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AdTech Sucks

285 points by tomlockwood 7y ago

DailyHN 7y ago
Yeah, it sucks for advertisers, too. From another active thread concerning the ad industry: > Using Google retargeting ads, less than 5% of desktop traffic goes on to click anywhere on my website. And it's worse for mobile than on desktops. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20124231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20124231
- omarchowdhury 7y ago
  You mean it sucks for you. How can you speak for all advertisers, especially based on a sample size of 200 clicks? You have to diagnose what could be off on your end before making extreme blanket statements. These ad systems are tools, and tools only work as well as how you use them.
  - DailyHN 7y ago
    I find it hard to believe that 97.5% of people can click a link to a website and not even accidentally click something on that website. I'm not referring to real conversions, where yes, skills in marketing and using the tools does make all the difference. All I'm saying is that I paid for 200 clicks that appear to not even have real people clicking anywhere at all.
    - omarchowdhury 7y ago
      No doubt, there is fraud in the system. If you want to be successful in using these ad platforms for your business, you will have to accept that as a fact of life. What you need to do is to exclude bad placements/websites from your campaign. But even before that, you have to see if your ads + landing page are compelling, or you'll just waste a ton of money.
      - navigatesol 7y ago
        >But even before that, you have to see if your ads + landing page are compelling, or you'll just waste a ton of money. And how do you determine that, ex ante?
        omarchowdhury 7y ago
        This part is more art than science, and requires being objective about the subjective, and what I mean by that is: being honest about what you're offering and if it's actually valuable to your prospects, and then seeing if how you're presenting your offer is simultaneously clear and breaks through the noise. At the end of the day we're still talking about sales, just in a new form, in a multi-dimensional bazaar called the Internet.
    - bduerst 7y ago
      Only you know how you set up your ads. Did you use the right keyword targeting? Location settings? Is your ad copy relevant to what you're actually selling or even to your website? Does your website have clear CTAs and copy? What is considered your conversion goal? Are you advertising in a popular market? Have you tried optimized with A/B testing for any of the above?
      - DailyHN 7y ago
        Retargeting + content keyword + location targeting. That is, people that have visited my site in the past(with separate ad groups to test "expanded audiences"), currently visiting another site with the target keywords, from a targeted location. And ads are generic branding and go to the homepage. Conversion goal: simply clicking anything at all.
        bduerst 7y ago
        Is your goal brand awareness or actual conversions (i.e. selling something or form fills)? It sounds like you're trying to do both.
        cameronbrown 7y ago
        If they've visited before, why will they come again without a reason? Your ad has to actually convince them to do something beyond read the same thing twice.
    - kps 7y ago
      > I find it hard to believe that 97.5% of people can click a link to a website and not even accidentally click something on that website. Depends on the type of site. If I follow a link to read something, I'll probably read it and leave. If the site tries to make me click something, I'll probably just leave.
  - username444 7y ago
    Exactly this. Are you retargeting someone immediately after they purchased? Before their purchase even arrived? Is it a good targeting list? We have 3 buckets of customers, based on historical buying cycle: 0-30, 31-60, 61-90. We run retargeting within their purchase cycle, which is friendly and relevant. Customers get churned out of retargeting if not within their buying cycle, which saves us money, and saves them irritation.
  - DisruptiveDave 7y ago
    This, this, this. So many people who are not well versed in advertising (the art, not the tech) simply launch a bare minimum campaign, for some reason expect great returns, then blame the tool. It's completely illogical. There are many components to an ad campaign, from targeting to what's being advertised to creative to copy (and the thousands of variations within each) to ad type...and so on.
    - DailyHN 7y ago
      Great returns? My only expectations is being able to believe real people are actually clicking the ads. Which I don't.
      - 55555 7y ago
        You realize the prices you pay per click or impression are set by a market, right? The crux of the problem is that other people are just better at advertising than you are. There's a lot of fraud but I'm tired of people on HN who are terrible at advertising saying that "ads don't work." It's like saying "code doesn't work". It's just nonsense. What is your website/landing page URL and what did your ad say?
        DailyHN 7y ago
        Maybe more focus should be on the fraud instead of the people who are wondering if ads are worth pursuing because of having to set aside a part of their budget to that fraud. And considering the pervasiveness of tracking, why isn't the fraud better tracked?
        bunderbunder 7y ago
        > why isn't the fraud better tracked? Because the people who are best-positioned to do something about click fraud also make heaps of money off of click fraud. For example, browser extensions like AdNauseam that randomly "click" on ad links are maybe meant to be a middle finger aimed at the ad networks, but, realistically, if you, the person doing the advertising, are paying for clicks, then the main effect of such extensions is to transfer money from your pocket to the ad network's.
- elorant 7y ago
  5% ain't bad. Depending on site content ctr could be as low as 0,5%. Rates have been dropping for ages.
  - DailyHN 7y ago
    That's 5% of clicks I paid for, resulting in any click on the website.
    - bunderbunder 7y ago
      It doesn't really surprise me at all. Virtually 100% of my clicks on ads are accidental - either the touchpad registered a tap when I didn't intend it, or, in the ever-increasing case of ads moving around on the page, because the ad popped in front of what I actually intended to click on. To tell the truth, the ads may be working, insofar as sometimes I will go to find out more based on an ad. But you won't see it in your click-through rates. I'll get to your website by opening a new tab and searching in DDG, because at this point I'm so annoyed by adtech and all their scumminess that I'm not willing to give them any additional data if I can possibly avoid it.
tomrod 7y ago
Online ads seem to perform poorly and, for larger companies with brand recognition and large budgets, almost no lift. I've been under the impression that adtech is a bubble, but I'm not an expert in the space.
- libertine 7y ago
  It's not a bubble, but it definitely shouldn't be on a pedestal.
dpflan 7y ago
"""The systemic issue occurs because marketers and AdTech companies unreflectively increase surveillance and data collection in the hopes of increasing media attribution. Even the most trivial data point, the most granular site visit or location data, stored on a person-by-person basis, could conceivably be used to demonstrate that a customer may have come into contact with one of your campaigns.""" I'm genuinely intrigued by AdTech. It exists, but no one likes it -- i.e. before internet ads --> TiVo, internet ads --> ad blockers. I understand it can attract talent due to profits and the engineering + data problems, but is that the main attraction for developers? If you worked in adTech, what attracted you to it? Is there a hope you could make more ethical or privacy aware or (<insert positive idea here>) ad tech systems? Does adTech even work? Is there an active campaign somewhere / grassroots movement to "boycott" recruitment to ad tech companies? (Just trying to get a better understanding here, ad tech has become symbiotic with the current state of the internet, so I would like to better understand it.)
- tomlockwood 7y ago
