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> 6. The adtech industry has 2 of the most valuable companies in the world and generates petabytes of data and billions in profit proving how well ads work But
by mojuba 8y ago
> 6. The adtech industry has 2 of the most valuable companies in the world and generates petabytes of data and billions in profit proving how well ads work
But that's exactly the author's point. The ad industry works but not because it knows so much about you. Like many other commenters here, I can confirm that it always puzzled me how bad ad targeting is (or how nonsensical retargeting is, or how irrelevant recommendations are, etc.) despite what everyone is saying about how they all collect and mine data on our every move.
In my whole time on the Internet for more than 2 decades now, I can remember maybe only 2 or 3 ads that I mistook for genuine content and even clicked, that was on Facebook. Most of the other ads on social networks and elsewhere is trivial retargeting (remarketing) that fails 100% of time on me. This is not an exaggeration, remarketing never ever works for me, it's always stupid and irrelevant. Every marketing and growth professional will tell you that remarketing is the simplest thing that works, though probably not on people like me, but apparently it is pretty efficient.
Looking back now I realize that the author is right in that simpler hacks may be more effective than sophisticated ML-based algorithms. The truth may be in that, similarly to how Hollywood can sell stupider movies better despite that it can afford the best screenwriters in the world, we may be witnessing a similar "dumbing down" effect of the online ad industry. The fact that Hollywood has become a multibillion dollar realm today (and thriving!) whereas blockbusters become more and more predictable and simplistic over time, only tells us that the ad industry is probably heading in the same direction.
Oh and there's nothing new for me in "the dirty secret of the ML movement" the author mentions. That's quite an unpopular opinion today but time will tell.
- manigandham 8y agoJust because personal targeting is not used as often is not evidence it doesn't work. Like I said, advertisers control their own campaigns and often start wide open to optimize, and they also don't want to pay for precise targeting. There's also a giant market for performance pricing is pay-per-click or other action. This means impressions are free so showing your ads to as many people as possible is the better approach. If you want to see what personal targeting can do then you should look at lookalike modeling which finds similar people based on interests and behaviors and their propensity to carry out the same action. This technology has created many millionaires in the affiliate marketing world as campaigns would automatically keep finding similar people. There are trillions of ad impressions and it's impossible for every single one to be perfectly tailored to you. That's just not how the industry works but business practices are completely different for technical capabilities. That's what this blog post and commenters do not understand, and your limited and faulty human memory is not somehow proof otherwise.
- mojuba 8y agoI'm sorry but you keep lecturing everyone here how big and sophisticated the ad industry is. Nobody denies it, no doubt there are billions in circulation and no doubt you can build something and sell it upstream to one of the giants (no matter how useful the giant will find it). However I'm yet to see one good recommendation or ad shown to me. Like I said, very close to 100% of all advertisement shown to me, just as well as "friend" recommendations on social networks etc etc - all those things are so stupid and irrelevant that I refuse to believe there's something going on under the hood other than just plain stupid algorithms that probably work for some categories of consumers but not the others. The most relevant things happen only when I look for specific consumer products on Google and what I get is some ads in French which I don't even speak. Seems to me like tens of billions wasted. But of course capitalism is capitalism, they earn their money and they are free to spend it the way they like it for as long as it doesn't cross certain privacy rules in my country of residence.
- manigandham 8y agoWhy do you say that "nobody denies it" when that is exactly what this blog post is doing? You are claiming to remember all ads seen over decades. Even people with eidetic memory cannot do this, and in my experience people who claim to never see a perfect ad are the most susceptible to advertising. Influence is a lot more complicated than a simple banner ad that you think you've foiled by not clicking. And I've explained several times why every ad impression is not perfect relevancy for you. What ads you see are a highly complex mix of the platform, running campaigns, targeting chosen by advertisers, optimizations in play, predictive analytics and propensity to action, pricing models, 3rd party data providers, inventory supply chains, creative formats, and many other factors. Trying to take trillions of ad impressions and derive the state of tech from it is both inaccurate and nonsensical.