12 ms·

All of this money and effort to create something that has never scientifically been proven to work: Super-targeted ads, instead of contextual ads. The context

All of this money and effort to create something that has never scientifically been proven to work: Super-targeted ads, instead of contextual ads. The context is already there. Each article on a newspaper already provides the context. What is the true purpose of this? The true purpose is psychological control and manipulation, as well as making additional money with the data beyond ads. Psychological manipulation gives the ability to actually create demand. And this is what this is about, because that's the only way to actually increase revenue in a meaningful way. If you can target a person everywhere on all channels, and all the time, you can do things that are not possible with simple contextual ads, and the profiles that are being created are for lots of different purposes, not for ads. I wait for the day some newspaper actually does an in-depth investigative study into the level of manipulation that drives sales in ad-tech, because I suspect that the entire system feeds off low-educated and poor people, for example lower-class stressed-out people who struggle to lose weight and are prone to manipulative ads. This is the target audience that you can manipulate into spending 500$ instead of 50$.

avn2109 7y ago
You’re waiting for newspapers to investigate why their own primary revenue stream is unethical?
- untog 7y ago
  Newspapers get huge amounts of referral traffic from Facebook, it hasn't stopped them investigating Facebook's practises.
  - toasterlovin 7y ago
    Facebook is an adversary, though. Big difference.
- ChrisSD 7y ago
  Technically the journalists should have editorial independence and a firewall between them and marketing. So they could in theory investigate their own paper's revenue stream. Although in this case they wouldn't have to frame it in such stark terms because ad tech is widely used.
- user17843 7y ago
  there are state-sponsered media like BBC, etc.
  - Lio 7y ago
    Even with the BBC though there are conflicts of interest. For example, when the BBC introduced compulsory logins for its iPlayer service so that it could, amongst other things, form political profiles on users just in case viewers decided to be in the audience of it's political shows such as Question Time. I distinctly remember hearing the BBC News team interviewing the BBC's own staff and coming to the consensus with themselves that they were "striking the right balance". There were no descenting voices on the programme and discussion about why creating political profiles for people might be a bad thing.
    - Aethelwulf 7y ago
      Do you have a reference for that discussion?
      - Lio 7y ago
        Not to hand but I'm just having a search for it. I'm pretty sure it was PM with Eddy Mare on Radio Four and from memory would have been back in 2017.
      - michaelt 7y ago
        Radio 4's 'Feedback' [1] bills itself as "The programme that holds the BBC to account on behalf of the radio audience" and frequently interviews BBC employees. Obviously there are fraught incentives from them paying for their own criticism. Not sure cancelling the program would improve the situation though. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006slnx/episodes/downloads https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006slnx/episodes/downloads
- moviuro 7y ago
  Le Canard Enchaîné disagrees [0]. Still stuck in the old ways of paper printing though. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Canard_encha%C3%AEn%C3%A9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Canard_encha%C3%AEn%C3%A9
  - souterrain 7y ago
    “Stuck” may not be the best word for a profitable journalism company that ensures its readers that they aren’t being tracked nor individually manipulated. Are there any digital news outfits that don’t subject their paying readers to unethical (IMHO) advertising? If no, I’ll continue to read via dead trees.
Donzo 7y ago
I'm not sure what scientific bar of proof you would need to see passed, but Google stalks users and targets them because it makes them more money. The ads perform better. Their systems fall back on context, when they can't do the more lucrative stalking.
- user17843 7y ago
  Probably. I think it's a downward spiral, it only works because each player is forced to play along due to fundamentals of game theory. So what we are seeing is that the methods become more ruthless every day, but everyone needs to conform, and it's a race to the bottom. The end result is spending-fatigue and numbness in response to normal ads that are not hyper-addictive. I also think it does not really pay off for publishers. It only really pays off for the middle men and those players who sell unethical products aimed at manipulation.
titzer 7y ago
> All of this money and effort to create something that has never scientifically been proven to work: Super-targeted ads, instead of contextual ads. Oh, it works to some extent. Trust me, advertisers and ad networks look at this stuff very, very closely. They have the data. I know only rough numbers, but a.) the difference is surprisingly small, yet b.) big enough that they can't just stop.