  Author here. I was attracted by the money, but also the exciting technical challenges. AdTech had all the largest datasets! At the time I entered the industry I wasn't really thinking about the ethical concerns. I just didn't think those issues would bother me as much as they ended up bothering me.
  - dpflan 7y ago
    Thank you for sharing your perspective and authoring the article. Is there growing sentiment like yours amongst colleagues and peers in ad tech?
    - tomlockwood 7y ago
      I'm not sure since I've been out for a couple years, but at the time I'd often have conversations with marketers where I'd come away wondering how they could be so oblivious to the ethical concerns in what they were asking for. I do think as time goes on, more and more people are becoming aware of the issues, but I see that uniformly across society rather than in tech.
bad_user 7y ago
The example of the pizza delivery selling the personal details of their customers is precisely why GDPR has value. People have been dismissing it as being unfriendly to startups. As a software developer I totally get the complaints, but as an Internet user I couldn't care less. You could say that the free market will adjust itself when consumers will figure out the damage and learn to protect themselves by choosing better alternatives. But there's no way to protect oneself. For example in the pizza delivery case, there's often no way to know that your address and phone will be sold to third parties, unless it's against the law to do so without you giving explicit consent.
- pedro_hab 7y ago
  Selling personal data without permission is illegal without GDPR.
  - bad_user 7y ago
    Please explain.
    - pedro_hab 7y ago
      AFAIK GDPR makes a slight difference because it requires opt in for data sharing. But I'd argue it is very hard, if not possible, to know if a company has shared your data. The damage of regulations like this may be greater than the benefit. We will see how the weak European innovation will take these changes. I say weak innovation bc VC money is not flowing there as it does in US.
      - Barrin92 7y ago
        the lack of VC culture doesn't indicate a lack of innovation, because the VC industry is just one form of financing businesses, very regionally limited to countries that have huge homogenous consumer markets and operate on scale. Innovation in countries like Germany is traditionally distributed. And the idea that GDPR is damaging to innovation is really just a fiction at best and deregulation agitprop at worst. Europe has not competed with tech giants before GDPR, and more importantly, even other US companies cannot compete with Facebook or Google. You can measure the lack of competition in feet as you walk away from the Google and Facebook HQs. VC money in the US is geographically concentrated in an area that doesn't even cover 1% of the map, the law has nothing to do with it.
nopriorarrests 7y ago
From the article - "If you’ve been on the internet for any amount of time, you’ve probably seen very poorly targeted advertising. In my experience, I see a lot of car ads. I don’t own a car". One can argue that advertising cars to person without one make some sense. At least it's better then advertising vacuum cleaners to person who bought one on amazon 1 week ago.
- asenna 7y ago
  I'll give you a better example - I'm an English speaking guy consuming regular US content. I travel quite often and when I'm in non-english speaking places like Thailand, I see ads on Youtube(mobile) purely in Thai language. I use Google products extensively and Google most definitely knows I don't speak Thai. I mean it's almost ridiculous the number of Thai ads I've seen on Youtube. For a company that sophisticated with AdTech, I'm shocked how bad they are with this. Are they doing this on purpose just to sell more ads? The companies spending the money to show me those videos are practically throwing money down the drain if I don't even understand them.
  - tomlockwood 7y ago
    Author here. I wish I'd thought of your example before I wrote the article :D And I think my opinion on that is probably obvious, but I think the simplest answer is that Google simply doesn't care about mistargeting ads to a consumer who wouldn't conceivably click on them. They gain no benefit from reducing an advertisers spend that way.
    - criddell 7y ago
      The cars example is also not great because cars are one of those things that are advertised to everybody. Beer, laundry detergent, insurance, and movies are other examples like that. Basically, the kind of ads you see during a Sunday afternoon football game.
    - dano 7y ago
      Another aspect of the Thai example is that the target is over constrained. The user is from the US, knows English, doesn't know Thai, is temporary located in Thailand, age 30 to 35, likes country music, and of ethnic decent (just example data). Advertisers can't really customize their offer to that overly constrained individual and the algorithm falls through to the remnant ad inventory. On the sell side, such a constrained target is a small market and not worth the effort to buy placement. If one runs unlock orig or pi-hole regularly, ads you do get out of home on your phone will start to be less targeted to you. To the larger point of pull vs. push, I would embrace such a market place. Google shopping sort of does this. Good article. Thank you.
geuis 7y ago
Ironically that url is being blocked by Ublock Origin on my phone.
- tomlockwood 7y ago
  Author here - I actually had to change some of the image URLs I made because they had AdTech in the name, and uBlock was blocking them. Hahaha! I solemnly swear that my website has no tracking installed on it (that I know of, welp). Cheers.
  - geuis 7y ago
    Probably because of the combination of “advertising” and dates in the path.
- gorhill 7y ago
  I do not experience this -- sounds like a false positive. I tried enabling various filter lists to see if I could reproduce and I can't. What reason uBO is giving you for blocking the page?
bunderbunder 7y ago
> I’d love for data to be seen as a liability - something audited and discarded often to minimise risk. Perhaps it's just the industries I've worked in, which tend to be highly regulated, but I have such a hard time seeing why this idea isn't more intuitive to people. Every single scrap of sensitive information you have laying around is something that has the potential to fuel a very expensive, possibly even existential, crisis for your company. Even for the non-sensitive stuff, keeping it around "just in case" increases the risk that somebody who has taken a couple classes in how to use R or Pandas and is still a bit starry-eyed about Big Data starts making questionable business decisions based on unskeptical interpretations of biased results drawn from convenience-sampled data of uncertain provenance. The default shouldn't be collecting and warehousing everything, the default should be, "when in doubt, throw it out."
- tomlockwood 7y ago
  Author here. Yeah, and to expand on the idea of liability, I also additionally mean the possibility of a financial liability. If we were to say, charge per month for a retained customer date of birth, you'd see business analysts internally constantly asking why the data needed to be stored so long, or whether just age could be stored, or something. If the price was high enough, the problem would sort of just... go away. Obviously much smarter people than me would need to figure out those regulations though.
  - afiori 7y ago
    On the liability side the GDPR was already good progress
- diogofranco 7y ago
  Surely there are many reasons to not hoard everything, but I find this argument strange. If you're in a business that is making bad decisions due to wrong analysis of data, it seems like there should be more nuanced and pertinent ways to tackle this then just throwing it out, which also prevents good analysis.
  - 7y ago
baybal2 7y ago
