4 ms·

It's amazing how so many people who no knowledge of online advertising post so confidently in these threads. Since I have a lot of experience with targeted ads,

by cm2012 8y ago

It's amazing how so many people who no knowledge of online advertising post so confidently in these threads. Since I have a lot of experience with targeted ads, it makes me trust the comments on topics I'm not an expert on less.

Reedx 8y ago
> people who no knowledge ... post so confidently The Dunning–Kruger effect at work. > Since I have a lot of experience with targeted ads, it makes me trust the comments on topics I'm not an expert on less. That's like when you see a news report about something you're a domain expert on. You notice the mistakes and are left to wonder how often that happens with all the areas you're not an expert on...
- rjf72 8y ago
  I think there's a secondary effect going on in social media comments (including this site). The mostly anonymous nature of things means that people have no ability to understand who they're talking to or their qualifications to speak on a subject. So they take cues from language itself. When things are posted without exuding confidence, people assume ineptitude or uncertainty and rarely regard it as meaningful. By contrast things posted confidently instill trust and confidence and thus are treated as more meaningful. You can trial this pretty easily by just creating multiple accounts and consciously changing the tone of the comments you make. It's pretty amusing! Online comment voting systems are extremely easy to game because of basic recurring phenomena like this, that you'll find many people come to exploit whether consciously or not. And thanks to those little arrows by our names, those comments that game the system end up near the top. And finally you also have to keep in mind the You and I that actually chat instead of lurk are outliers, a surprisingly small percent of all people on the site. So you get twisted and likely counter-productive conversational cues driving conversations between a likely biased sample of (not necessarily positive) outliers. And finally now add in the countless biased interests (corporate and political in particular) with presences working to steer perception to their benefit. Nonetheless, I still find it entertaining watching how all the parts play together.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
alkonaut 8y ago
I think it's fair to say that fear is always a product of not knowing. But when it comes to integrity and privacy online I think history has tought us that it's usually worse than we fear. Also: I think people (especially in adtech) underestimate the privacy people expect online.
phiresky 8y ago
Feel free to share some of your expert knowledge with the rest of us (instead of just complaining about comments from non-experts).
- cm2012 8y ago
  I comment in these threads often correcting things, but it gets exhausting. Now that I'm not on mobile though: Tons of comments here confidently say that the very idea of targeting clearly doesn't work based on their own experience or that it's a house of mirrors that doesn't work because of some obscure math. I've managed over $10 million of ROI focused ad spend on Facebook and Adwords. You can test if targeting works trivially: 1) Use the platforms to target one audience that's a generic "All US Population" audience. 2) Test this against (for example) an algorithmically generated Lookalike that FB creates based on your seed audience. The Lookalike will generally perform 3-20x better than the general population, depending on how specific the audience is your trying to target. As far as public data goes, 90% of new ad spend goes to FB and Google for a reason - they're the best ways of targeting specific audiences online. And this is easily provable if you've ever worked on even mid-size ad campaign.
  - PhineasRex 8y ago
    This is a bad test. The alternative to algorithmically target ads is not totally blind ads, the alternative is direct ad-buying which targets based on context. Buying ads on the NYT Health section is a form of targeting. It's also a much lower noise targeting compared to programmatic.
    - cm2012 8y ago
      It's a good test for "Advertising targeting techniques are a hoax" - which is the claim people in the thread are making. I'll also note there's very little scale in direct ad buying - very few niches have scale that matters for any audience smaller than "interested in business". That said, programmatic outside of FB and Google is indeed trash and the NYtimes did well to drop it. But pretty much everyone in the thread conflates Facebook and Google (Again, 90% of spend) with the 1000s of random ad tech firms out there of dubious quality.
soared 8y ago
Agreed. Absolutely stunning how so many comments make insane claims with no knowledge about what they're talking about. > I honestly would not be surprised if the difference in effectiveness of targeted vs untargeted advertisement turns out to be none > What if I told you the NYT has been doing "untargeted" advertising for 150 years? Besides if you advertise in the NYT you ARE technically targeting people > advertising is the art of fooling oneselves first about the source of success and then fooling others > Why would any premium website even agree to ads that track users?
tivert 8y ago
> It's amazing how so many people who no knowledge of online advertising post so confidently in these threads. Since I have a lot of experience with targeted ads... Since you seem to work in adtech or advertising, that famous Upton Sinclair quote probably legitimately applies to you ("It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"). That's the big problem here. The people with the most knowledge of adtech are likely biased and untrustworthy due to their economic interests, but the people who lack that bias also have less knowledge. What needs to happen is that you and other adtech people should volunteer to be interviewed by some deep investigative journalism piece by a place like the NY Times or ProPublica. They could take your knowledge, filter out some of the self interest, and educate the rest of us.
- soared 8y ago
  The problem with this approach is that it takes years to understand adtech. Reporters try to understand it but simply cannot. It would be a like a normal reporter trying to find the root cause of a financial crisis. Below is an example of someone trying to write about ad tech, but just making incorrect claims throughout the entire blog post. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18732538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18732538 It also doesn't really make sense that every single person who works in adtech is biased, and unable to get around that. If a single person could "fix advertising" then they'd make billions of dollars by changing the entire industry.
  - tivert 8y ago
    > The problem with this approach is that it takes years to understand adtech. Reporters try to understand it but simply cannot. It would be a like a normal reporter trying to find the root cause of a financial crisis. So you're saying we should just take whatever Wall Street says as the truth, since only insiders can really understand? I think sometimes insiders confuse "not taking an insider perspective" with being wrong or being unable to understand. If you think they're missing something, find an good reporter (who can understand you, find alternative viewpoints and call you on any BS), then volunteer your testimony and experience to them.
- 8y ago
vertexFarm 8y ago
This is an effect more people should experience. Everyone should study and work in their area of specialty until they are considered professionally competent in that subject, then go check out that subject's subreddit. Feel bleak and abject despair. Realize you should never use reddit / similar voting-based internet forums to learn about subjects you don't understand because the signal-to-noise ratio is miserable. It's all people who don't know yet they don't let that fact stop them from posting. Early generations of charlatans "educate" successive generations and so you have this illusion that people might know what they're talking about or at least it appears like there's some legit group consensus. But it's just people going around replying in every sub-thread parroting what some random shmoe posted elsewhere in the very same thread; people racing to parrot it before other people parrot it so they get to be top parrot. People vote for stuff that's familiar to them because we universally are attracted to things we already recognize, so what we get is a bunch of those special sort of misconceptions that are popular among novices churning around endlessly. I'm beginning to think that user-curated content is fundamentally flawed.

