large print-on-demand apparel marketplace. Most of the sellers were driving traffic with facebook ads. It worked great. Unfortunately (for the sellers) so many people jumped into the game that they bid up the ad rates. Now Facebook makes most of the money in the tshirt business... but you can't say the system doesn't work.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      > You can experiment with $10 if you want. Try it. Guess what, I actually thought about doing that just "for science" - setting up some nonsense page, launching a $5-10 ad campaign, and seeing what happens. I.e. measuring the impulse response of the system, in a way. To be clear, I source my distrust to adtech partly from personal experience as well. I worked at a company that also did social media marketing once, in particular it would run content marketing on Facebook for people. I had a first-hand look at "how the sausage is made", and my overall impression is: marketers having no clue about statistics dump some charts into a Word file and write a story about how that graph means things are great; customers having no more clue and no way to verify effectiveness believe that. Both sides are happy, and money changes hands. Also funny you mention print-on-demand, for two reasons. One, I'm building a side project in this space right now. Two, print-on-demand apparel are the ads that are pissing me off the most right now on Facebook (in particular a certain company that's named after a game animal saying "hello" in Hawaiian).