My first ever "earning money in Internet" experience was in my teen years when I ran my own ad farm as a part of an ad farming collective 2005-2007. Back then, things were simple: you open a website, sign for 100+ banner networks, then drive in traffic with all tricks imaginable, including "buying it." Part of your revenue goes to group's 'big papa' who does all the "business cover" in the West: setting up companies, bank accounts, accounting, tax reporting, and cashing out payments from ad nets. My second venture into Ad industry came rather unexpected. In 2016, when I had to leave Canada because my employer was denied LMIA (a paper "certifying" that you are not stealing a job from locals.) I called up all my friends with whomever I had working relationship before I moved out of Russia. A man who once was a guy behind of Russia's biggest ad farming group back in mid-naughties called me back. Unbeknown to me, he worked day and night to up his profile for 10 years, and became a "big name man" in Ad industry, moved to USA, and opened one of the biggest DSP on the market today. What shocked me, is that the nature of the industry and attitudes to the client hasn't changed a dime since 2005. The slang for F500 clients there is still a "whale" (the term itself originally came from either "ad farming" circles or banking) After passing through shock coming back to Russia after 8 years and coming back to my senses, I said *ck with that and left. Been happily working in OEM electronics again since.
spectramax 7y ago
Is there a "pull" rather push aspect to advertisement? Sort of a trade-show equivalent of digital advertisement? Issues with pushing ads down my throat are as follows: 1. I don't want to buy another Sony XM3 headphones. I just fucking bought them and I am seeing more ads of the same thing. 2. Even if I saw ads for relevant accessories, say, I bought an iPhone and I am seeing ads for phone cases; I don't want to see them when I am browsing Instagram or a lecture video on YT about how to meditate. 3. Say the timing is right and the ad is relevant, I still am repulsed by advertisers. I don't like salesmen. I find them sleezy and annoying. It is like walking into Radioshack and a platoon of salesmen are trying to sell you Sprint cell phone and I am here to buy a goddamn electrolytic capacitor. However, when I am searching for a pressure cooker, it would be great to go to a centralized repository of ads and look through who markets this sort of thing the best and may be have some objective reviews along with it. May be have a standardized ad template and guidelines so the marketing dickheads don't go overboard with flashing lights and sparkles. Have a standardized page full of pressure cooker ads, let them fight over my business in a level playing field. No psychological tricks, no sleezy techniques, I want to see increased competition based on value they provide to consumers. Not weak anti-competitive deceitful marketing. I love going to trade-shows. They're all salesmen but there is something about serendipitous discovery of new stuff, seeing things that you may not need immediately but it goes in the back of your mind and you remember it at some obscure situation (especially in hardware engineering, I run a lab that serves 50 engineers). Most importantly, I am in the mindset when I visit a trade-show. That mindset is different than when I am desperately looking for a tire shop nearby to fix my flat tire. Fuck advertisement. It is the worst thing modern society is plagued with. We need yellow pages, not 60 second interruptions during a cooking show. YC folks are reading this - there is a huge gap for a "pull" advertisement model. AdTech guys can still collect data and be assholes about it, but at least you won't be bothering me when I need not.
- rkallos 7y ago
  The only thing I know of that somewhat resembles what you describe is https://thewirecutter.com/ https://thewirecutter.com/
- iamnothere 7y ago
  > However, when I am searching for a pressure cooker, it would be great to go to a centralized repository of ads and look through who markets this sort of thing the best and may be have some objective reviews along with it. The Wirecutter used to be pretty good for this, until the NYT bought it. It's still OK now, but it feels like that the pool of products being reviewed in each category is smaller than it once was. The whole site is basically a giant ad/referral scheme, but as long as you're aware of that then it's not bad as a starting point for research. I used to just do a search on Amazon and start from there. Now it's 1 or 2 big brands followed by 20 pages of the same identical Chinese clone product with names like "Wootoo" and "Yungoo".
programmertote 7y ago
> Imagine you’re a marketing-degree graduate in middle management. If you’re lucky, you may have done some statistics courses. In your day-to-day, you likely don’t apply these to a great amount. You hear about this great thing called “Machine Learning” which is sweeping marketing departments. You might have read a white paper or two about it, heard about it at a conference, or been schmoozed by someone from IBM trying to sell you Watson (ugh). You decide to talk to a consultancy about it, or are referred to one by upper management, who’s been living from cocktail-to-cocktail on the consultant’s corporate AMEX for their entire career. Lets be real - when you’re in this position, the consultants say a lot of words to you that you don’t understand and then you say yes to a contract because the PowerPoint looks good. Not only do you get to mention your huge new budget on your resume, thanks to the huge invoice, but you also get to mention you implemented MACHINE LEARNING at your company. But what’s next? I have been working in advertising industry (background in software engineering) for 3+ years as an engineer (for one of the four biggest agencies). I think the author overestimates how much data we can/do collect, and how much we leverage on it. But the excerpt above is absolutely spot on. I'm a mid-level manager and I sometimes baffled at how much bullshit some companies try to sell to our clients (e.g., some big CPG companies), and how much the management folks from our clients and our advertising agency/company alike buy into that bullshit. "ML/AI" and "Media attribution" are really big now. But I believe almost 99% of the people who are leading these efforts (at least in my company) have no clue as to how to do it--thus, the snake oil salesmen are taking advantage of this.
- tomlockwood 7y ago
  Thanks for your kind words! :) I worked at a Telecom for most of my time in AdTech so I think I might have had a close encounter with some particularly high overcollection of data there.
  - programmertote 7y ago
    Ah...I definitely see the Telecoms recording and hoarding a lot of data without any regard to consequence/implication. I know a couple of coworkers who decided to leave my current employer and work for big Telecoms, and they said it's more chaotic there. :)
xixixao 7y ago
> Why, oh why, would a company built on ad revenue want to reduce ad spend? > These companies are perfectly positioned to make ads more efficient - and they have absolutely no reason to do so. The question is not really asking about reducing ad spend, it's asking about reducing advertiser costs per outcome. It's pretty obvious that if you decrease costs per outcome, return on ad spend will rise, and advertisers will spend more. In fact, more advertisers will want to get in on the game (as costs decrease, ads become profitable for more and more advertisers), and this pushes costs up. This eventually creates an equilibrium, but even at that point, it is still the case that decreasing costs increases revenues for ad networks. Attribution is a really, really hard problem. Ideally you want to do a Lift test, and ideally you want to do it across all your ad spend channels. To do this, you still need the attribution mechanisms ("tracking" in the article). So I don't find the article coherent. It points out deficiencies in the system (which there are many), it falsely claims that big players have no incentive to improve, and it makes it sounds like all these advertisers are just burning their money. It makes it sound like pervasive tracking is a problem, which it might be for other reasons (privacy, unintended consequences), but certainly is not making ad tech worse.
- tomlockwood 7y ago
  Author here. I think your response only holds true if both the market acts rationally (which isn't the case if people are optimizing-for-resume), and the benefit from claiming more conversions isn't as low hanging as other "efficiency" gains. The "attribution mechanisms" you mention are precisely one of the drivers for the pervasive data collection that is in AdTech.
