8 ms·

You be surprised how much less sophisticated Googles and Facebooks ad targeting is! We are far away from a machine classifying you as being single and going to

You be surprised how much less sophisticated Googles and Facebooks ad targeting is! We are far away from a machine classifying you as being single and going to the gym every day or liking BMW and having gotten a promotion. Not that I don’t think we couldn’t get there...but today these system are far away from it! Just go to your Facebook ad settings to understand how primitive the information is they have about you. But I agree that targeted ads (as primitive as they are) are more efficient then I untargeted ads

codq 8y ago
Perhaps there's some kind of Baader-Meinhof phenomena going on here. When a targeted ad is creepily accurate and on point, people flip and think that the machines have figured us out. But the ads that are irrelevant just fly by us without a hit. The one-out-of-a-hundred ads that get it right, likely due to an ad targeter's lucky strike, are the ones that get under our skin, and the only ones we really notice.
- adzicg 8y ago
  I read somewhere (can’t remember the book name unfortunately) that Tesco in the UK faced this problem when they started sending out personalised coupon booklets based on loyalty card purchases. People were freaking out. Then they started adding coupons to the booklet designed to be irrelevant - say if they figured out that someone was newly pregnant, they’d send a few pages of baby stuff, but also inject lawn mower coupons and stuff only men would care about. That achieved the whole targetted effect and avoided looking creepy for just a few pennies more.
  - fyfy18 8y ago
    I remember during college I was working at Tesco, and a customer way buying a lot of baby food, and she had received some Clubcard coupons for them. I asked her if she had grandchildren, she said no, but her husband really likes baby food.
    - dazc 8y ago
      A niche yet to be exploited?
  - dazc 8y ago
    You still get that if you shop online, everything you ever bought suggested as an add on to your basket. I can see how this could cause embarrassment and, maybe, awkward questions if one's partner also uses the same account.
  - tivert 8y ago
    > I read somewhere (can’t remember the book name unfortunately) that Tesco in the UK faced this problem when they started sending out personalised coupon booklets based on loyalty card purchases. People were freaking out. Then they started adding coupons to the booklet designed to be irrelevant - say if they figured out that someone was newly pregnant, they’d send a few pages of baby stuff, but also inject lawn mower coupons and stuff only men would care about. That achieved the whole targetted effect and avoided looking creepy for just a few pennies more. It was Target in the US: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.... > As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy. > ... > “With the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly,” the executive said. “Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.
- Sharlin 8y ago
  But do people generally think that targeted ads are especially accurate? If anything, I’d think people are bothered by all that privacy invasion and still getting completely irrelevant ads!
  - ehnto 8y ago
    God forbid you accidentally click on the wrong product in a re-targetting carousel. Now "the advertising complex" thinks I'm super into motorbikes. I don't even have a license.
  - iagovar 8y ago
    IMO many people managing ads do not seem to use it properly. I worked for a marketing agency once and we got pretty good results, but we tried to understand our target, use negative keywords, use different ads for different keywords and so on. It was actually a lot of work. I guess some people wants to cut corners and just gets the client money and puts it down into adwords and fb ads, write some reports and pass it to client. In my experience clients most of the time get confused with so much jargon, and they are unable to link sales with marketing expending correctly, the only certain thing they know is that (for most of them) if they don't do marketing sales will go down over time. I'm always surprised when I see a company wasting money on adwords when they are also ranking many #1 keywords organically, specially on brand keywords. I may be outdated but I doesn't make any sense to me.
  - RandallBrown 8y ago
    My Facebook/Instagram are stunningly on point. I've even bought a few things from them.
    - lbotos 8y ago
      I want to echo this. I need a new bag and gym clothes. Instagram is hitting me hard with this. I haven't consciously shopped for them either, but I assume I've looked at enough content to get me in those buckets. I am considering getting one of the bags they've shown me.
    - JAlexoid 8y ago
ehnto 8y ago
One thing I have wondered for a little while is how all these learning algorithms will handle change over time. A lot of my advertising is for things I may have liked perhaps 5 years ago, but no longer have anything to do with. It's also a bunch of super wrong things, like parenting, even though it also thinks I'm a single male who likes holidays, and skiing, even though it doesn't snow where I live and I've never even entertained the idea. It's clearly confused, and so my wonder is how do they correct that over time? How do you un-scramble a scrambled machine learned profile? Can you even detect that it's gone awry?
- rock_hard 8y ago
  The strongest signal to fix your targeting is to buy something you actually like from a ad! The models react strongly to that...i went from years of poor ads to fantastic ads within 2-3 purchases
- bryan_w 8y ago
  Yes! Both Facebook and Google have ad preferences pages you can go to to see what they have inferred about you and delete any wrong things
tzs 8y ago
> You be surprised how much less sophisticated Googles and Facebooks ad targeting is! If Google's ability to discern my interests for ads is as bad as is their ability to discern my interests for news, then I would not be surprised. I have never been aware of listening to any music by the band "Foo Fighters". I've almost certainly heard their songs in passing, but never in a context that gave me the name of the band. A friend on Facebook posted a link to a YouTube video called "Dave Grohl brings kid on stage in Kansas City to rock out", in which Grohl, who is apparently the lead of the Foo Fighters, invited a kid from the audience at a Foo Fighters concert up to play a song, and I watched this video. (The kid asked to play a Metallica song, which Grohl and the Foo Fighters knew and played, so I still have not knowingly listened to any Foo Fighters music!) Google has latched onto this and decided that I am interested in Dave Grohl news. Every time I go to Google News, for the last several weeks, the top of the "recommended by your interests" section is a story about Grohl or the Foo Fighters. Even though I hit the "show fewer stories like this" link for most of them, still they come. Furthermore, they are almost all negative stories. The one thing they have of me showing any interest in Grohl and/or Foo Fighters, that video of the kid on stage, was a positive thing. But what they are giving me is a parade of stories about Grohl screwing over current or former bandmates, Grohl misbehaving while drunk, etc., from what appear to be trashy gossip publications. Yet a bit of research shows that Grohl is apparently actually a nice guy, well regarded. If I click the link to tell Google to not show me anything else from one of these trash publications...it obeys and just turns to other one to find Grohl gossip for me. What the heck, Gooogle!?
- CPLX 8y ago
  Oddly enough, I recently have been seeing an onslaught of Foo Fighters stories on Google news. I am in fact a music fan and musician who knows their songs but I have no special interest in them. I wonder if something about them triggers some runway like function in Google’s algorithm.
  - asr 8y ago
    Obviously Google treats "foo" as a placeholder and returns these stories whenever it thinks the user might be interested in a story about a conflict.
JAlexoid 8y ago
Worked there... Done that... They are very efficient in telling people that are intending to buy your product that they are going to buy your product. Or even buy your advertised product on the website that you're advertising. They are not efficient in acquiring new customers, as most(90%+++) of the ad impressions go to the people that are already aware about your product. The only truly efficient ad targeting is restricted by geography, culture, age and timezone.