by cm2012 8y ago

Reedx 8y ago

> people who no knowledge ... post so confidently The Dunning–Kruger effect at work. > Since I have a lot of experience with targeted ads, it makes me trust the comments on topics I'm not an expert on less. That's like when you see a news report about something you're a domain expert on. You notice the mistakes and are left to wonder how often that happens with all the areas you're not an expert on...

rjf72 8y ago
I think there's a secondary effect going on in social media comments (including this site). The mostly anonymous nature of things means that people have no ability to understand who they're talking to or their qualifications to speak on a subject. So they take cues from language itself. When things are posted without exuding confidence, people assume ineptitude or uncertainty and rarely regard it as meaningful. By contrast things posted confidently instill trust and confidence and thus are treated as more meaningful. You can trial this pretty easily by just creating multiple accounts and consciously changing the tone of the comments you make. It's pretty amusing! Online comment voting systems are extremely easy to game because of basic recurring phenomena like this, that you'll find many people come to exploit whether consciously or not. And thanks to those little arrows by our names, those comments that game the system end up near the top. And finally you also have to keep in mind the You and I that actually chat instead of lurk are outliers, a surprisingly small percent of all people on the site. So you get twisted and likely counter-productive conversational cues driving conversations between a likely biased sample of (not necessarily positive) outliers. And finally now add in the countless biased interests (corporate and political in particular) with presences working to steer perception to their benefit. Nonetheless, I still find it entertaining watching how all the parts play together.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

alkonaut 8y ago

I think it's fair to say that fear is always a product of not knowing. But when it comes to integrity and privacy online I think history has tought us that it's usually worse than we fear. Also: I think people (especially in adtech) underestimate the privacy people expect online.

phiresky 8y ago

Feel free to share some of your expert knowledge with the rest of us (instead of just complaining about comments from non-experts).