gmurad 7y ago
I joined AdTech just a few years after graduation (my formative years as a software engineer) and that gave me the opportunity to work on very high throughput systems. Eventually I got to lead several different project like building ad servers and real time bidder from scratch and scale them to the 100K+ requests per second while maintaining single digit ms avg response times. I also had a head start in the "big" data space because of AdTech. I will always be thankful for the knowledge I got because of the nature of AdTech, it positioned me really well in the market and just made me a much better engineer. After 5+ years working in AdTech is was time for a change, I was feeling dragged down by similar reasons, I had a high leadership position and a lot of domain knowledge so a lot to lose, but I made a change to mobile F2P gaming and have been doing that for over 3 years, it's been a great change.
matz1 7y ago
Its not always sucks, as a consumer, if I can get cheaper pizza, with the trade of they may sell my data, I'm fine with it. What is the downside ? My email spammed ? not that much of issue, gmail spam filter work reasonably well. My phone being spammed by robocall ? smart app can filter those out too. Ads on the web ? adblocker solve that.
- tomlockwood 7y ago
  Author here. Would you be ok with your health insurer buying your pizza purchase frequency from a data broker?
  - matz1 7y ago
    Whats the actual issue ? They might increase my premium if i I buy too much pizza ? then it may be possible they might decrease my premium if I don't buy pizza that much.
    - jdcro 7y ago
      Do you really want every decision you make to be available to everyone you interact with, and then used to judge you? You're that confident in the dirty details of your life?
      - bongobongo 7y ago
        Keep in mind "dirty details" is a matter of perspective. Details that aren't dirty can become dirty depending upon who is wielding power.
      - matz1 7y ago
        Ideally yes, provided everyone else decision is also available to me. Do I have dirt ? Of course. I would be okay if everyone else dirt is exposed too. True that people can use information to judge me, but it can be both positive and negative. Right now, having "dirt" is not without its trade off and inconvenient, you have to make effort to conceal it, hide it.
SPGWhistler 7y ago
I commented on a different article earlier which was all fear mongering. This, on the other hand, is exactly correct. This article is fantastic and spot on.
fromthestart 7y ago
>Tracking is bad, because even if you don’t have anything to hide now, you may find that your past activities make you a target under a future political system. I've been screaming about this for years, but everyone thinks I'm crazy. Here's an interesting point of frustration: one one likes to give out phone numbers in the context of online dating anymore. Usually the request is to move from, say, tinder, to an app like Snapchat. People don't understand why I'm hesitant, especially when they want to discuss relatively personal, indirectly or directly politically charged politics on a platform built to harvest literally everything you write, photograph, and send. On some level I start to feel like society is deserving of the dystopia it is building, because the average person simply doesn't care to understand the dangers of anything they do when everyone else is doing it. But maybe that's just vindictiveness brought on by jealousy of their blissful ignorance.
reallydude 7y ago
AdTech is wonderful, from a technical perspective. The standards are rich while the ecosystem is rife with opportunity. If you are a developer in AdTech, you will NEVER hear about interaction, or see contract, with most of the companies listed...other than a handful (maybe FB, maybe Yahoo, maybe Instagram). I've worked for Experian (the US Company) and talking about them in the AdTech space is the same as talking about HN in the cooking recipe space. There's a tiny bit of overlap, but it's largely pointing to shoehorned third parties because that isn't something Experian's existing infrastructure performs. AdTech is fun, it pays well, and you get to be at the ground level of these moral compass debates. I have refused some pieces of work and AdTech is tolerant to negotiating concerns. I think most developers would benefit from experience in AdTech, even if it's just a short time.
- seibelj 7y ago
  I worked in adtech for a bit and thought the tech was really subpar. The engineer’s goal is try and find edge cases where the privacy controls of the OS / browser have gaps so you can better target and serve more ads. The ads themselves are garbage. Very underwhelming experience. Also it’s a race to the bottom. No VC’s want to invest in adtech anymore given that old tech has monopolized it and regulations are coming. No career path. Stay away.
- r00fus 7y ago
  > you get to be at the ground level of these moral compass debates Is this a euphemism for "test your moral fibre"? I had a similar experience with a company that later turned patent-troll - not sure I'd wish that on anyone (high stress, not rewarding).
- whatshisface 7y ago
  >you get to be at the ground level of these moral compass debates. That's the most generous way of phrasing it that I've ever heard... ;)
- tomlockwood 7y ago
  Author here. The companies listed are by no means meant to be an exhaustive list, just illustrative examples. As long as Experian buys and sells consumer data (and in the Australian market, mosaic segments are often used and widely known) they'll be relevant to the point. I could rattle off a good two dozen names of AdTech companies, or companies making AdTech plays as a minor element of their business (like gosh dang adobe lol) and not even scratch the surface of the industry.
kgwxd 7y ago
It should be referred to as Tracking Tech, it reflects the actual goal much more clearly.
joefkelley 7y ago
The idea that ad targeting sucks because ad networks have no incentive to improve it is extremely dubious. Google and Facebook have an incentive to use up advertisers' budgets. But they also have an incentive to keep advertisers happy by providing good returns so that they will keep spending / increase spending in the long run. Advertisers are not always perfectly rational, but I don't think they're as dumb as the article makes them out to be. The simpler explanation for poor ad targeting is the bidding component. If it was the case that you were shown whichever ad had the highest predicted CTR, I'm pretty sure you'd be seeing some damn relevant ads. But instead you're seeing whichever ad has the highest (bid per click * ctr). Or worse, advertisers can also bid per impression, in which case there might be no relevancy component at all. My guess is the car ads on YouTube mentioned in the article are that last case. Both of those components (YouTube and car companies) are notable for skewing towards "brand" advertising rather than "performance" advertising. They're not trying to get you to buy a car right then. They're trying to get you to feel good about their company in the long run so that five years from now you're more likely to buy their car.
- tilolebo 7y ago
  +1 with that. Having worked for an ad network: it doesn't matter how good your recommendation algorithms are if all you have in your ad campaign pool is shitty diet and car ads.
  - a123b456c 7y ago
    There is an alternate explanation that doesn't rely on advertiser stupidity. Most advertisers are statistically unable to estimate the profitability of their campaigns, because ads generally exert weak effects in very noisy environments. There is some high quality evidence supporting that, e.g. https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/130/4/1941/1914592 https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/130/4/1941/1914592 Nota bene, weak effects does not mean ads are necessarily profitable. Profitability depends on many factors including margin, retention, ad cost, etc.
- bogomipz 7y ago
  Might you or someone else mind explaining how this "bidding component" works? I'm not familiar with it or with the specific bidding models at work - "bid per click * ctr" etc?