jefftk 7y ago
> All of this money and effort to create something that has never scientifically been proven to work There are parts of the online ads business that are very scientific. They run A/B tests to figure out what will make them the most money, and they're very good at it. Amazon, for example: say you look at a blender there and don't buy it. Amazon has cookied you, and can then target that cookie on other websites, showing you pictures of the blender trying to get you to come back and complete your purchase. They have very good metrics showing how much they should pay for these remarketing ads, and they make a lot of money from it. > Each article on a newspaper already provides the context. The article you're reading does give some information. There are a few kinds of articles that people are especially likely to read before spending money ("what kind of phone should I buy", "which credit card should I get", "what do I do if I've been diagnosed with mesothelioma") and ads on those pages are worth a lot. But if you look over the front page of the Washington Post ("Opioid death rates soared in areas where pain pills flowed", "At rally, crowd responds to Trump’s criticism of Rep. Omar with chants of ‘Send her back!’", "House votes to kill impeachment resolution", "This German city had few foreigners. Then refugees changed it in some surprising ways") or any other general interest publication you'll see that most articles are targeted at, and going to be read by, a very wide range of people. (Disclosure: I work on ads at Google)
- user17843 7y ago
  Aren't A/B tests super short-term and specific to single advertisers? In the end the money in the system is limited, and if one competitor achieves a high level of revenue via A/B testing, someone else probably loses that amount of money. I wonder whether Ad-tech has seen a reduction in revenue after Apple introduced Intelligent Tracking Protection, as these users can not be tracked via cookies. This source claims there was no significant dip for Criteo for example: https://www.thedrum.com/news/2018/08/01/despite-apple-s-game-changing-itp-update-criteos-revenues-have-dipped-just-1-year https://www.thedrum.com/news/2018/08/01/despite-apple-s-game...
  - nerdponx 7y ago
    The conspiracy theorist in me suspects that they only introduced cookie blocking after they were sure that other fingerprinting methods were reliable enough that they didn't need cookies anymore. They can pretend like they're "doing something" when blocking cookies in and of itself is another variable they can use to fingerprint you.
untog 7y ago
> The context is already there. Each article on a newspaper already provides the context. While that's true, I'd imagine the vast majority of articles aren't all that useful to sell against. What ads do you put next to "Trump racist tweet controversy"? Flights to Canada, perhaps...
- superhuzza 7y ago
  That's an easy one, you sell #IStandWithIlhan shirts. Next ad? MAGA hats, so you can sell to both sides.
- stubish 7y ago
  'Take back control of your health cover' Trump tweets are clickbait and generate outrage. You just need an targeted to people in that mood. And probably a much better return per click than selling ads targeted to people who have been searching for health cover, because they are already in the comparison stage or are no longer in the market, where as the clickbait ad targeted at people pissed off at the government gets to make some first impressions.
mindslight 7y ago
> Each article on a newspaper already provides the context That doesn't work when the articles are optimized for creating fear and panic to drive "engagement". In the best case, it would look like they're trying to tastelessly profit from the problem - eg an ad for Suboxone. Psychological manipulation does not require persistent personalized targeting, it just helps. Base consumerism is driven by contrasting a horrible hyperreality with stability/escape - the context of the ad must be different from the context of the story.
mikeash 7y ago
It’s always hilarious to look at ads and try to figure out why they think I’m the right audience for them. Facebook keeps showing me ads for a cup with a hidden compartment for alcohol in the lid, and for various gun safes. Apparently they’ve decided I’m an alcoholic who attends a lot of festivals, and a gun owner. Neither one is remotely correct. The other day a different site showed me an ad for a capsule containing a 360° panoramic camera that a proctologist can use to inspect people’s digestive tracts. I’m not any sort of doctor. It would be one thing if all this abusive technology was used to show me relevant stuff. But they do all this nonsense and end up showing me ads for butt cameras?!
- dorfsmay 7y ago
  I'm surprised Facebook's showing irrelevant ads to you. The few times I have to use Facebook the ads are so relevant that it is downright creepy. They are known for buying people purchase history from credit card company, but they are still stuff I have not figured out how they made the connection, for example, I get ads for very specific product that family members with a different last name and who don't have facebook, bought recently.
  - T1glober 7y ago
    It gets really spooky when you start getting ads for something that was mentioned a couple times in Messenger. Wouldn't be surprised if they are scraping DMs now, too.
    - afiori 7y ago
      And the alternative explanation is even worse: modern behavioral model (at times) as so good that they know what product to sell you before you do.