codq 8y ago

Perhaps there's some kind of Baader-Meinhof phenomena going on here. When a targeted ad is creepily accurate and on point, people flip and think that the machines have figured us out. But the ads that are irrelevant just fly by us without a hit. The one-out-of-a-hundred ads that get it right, likely due to an ad targeter's lucky strike, are the ones that get under our skin, and the only ones we really notice.

adzicg 8y ago
I read somewhere (can’t remember the book name unfortunately) that Tesco in the UK faced this problem when they started sending out personalised coupon booklets based on loyalty card purchases. People were freaking out. Then they started adding coupons to the booklet designed to be irrelevant - say if they figured out that someone was newly pregnant, they’d send a few pages of baby stuff, but also inject lawn mower coupons and stuff only men would care about. That achieved the whole targetted effect and avoided looking creepy for just a few pennies more.
- fyfy18 8y ago
  I remember during college I was working at Tesco, and a customer way buying a lot of baby food, and she had received some Clubcard coupons for them. I asked her if she had grandchildren, she said no, but her husband really likes baby food.
  - dazc 8y ago
    A niche yet to be exploited?
- dazc 8y ago
  You still get that if you shop online, everything you ever bought suggested as an add on to your basket. I can see how this could cause embarrassment and, maybe, awkward questions if one's partner also uses the same account.
- tivert 8y ago
  > I read somewhere (can’t remember the book name unfortunately) that Tesco in the UK faced this problem when they started sending out personalised coupon booklets based on loyalty card purchases. People were freaking out. Then they started adding coupons to the booklet designed to be irrelevant - say if they figured out that someone was newly pregnant, they’d send a few pages of baby stuff, but also inject lawn mower coupons and stuff only men would care about. That achieved the whole targetted effect and avoided looking creepy for just a few pennies more. It was Target in the US: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.... > As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy. > ... > “With the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly,” the executive said. “Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.
Sharlin 8y ago
But do people generally think that targeted ads are especially accurate? If anything, I’d think people are bothered by all that privacy invasion and still getting completely irrelevant ads!
- ehnto 8y ago
  God forbid you accidentally click on the wrong product in a re-targetting carousel. Now "the advertising complex" thinks I'm super into motorbikes. I don't even have a license.
- iagovar 8y ago
  IMO many people managing ads do not seem to use it properly. I worked for a marketing agency once and we got pretty good results, but we tried to understand our target, use negative keywords, use different ads for different keywords and so on. It was actually a lot of work. I guess some people wants to cut corners and just gets the client money and puts it down into adwords and fb ads, write some reports and pass it to client. In my experience clients most of the time get confused with so much jargon, and they are unable to link sales with marketing expending correctly, the only certain thing they know is that (for most of them) if they don't do marketing sales will go down over time. I'm always surprised when I see a company wasting money on adwords when they are also ranking many #1 keywords organically, specially on brand keywords. I may be outdated but I doesn't make any sense to me.
- RandallBrown 8y ago
  My Facebook/Instagram are stunningly on point. I've even bought a few things from them.
  - lbotos 8y ago
    I want to echo this. I need a new bag and gym clothes. Instagram is hitting me hard with this. I haven't consciously shopped for them either, but I assume I've looked at enough content to get me in those buckets. I am considering getting one of the bags they've shown me.
  - JAlexoid 8y ago