285 points by tomlockwood 7y ago

Yeah, it sucks for advertisers, too. From another active thread concerning the ad industry: > Using Google retargeting ads, less than 5% of desktop traffic goes on to click anywhere on my website. And it's worse for mobile than on desktops. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20124231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20124231

omarchowdhury 7y ago
You mean it sucks for you. How can you speak for all advertisers, especially based on a sample size of 200 clicks? You have to diagnose what could be off on your end before making extreme blanket statements. These ad systems are tools, and tools only work as well as how you use them.
- DailyHN 7y ago
  I find it hard to believe that 97.5% of people can click a link to a website and not even accidentally click something on that website. I'm not referring to real conversions, where yes, skills in marketing and using the tools does make all the difference. All I'm saying is that I paid for 200 clicks that appear to not even have real people clicking anywhere at all.
  - omarchowdhury 7y ago
    No doubt, there is fraud in the system. If you want to be successful in using these ad platforms for your business, you will have to accept that as a fact of life. What you need to do is to exclude bad placements/websites from your campaign. But even before that, you have to see if your ads + landing page are compelling, or you'll just waste a ton of money.
    - navigatesol 7y ago
      >But even before that, you have to see if your ads + landing page are compelling, or you'll just waste a ton of money. And how do you determine that, ex ante?
      - omarchowdhury 7y ago
        This part is more art than science, and requires being objective about the subjective, and what I mean by that is: being honest about what you're offering and if it's actually valuable to your prospects, and then seeing if how you're presenting your offer is simultaneously clear and breaks through the noise. At the end of the day we're still talking about sales, just in a new form, in a multi-dimensional bazaar called the Internet.
  - bduerst 7y ago
    Only you know how you set up your ads. Did you use the right keyword targeting? Location settings? Is your ad copy relevant to what you're actually selling or even to your website? Does your website have clear CTAs and copy? What is considered your conversion goal? Are you advertising in a popular market? Have you tried optimized with A/B testing for any of the above?
    - DailyHN 7y ago
      Retargeting + content keyword + location targeting. That is, people that have visited my site in the past(with separate ad groups to test "expanded audiences"), currently visiting another site with the target keywords, from a targeted location. And ads are generic branding and go to the homepage. Conversion goal: simply clicking anything at all.
      - bduerst 7y ago
        Is your goal brand awareness or actual conversions (i.e. selling something or form fills)? It sounds like you're trying to do both.
      - cameronbrown 7y ago
        If they've visited before, why will they come again without a reason? Your ad has to actually convince them to do something beyond read the same thing twice.
  - kps 7y ago
    > I find it hard to believe that 97.5% of people can click a link to a website and not even accidentally click something on that website. Depends on the type of site. If I follow a link to read something, I'll probably read it and leave. If the site tries to make me click something, I'll probably just leave.
- username444 7y ago
  Exactly this. Are you retargeting someone immediately after they purchased? Before their purchase even arrived? Is it a good targeting list? We have 3 buckets of customers, based on historical buying cycle: 0-30, 31-60, 61-90. We run retargeting within their purchase cycle, which is friendly and relevant. Customers get churned out of retargeting if not within their buying cycle, which saves us money, and saves them irritation.
- DisruptiveDave 7y ago
  This, this, this. So many people who are not well versed in advertising (the art, not the tech) simply launch a bare minimum campaign, for some reason expect great returns, then blame the tool. It's completely illogical. There are many components to an ad campaign, from targeting to what's being advertised to creative to copy (and the thousands of variations within each) to ad type...and so on.
  - DailyHN 7y ago
    Great returns? My only expectations is being able to believe real people are actually clicking the ads. Which I don't.
    - 55555 7y ago
      You realize the prices you pay per click or impression are set by a market, right? The crux of the problem is that other people are just better at advertising than you are. There's a lot of fraud but I'm tired of people on HN who are terrible at advertising saying that "ads don't work." It's like saying "code doesn't work". It's just nonsense. What is your website/landing page URL and what did your ad say?
      - DailyHN 7y ago
        Maybe more focus should be on the fraud instead of the people who are wondering if ads are worth pursuing because of having to set aside a part of their budget to that fraud. And considering the pervasiveness of tracking, why isn't the fraud better tracked?
        bunderbunder 7y ago
        > why isn't the fraud better tracked? Because the people who are best-positioned to do something about click fraud also make heaps of money off of click fraud. For example, browser extensions like AdNauseam that randomly "click" on ad links are maybe meant to be a middle finger aimed at the ad networks, but, realistically, if you, the person doing the advertising, are paying for clicks, then the main effect of such extensions is to transfer money from your pocket to the ad network's.
elorant 7y ago
5% ain't bad. Depending on site content ctr could be as low as 0,5%. Rates have been dropping for ages.
- DailyHN 7y ago
  That's 5% of clicks I paid for, resulting in any click on the website.
  - bunderbunder 7y ago
    It doesn't really surprise me at all. Virtually 100% of my clicks on ads are accidental - either the touchpad registered a tap when I didn't intend it, or, in the ever-increasing case of ads moving around on the page, because the ad popped in front of what I actually intended to click on. To tell the truth, the ads may be working, insofar as sometimes I will go to find out more based on an ad. But you won't see it in your click-through rates. I'll get to your website by opening a new tab and searching in DDG, because at this point I'm so annoyed by adtech and all their scumminess that I'm not willing to give them any additional data if I can possibly avoid it.

tomrod 7y ago

Online ads seem to perform poorly and, for larger companies with brand recognition and large budgets, almost no lift. I've been under the impression that adtech is a bubble, but I'm not an expert in the space.

libertine 7y ago
It's not a bubble, but it definitely shouldn't be on a pedestal.

dpflan 7y ago

"""The systemic issue occurs because marketers and AdTech companies unreflectively increase surveillance and data collection in the hopes of increasing media attribution. Even the most trivial data point, the most granular site visit or location data, stored on a person-by-person basis, could conceivably be used to demonstrate that a customer may have come into contact with one of your campaigns.""" I'm genuinely intrigued by AdTech. It exists, but no one likes it -- i.e. before internet ads --> TiVo, internet ads --> ad blockers. I understand it can attract talent due to profits and the engineering + data problems, but is that the main attraction for developers? If you worked in adTech, what attracted you to it? Is there a hope you could make more ethical or privacy aware or (<insert positive idea here>) ad tech systems? Does adTech even work? Is there an active campaign somewhere / grassroots movement to "boycott" recruitment to ad tech companies? (Just trying to get a better understanding here, ad tech has become symbiotic with the current state of the internet, so I would like to better understand it.)