cm2012 8y ago
I comment in these threads often correcting things, but it gets exhausting. Now that I'm not on mobile though: Tons of comments here confidently say that the very idea of targeting clearly doesn't work based on their own experience or that it's a house of mirrors that doesn't work because of some obscure math. I've managed over $10 million of ROI focused ad spend on Facebook and Adwords. You can test if targeting works trivially: 1) Use the platforms to target one audience that's a generic "All US Population" audience. 2) Test this against (for example) an algorithmically generated Lookalike that FB creates based on your seed audience. The Lookalike will generally perform 3-20x better than the general population, depending on how specific the audience is your trying to target. As far as public data goes, 90% of new ad spend goes to FB and Google for a reason - they're the best ways of targeting specific audiences online. And this is easily provable if you've ever worked on even mid-size ad campaign.
- PhineasRex 8y ago
  This is a bad test. The alternative to algorithmically target ads is not totally blind ads, the alternative is direct ad-buying which targets based on context. Buying ads on the NYT Health section is a form of targeting. It's also a much lower noise targeting compared to programmatic.
  - cm2012 8y ago
    It's a good test for "Advertising targeting techniques are a hoax" - which is the claim people in the thread are making. I'll also note there's very little scale in direct ad buying - very few niches have scale that matters for any audience smaller than "interested in business". That said, programmatic outside of FB and Google is indeed trash and the NYtimes did well to drop it. But pretty much everyone in the thread conflates Facebook and Google (Again, 90% of spend) with the 1000s of random ad tech firms out there of dubious quality.

soared 8y ago

Agreed. Absolutely stunning how so many comments make insane claims with no knowledge about what they're talking about. > I honestly would not be surprised if the difference in effectiveness of targeted vs untargeted advertisement turns out to be none > What if I told you the NYT has been doing "untargeted" advertising for 150 years? Besides if you advertise in the NYT you ARE technically targeting people > advertising is the art of fooling oneselves first about the source of success and then fooling others > Why would any premium website even agree to ads that track users?

tivert 8y ago

> It's amazing how so many people who no knowledge of online advertising post so confidently in these threads. Since I have a lot of experience with targeted ads... Since you seem to work in adtech or advertising, that famous Upton Sinclair quote probably legitimately applies to you ("It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"). That's the big problem here. The people with the most knowledge of adtech are likely biased and untrustworthy due to their economic interests, but the people who lack that bias also have less knowledge. What needs to happen is that you and other adtech people should volunteer to be interviewed by some deep investigative journalism piece by a place like the NY Times or ProPublica. They could take your knowledge, filter out some of the self interest, and educate the rest of us.

soared 8y ago
The problem with this approach is that it takes years to understand adtech. Reporters try to understand it but simply cannot. It would be a like a normal reporter trying to find the root cause of a financial crisis. Below is an example of someone trying to write about ad tech, but just making incorrect claims throughout the entire blog post. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18732538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18732538 It also doesn't really make sense that every single person who works in adtech is biased, and unable to get around that. If a single person could "fix advertising" then they'd make billions of dollars by changing the entire industry.
- tivert 8y ago
  > The problem with this approach is that it takes years to understand adtech. Reporters try to understand it but simply cannot. It would be a like a normal reporter trying to find the root cause of a financial crisis. So you're saying we should just take whatever Wall Street says as the truth, since only insiders can really understand? I think sometimes insiders confuse "not taking an insider perspective" with being wrong or being unable to understand. If you think they're missing something, find an good reporter (who can understand you, find alternative viewpoints and call you on any BS), then volunteer your testimony and experience to them.
8y ago

vertexFarm 8y ago

This is an effect more people should experience. Everyone should study and work in their area of specialty until they are considered professionally competent in that subject, then go check out that subject's subreddit. Feel bleak and abject despair. Realize you should never use reddit / similar voting-based internet forums to learn about subjects you don't understand because the signal-to-noise ratio is miserable. It's all people who don't know yet they don't let that fact stop them from posting. Early generations of charlatans "educate" successive generations and so you have this illusion that people might know what they're talking about or at least it appears like there's some legit group consensus. But it's just people going around replying in every sub-thread parroting what some random shmoe posted elsewhere in the very same thread; people racing to parrot it before other people parrot it so they get to be top parrot. People vote for stuff that's familiar to them because we universally are attracted to things we already recognize, so what we get is a bunch of those special sort of misconceptions that are popular among novices churning around endlessly. I'm beginning to think that user-curated content is fundamentally flawed.