ehnto 8y ago

One thing I have wondered for a little while is how all these learning algorithms will handle change over time. A lot of my advertising is for things I may have liked perhaps 5 years ago, but no longer have anything to do with. It's also a bunch of super wrong things, like parenting, even though it also thinks I'm a single male who likes holidays, and skiing, even though it doesn't snow where I live and I've never even entertained the idea. It's clearly confused, and so my wonder is how do they correct that over time? How do you un-scramble a scrambled machine learned profile? Can you even detect that it's gone awry?

rock_hard 8y ago
The strongest signal to fix your targeting is to buy something you actually like from a ad! The models react strongly to that...i went from years of poor ads to fantastic ads within 2-3 purchases
bryan_w 8y ago
Yes! Both Facebook and Google have ad preferences pages you can go to to see what they have inferred about you and delete any wrong things

tzs 8y ago

> You be surprised how much less sophisticated Googles and Facebooks ad targeting is! If Google's ability to discern my interests for ads is as bad as is their ability to discern my interests for news, then I would not be surprised. I have never been aware of listening to any music by the band "Foo Fighters". I've almost certainly heard their songs in passing, but never in a context that gave me the name of the band. A friend on Facebook posted a link to a YouTube video called "Dave Grohl brings kid on stage in Kansas City to rock out", in which Grohl, who is apparently the lead of the Foo Fighters, invited a kid from the audience at a Foo Fighters concert up to play a song, and I watched this video. (The kid asked to play a Metallica song, which Grohl and the Foo Fighters knew and played, so I still have not knowingly listened to any Foo Fighters music!) Google has latched onto this and decided that I am interested in Dave Grohl news. Every time I go to Google News, for the last several weeks, the top of the "recommended by your interests" section is a story about Grohl or the Foo Fighters. Even though I hit the "show fewer stories like this" link for most of them, still they come. Furthermore, they are almost all negative stories. The one thing they have of me showing any interest in Grohl and/or Foo Fighters, that video of the kid on stage, was a positive thing. But what they are giving me is a parade of stories about Grohl screwing over current or former bandmates, Grohl misbehaving while drunk, etc., from what appear to be trashy gossip publications. Yet a bit of research shows that Grohl is apparently actually a nice guy, well regarded. If I click the link to tell Google to not show me anything else from one of these trash publications...it obeys and just turns to other one to find Grohl gossip for me. What the heck, Gooogle!?

CPLX 8y ago
Oddly enough, I recently have been seeing an onslaught of Foo Fighters stories on Google news. I am in fact a music fan and musician who knows their songs but I have no special interest in them. I wonder if something about them triggers some runway like function in Google’s algorithm.
- asr 8y ago
  Obviously Google treats "foo" as a placeholder and returns these stories whenever it thinks the user might be interested in a story about a conflict.

JAlexoid 8y ago

Worked there... Done that... They are very efficient in telling people that are intending to buy your product that they are going to buy your product. Or even buy your advertised product on the website that you're advertising. They are not efficient in acquiring new customers, as most(90%+++) of the ad impressions go to the people that are already aware about your product. The only truly efficient ad targeting is restricted by geography, culture, age and timezone.