tomlockwood 7y ago
Author here. I was attracted by the money, but also the exciting technical challenges. AdTech had all the largest datasets! At the time I entered the industry I wasn't really thinking about the ethical concerns. I just didn't think those issues would bother me as much as they ended up bothering me.
- dpflan 7y ago
  Thank you for sharing your perspective and authoring the article. Is there growing sentiment like yours amongst colleagues and peers in ad tech?
  - tomlockwood 7y ago
    I'm not sure since I've been out for a couple years, but at the time I'd often have conversations with marketers where I'd come away wondering how they could be so oblivious to the ethical concerns in what they were asking for. I do think as time goes on, more and more people are becoming aware of the issues, but I see that uniformly across society rather than in tech.

bad_user 7y ago

The example of the pizza delivery selling the personal details of their customers is precisely why GDPR has value. People have been dismissing it as being unfriendly to startups. As a software developer I totally get the complaints, but as an Internet user I couldn't care less. You could say that the free market will adjust itself when consumers will figure out the damage and learn to protect themselves by choosing better alternatives. But there's no way to protect oneself. For example in the pizza delivery case, there's often no way to know that your address and phone will be sold to third parties, unless it's against the law to do so without you giving explicit consent.

pedro_hab 7y ago
Selling personal data without permission is illegal without GDPR.
- bad_user 7y ago
  Please explain.
  - pedro_hab 7y ago
    AFAIK GDPR makes a slight difference because it requires opt in for data sharing. But I'd argue it is very hard, if not possible, to know if a company has shared your data. The damage of regulations like this may be greater than the benefit. We will see how the weak European innovation will take these changes. I say weak innovation bc VC money is not flowing there as it does in US.
    - Barrin92 7y ago
      the lack of VC culture doesn't indicate a lack of innovation, because the VC industry is just one form of financing businesses, very regionally limited to countries that have huge homogenous consumer markets and operate on scale. Innovation in countries like Germany is traditionally distributed. And the idea that GDPR is damaging to innovation is really just a fiction at best and deregulation agitprop at worst. Europe has not competed with tech giants before GDPR, and more importantly, even other US companies cannot compete with Facebook or Google. You can measure the lack of competition in feet as you walk away from the Google and Facebook HQs. VC money in the US is geographically concentrated in an area that doesn't even cover 1% of the map, the law has nothing to do with it.

nopriorarrests 7y ago

From the article - "If you’ve been on the internet for any amount of time, you’ve probably seen very poorly targeted advertising. In my experience, I see a lot of car ads. I don’t own a car". One can argue that advertising cars to person without one make some sense. At least it's better then advertising vacuum cleaners to person who bought one on amazon 1 week ago.

asenna 7y ago
I'll give you a better example - I'm an English speaking guy consuming regular US content. I travel quite often and when I'm in non-english speaking places like Thailand, I see ads on Youtube(mobile) purely in Thai language. I use Google products extensively and Google most definitely knows I don't speak Thai. I mean it's almost ridiculous the number of Thai ads I've seen on Youtube. For a company that sophisticated with AdTech, I'm shocked how bad they are with this. Are they doing this on purpose just to sell more ads? The companies spending the money to show me those videos are practically throwing money down the drain if I don't even understand them.
- tomlockwood 7y ago
  Author here. I wish I'd thought of your example before I wrote the article :D And I think my opinion on that is probably obvious, but I think the simplest answer is that Google simply doesn't care about mistargeting ads to a consumer who wouldn't conceivably click on them. They gain no benefit from reducing an advertisers spend that way.
  - criddell 7y ago
    The cars example is also not great because cars are one of those things that are advertised to everybody. Beer, laundry detergent, insurance, and movies are other examples like that. Basically, the kind of ads you see during a Sunday afternoon football game.
  - dano 7y ago
    Another aspect of the Thai example is that the target is over constrained. The user is from the US, knows English, doesn't know Thai, is temporary located in Thailand, age 30 to 35, likes country music, and of ethnic decent (just example data). Advertisers can't really customize their offer to that overly constrained individual and the algorithm falls through to the remnant ad inventory. On the sell side, such a constrained target is a small market and not worth the effort to buy placement. If one runs unlock orig or pi-hole regularly, ads you do get out of home on your phone will start to be less targeted to you. To the larger point of pull vs. push, I would embrace such a market place. Google shopping sort of does this. Good article. Thank you.

geuis 7y ago

Ironically that url is being blocked by Ublock Origin on my phone.

tomlockwood 7y ago
Author here - I actually had to change some of the image URLs I made because they had AdTech in the name, and uBlock was blocking them. Hahaha! I solemnly swear that my website has no tracking installed on it (that I know of, welp). Cheers.
- geuis 7y ago
  Probably because of the combination of “advertising” and dates in the path.
gorhill 7y ago
I do not experience this -- sounds like a false positive. I tried enabling various filter lists to see if I could reproduce and I can't. What reason uBO is giving you for blocking the page?

bunderbunder 7y ago

> I’d love for data to be seen as a liability - something audited and discarded often to minimise risk. Perhaps it's just the industries I've worked in, which tend to be highly regulated, but I have such a hard time seeing why this idea isn't more intuitive to people. Every single scrap of sensitive information you have laying around is something that has the potential to fuel a very expensive, possibly even existential, crisis for your company. Even for the non-sensitive stuff, keeping it around "just in case" increases the risk that somebody who has taken a couple classes in how to use R or Pandas and is still a bit starry-eyed about Big Data starts making questionable business decisions based on unskeptical interpretations of biased results drawn from convenience-sampled data of uncertain provenance. The default shouldn't be collecting and warehousing everything, the default should be, "when in doubt, throw it out."

tomlockwood 7y ago
Author here. Yeah, and to expand on the idea of liability, I also additionally mean the possibility of a financial liability. If we were to say, charge per month for a retained customer date of birth, you'd see business analysts internally constantly asking why the data needed to be stored so long, or whether just age could be stored, or something. If the price was high enough, the problem would sort of just... go away. Obviously much smarter people than me would need to figure out those regulations though.
- afiori 7y ago
  On the liability side the GDPR was already good progress
diogofranco 7y ago
Surely there are many reasons to not hoard everything, but I find this argument strange. If you're in a business that is making bad decisions due to wrong analysis of data, it seems like there should be more nuanced and pertinent ways to tackle this then just throwing it out, which also prevents good analysis.
- 7y ago

baybal2 7y ago

My first ever "earning money in Internet" experience was in my teen years when I ran my own ad farm as a part of an ad farming collective 2005-2007. Back then, things were simple: you open a website, sign for 100+ banner networks, then drive in traffic with all tricks imaginable, including "buying it." Part of your revenue goes to group's 'big papa' who does all the "business cover" in the West: setting up companies, bank accounts, accounting, tax reporting, and cashing out payments from ad nets. My second venture into Ad industry came rather unexpected. In 2016, when I had to leave Canada because my employer was denied LMIA (a paper "certifying" that you are not stealing a job from locals.) I called up all my friends with whomever I had working relationship before I moved out of Russia. A man who once was a guy behind of Russia's biggest ad farming group back in mid-naughties called me back. Unbeknown to me, he worked day and night to up his profile for 10 years, and became a "big name man" in Ad industry, moved to USA, and opened one of the biggest DSP on the market today. What shocked me, is that the nature of the industry and attitudes to the client hasn't changed a dime since 2005. The slang for F500 clients there is still a "whale" (the term itself originally came from either "ad farming" circles or banking) After passing through shock coming back to Russia after 8 years and coming back to my senses, I said *ck with that and left. Been happily working in OEM electronics again since.

spectramax 7y ago

Is there a "pull" rather push aspect to advertisement? Sort of a trade-show equivalent of digital advertisement? Issues with pushing ads down my throat are as follows: 1. I don't want to buy another Sony XM3 headphones. I just fucking bought them and I am seeing more ads of the same thing. 2. Even if I saw ads for relevant accessories, say, I bought an iPhone and I am seeing ads for phone cases; I don't want to see them when I am browsing Instagram or a lecture video on YT about how to meditate. 3. Say the timing is right and the ad is relevant, I still am repulsed by advertisers. I don't like salesmen. I find them sleezy and annoying. It is like walking into Radioshack and a platoon of salesmen are trying to sell you Sprint cell phone and I am here to buy a goddamn electrolytic capacitor. However, when I am searching for a pressure cooker, it would be great to go to a centralized repository of ads and look through who markets this sort of thing the best and may be have some objective reviews along with it. May be have a standardized ad template and guidelines so the marketing dickheads don't go overboard with flashing lights and sparkles. Have a standardized page full of pressure cooker ads, let them fight over my business in a level playing field. No psychological tricks, no sleezy techniques, I want to see increased competition based on value they provide to consumers. Not weak anti-competitive deceitful marketing. I love going to trade-shows. They're all salesmen but there is something about serendipitous discovery of new stuff, seeing things that you may not need immediately but it goes in the back of your mind and you remember it at some obscure situation (especially in hardware engineering, I run a lab that serves 50 engineers). Most importantly, I am in the mindset when I visit a trade-show. That mindset is different than when I am desperately looking for a tire shop nearby to fix my flat tire. Fuck advertisement. It is the worst thing modern society is plagued with. We need yellow pages, not 60 second interruptions during a cooking show. YC folks are reading this - there is a huge gap for a "pull" advertisement model. AdTech guys can still collect data and be assholes about it, but at least you won't be bothering me when I need not.

rkallos 7y ago
The only thing I know of that somewhat resembles what you describe is https://thewirecutter.com/ https://thewirecutter.com/
iamnothere 7y ago
> However, when I am searching for a pressure cooker, it would be great to go to a centralized repository of ads and look through who markets this sort of thing the best and may be have some objective reviews along with it. The Wirecutter used to be pretty good for this, until the NYT bought it. It's still OK now, but it feels like that the pool of products being reviewed in each category is smaller than it once was. The whole site is basically a giant ad/referral scheme, but as long as you're aware of that then it's not bad as a starting point for research. I used to just do a search on Amazon and start from there. Now it's 1 or 2 big brands followed by 20 pages of the same identical Chinese clone product with names like "Wootoo" and "Yungoo".

programmertote 7y ago

> Imagine you’re a marketing-degree graduate in middle management. If you’re lucky, you may have done some statistics courses. In your day-to-day, you likely don’t apply these to a great amount. You hear about this great thing called “Machine Learning” which is sweeping marketing departments. You might have read a white paper or two about it, heard about it at a conference, or been schmoozed by someone from IBM trying to sell you Watson (ugh). You decide to talk to a consultancy about it, or are referred to one by upper management, who’s been living from cocktail-to-cocktail on the consultant’s corporate AMEX for their entire career. Lets be real - when you’re in this position, the consultants say a lot of words to you that you don’t understand and then you say yes to a contract because the PowerPoint looks good. Not only do you get to mention your huge new budget on your resume, thanks to the huge invoice, but you also get to mention you implemented MACHINE LEARNING at your company. But what’s next? I have been working in advertising industry (background in software engineering) for 3+ years as an engineer (for one of the four biggest agencies). I think the author overestimates how much data we can/do collect, and how much we leverage on it. But the excerpt above is absolutely spot on. I'm a mid-level manager and I sometimes baffled at how much bullshit some companies try to sell to our clients (e.g., some big CPG companies), and how much the management folks from our clients and our advertising agency/company alike buy into that bullshit. "ML/AI" and "Media attribution" are really big now. But I believe almost 99% of the people who are leading these efforts (at least in my company) have no clue as to how to do it--thus, the snake oil salesmen are taking advantage of this.

tomlockwood 7y ago
Thanks for your kind words! :) I worked at a Telecom for most of my time in AdTech so I think I might have had a close encounter with some particularly high overcollection of data there.
- programmertote 7y ago
  Ah...I definitely see the Telecoms recording and hoarding a lot of data without any regard to consequence/implication. I know a couple of coworkers who decided to leave my current employer and work for big Telecoms, and they said it's more chaotic there. :)

xixixao 7y ago

> Why, oh why, would a company built on ad revenue want to reduce ad spend? > These companies are perfectly positioned to make ads more efficient - and they have absolutely no reason to do so. The question is not really asking about reducing ad spend, it's asking about reducing advertiser costs per outcome. It's pretty obvious that if you decrease costs per outcome, return on ad spend will rise, and advertisers will spend more. In fact, more advertisers will want to get in on the game (as costs decrease, ads become profitable for more and more advertisers), and this pushes costs up. This eventually creates an equilibrium, but even at that point, it is still the case that decreasing costs increases revenues for ad networks. Attribution is a really, really hard problem. Ideally you want to do a Lift test, and ideally you want to do it across all your ad spend channels. To do this, you still need the attribution mechanisms ("tracking" in the article). So I don't find the article coherent. It points out deficiencies in the system (which there are many), it falsely claims that big players have no incentive to improve, and it makes it sounds like all these advertisers are just burning their money. It makes it sound like pervasive tracking is a problem, which it might be for other reasons (privacy, unintended consequences), but certainly is not making ad tech worse.

tomlockwood 7y ago
Author here. I think your response only holds true if both the market acts rationally (which isn't the case if people are optimizing-for-resume), and the benefit from claiming more conversions isn't as low hanging as other "efficiency" gains. The "attribution mechanisms" you mention are precisely one of the drivers for the pervasive data collection that is in AdTech.

gmurad 7y ago

I joined AdTech just a few years after graduation (my formative years as a software engineer) and that gave me the opportunity to work on very high throughput systems. Eventually I got to lead several different project like building ad servers and real time bidder from scratch and scale them to the 100K+ requests per second while maintaining single digit ms avg response times. I also had a head start in the "big" data space because of AdTech. I will always be thankful for the knowledge I got because of the nature of AdTech, it positioned me really well in the market and just made me a much better engineer. After 5+ years working in AdTech is was time for a change, I was feeling dragged down by similar reasons, I had a high leadership position and a lot of domain knowledge so a lot to lose, but I made a change to mobile F2P gaming and have been doing that for over 3 years, it's been a great change.

matz1 7y ago

Its not always sucks, as a consumer, if I can get cheaper pizza, with the trade of they may sell my data, I'm fine with it. What is the downside ? My email spammed ? not that much of issue, gmail spam filter work reasonably well. My phone being spammed by robocall ? smart app can filter those out too. Ads on the web ? adblocker solve that.

tomlockwood 7y ago
Author here. Would you be ok with your health insurer buying your pizza purchase frequency from a data broker?
- matz1 7y ago
  Whats the actual issue ? They might increase my premium if i I buy too much pizza ? then it may be possible they might decrease my premium if I don't buy pizza that much.
  - jdcro 7y ago
    Do you really want every decision you make to be available to everyone you interact with, and then used to judge you? You're that confident in the dirty details of your life?
    - bongobongo 7y ago
      Keep in mind "dirty details" is a matter of perspective. Details that aren't dirty can become dirty depending upon who is wielding power.
    - matz1 7y ago
      Ideally yes, provided everyone else decision is also available to me. Do I have dirt ? Of course. I would be okay if everyone else dirt is exposed too. True that people can use information to judge me, but it can be both positive and negative. Right now, having "dirt" is not without its trade off and inconvenient, you have to make effort to conceal it, hide it.

SPGWhistler 7y ago

I commented on a different article earlier which was all fear mongering. This, on the other hand, is exactly correct. This article is fantastic and spot on.

fromthestart 7y ago

>Tracking is bad, because even if you don’t have anything to hide now, you may find that your past activities make you a target under a future political system. I've been screaming about this for years, but everyone thinks I'm crazy. Here's an interesting point of frustration: one one likes to give out phone numbers in the context of online dating anymore. Usually the request is to move from, say, tinder, to an app like Snapchat. People don't understand why I'm hesitant, especially when they want to discuss relatively personal, indirectly or directly politically charged politics on a platform built to harvest literally everything you write, photograph, and send. On some level I start to feel like society is deserving of the dystopia it is building, because the average person simply doesn't care to understand the dangers of anything they do when everyone else is doing it. But maybe that's just vindictiveness brought on by jealousy of their blissful ignorance.

reallydude 7y ago

AdTech is wonderful, from a technical perspective. The standards are rich while the ecosystem is rife with opportunity. If you are a developer in AdTech, you will NEVER hear about interaction, or see contract, with most of the companies listed...other than a handful (maybe FB, maybe Yahoo, maybe Instagram). I've worked for Experian (the US Company) and talking about them in the AdTech space is the same as talking about HN in the cooking recipe space. There's a tiny bit of overlap, but it's largely pointing to shoehorned third parties because that isn't something Experian's existing infrastructure performs. AdTech is fun, it pays well, and you get to be at the ground level of these moral compass debates. I have refused some pieces of work and AdTech is tolerant to negotiating concerns. I think most developers would benefit from experience in AdTech, even if it's just a short time.

seibelj 7y ago
I worked in adtech for a bit and thought the tech was really subpar. The engineer’s goal is try and find edge cases where the privacy controls of the OS / browser have gaps so you can better target and serve more ads. The ads themselves are garbage. Very underwhelming experience. Also it’s a race to the bottom. No VC’s want to invest in adtech anymore given that old tech has monopolized it and regulations are coming. No career path. Stay away.
r00fus 7y ago
> you get to be at the ground level of these moral compass debates Is this a euphemism for "test your moral fibre"? I had a similar experience with a company that later turned patent-troll - not sure I'd wish that on anyone (high stress, not rewarding).
whatshisface 7y ago
>you get to be at the ground level of these moral compass debates. That's the most generous way of phrasing it that I've ever heard... ;)
tomlockwood 7y ago
Author here. The companies listed are by no means meant to be an exhaustive list, just illustrative examples. As long as Experian buys and sells consumer data (and in the Australian market, mosaic segments are often used and widely known) they'll be relevant to the point. I could rattle off a good two dozen names of AdTech companies, or companies making AdTech plays as a minor element of their business (like gosh dang adobe lol) and not even scratch the surface of the industry.

kgwxd 7y ago

It should be referred to as Tracking Tech, it reflects the actual goal much more clearly.

joefkelley 7y ago

The idea that ad targeting sucks because ad networks have no incentive to improve it is extremely dubious. Google and Facebook have an incentive to use up advertisers' budgets. But they also have an incentive to keep advertisers happy by providing good returns so that they will keep spending / increase spending in the long run. Advertisers are not always perfectly rational, but I don't think they're as dumb as the article makes them out to be. The simpler explanation for poor ad targeting is the bidding component. If it was the case that you were shown whichever ad had the highest predicted CTR, I'm pretty sure you'd be seeing some damn relevant ads. But instead you're seeing whichever ad has the highest (bid per click * ctr). Or worse, advertisers can also bid per impression, in which case there might be no relevancy component at all. My guess is the car ads on YouTube mentioned in the article are that last case. Both of those components (YouTube and car companies) are notable for skewing towards "brand" advertising rather than "performance" advertising. They're not trying to get you to buy a car right then. They're trying to get you to feel good about their company in the long run so that five years from now you're more likely to buy their car.

tilolebo 7y ago
+1 with that. Having worked for an ad network: it doesn't matter how good your recommendation algorithms are if all you have in your ad campaign pool is shitty diet and car ads.
- a123b456c 7y ago
  There is an alternate explanation that doesn't rely on advertiser stupidity. Most advertisers are statistically unable to estimate the profitability of their campaigns, because ads generally exert weak effects in very noisy environments. There is some high quality evidence supporting that, e.g. https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/130/4/1941/1914592 https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/130/4/1941/1914592 Nota bene, weak effects does not mean ads are necessarily profitable. Profitability depends on many factors including margin, retention, ad cost, etc.
bogomipz 7y ago
Might you or someone else mind explaining how this "bidding component" works? I'm not familiar with it or with the specific bidding models at work - "bid per click * ctr" etc?