- srrr 7y ago
  Facebook will always show you an ad. First the system tries to select a relevant ad with the highest predicted income ($$$) for FB winning the auction for your screenspace (the placement). If FB can't find a perfectly relevant ad the algorithm will choose a less relevant ad, But it will always show you an ad. The thing is FB does not select a relevant ad from all available ads on FB, but only from a subset of ads matching a certain targeting setting that in turn matches your profile or interest. And this targeting setting is set by the uploader of the ad. And in some cases advertisers select a targeting that does not make any sense at all. (They target you by error.) Does the placement algorithm like to show you a non relevant ad? Most likely not because on average it yields less money for FB. It could be that FB does not have much information on your interests or your privacy settings disallow using this information and the algorithm does not know what is relevant to you. And/Or the advertiser had a very high bid for the placement and the placement algorithm decided a less relevant ad with a high bid yields more money than a more relevant ad with a low bid. (This is often the case if the advertiser decided to pay per ad-view and not per ad-click. Pay-per-click ads only yield money to FB if they are relevant, because users don't click on non relevant ads. Per-per-view ads always yield money for FB.) But in the end it's not facebook who is to blame. It's the advertiser setting up stupid targeting and placement bids. (I once burned through 10000€ in one minute because of an erroneous targeting setting while showing the right advertisement to the wrong people...)
tinus_hn 7y ago
It’s proven to work in the area where it matters: convincing people to buy ads. Marketeers pay more for showing ads to targeted audiences than for showing them to random audiences. The Washington Post doesn’t care if you buy the toothpaste that is in the ad on their page.
- darepublic 7y ago
  I guess they should care in the sense that poor ad performance will cause marketers to question the effectiveness of ad buying with WP?
  - mr_crankypants 7y ago
    The open secret there is that it's infeasible to accurately measure ad performance, and embarrassingly easy to come up with metrics that would make basically any ad campaign look like a success without looking suspect to anyone but a trained statistician. Which will work out just fine, so long as your advertising client isn't someone like RStudio.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      Yup. There's no reason to expect that an industry whose sole specialty is being manipulative and dishonest to behave virtuously when dealing within the industry. Adtech companies compete against each other too.
    - riku_iki 7y ago
      > it's infeasible to accurately measure ad performance, how come? You can measure your conversion rate, cost per conversion, etc.
      - mr_crankypants 7y ago
        That's about the only gimme, and it'll only cover a portion of the hypothetical payoff for the ad - some other, potentially larger, number of people never click, but do remember and come back later. Or if you're trying to sell things in meatspace, it's really hard to ever be able to say, "More people came to our store because we ran an ad." If you do get enough profit from directly traceable conversions to cover the campaign, yeah, that's a gimme - you may not know your actual ROI, but you do know that its lowest possible value is still positive. That said, I don't work in adtech, so I don't really have any way of knowing how common that is.
neuronexmachina 7y ago
From the article, better contextual targeting appears to be the goal of WaPo's project: > The Zeus platform monitors contextual data such as what article a person is reading or watching, what position they have scrolled to on a page, what URL they have used to arrive there and what they’re clicking on. The publisher will then match that data to its existing audience data pools, which it has accumulated over the last four years, to create assumptions on what that news user’s consumption intent will be. The technology uses machine learning to decipher the patterns.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  Yes, that's why I'm hesitant to call this move unambiguously good. But it does seem better than most.
dehrmann 7y ago
Contextual ads work fine for some things (printer ads for "printers" searches and reviews), but for things that aren't e-commerce, context is much less interesting, and it's more effective to show a retargeted ad for printers on a news article on the latest laser research than an ad for laser pointers.
michaelt 7y ago
Each article on a newspaper already provides the context. What is the true purpose of this? I'm no ad lover, but I can't imagine stories like "Care worker found guilty of murdering 13-year-old girl" and "Foreign oil tanker seized in Gulf, state TV reports" really lend themselves to contextual ads?
- owenversteeg 7y ago
  For the first, security cameras, background check services, etc. For the second, political ads on all sides, as well as ads targeted to the reader. (Perhaps a book about geopolitics? A fancy globe/map?) I shared your initial reaction, but after thinking about it a bit more deeply I feel like it could actually work.
  - lenzm 7y ago
    People reading an article about a tragedy are no more likely to be interested in background check services than the population as whole. That's useless targeting, it's not even targeting. How many fancy globes and maps do you think are sold? Enough to fund all of the geopolitical news being reported?
    - dhimes 7y ago
      People reading an article about a tragedy are no more likely to be interested in background check services than the population as whole. Are you sure about that? New mother, wondering where she is going to find a babysitter, wouldn't feel an increased pressure to think about security cameras and background checks after seeing something like that? I can't speak for all of them, of course, but of the few I've known such things become topics of neighborhood conversation. Perhaps you have better data.
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        I suspect parents are a particularly juicy target. Being a fresh parent myself, I've already noticed I have much different emotional reactions to news reports and even movie scenes involving safety of children. I totally buy that in the above murder example, an ad for security cameras would be very effective.
mywittyname 7y ago
Bingo. YouTube is targeting me with hyper-manipulative ads. I had one that was a five minute explanation about What Racism Really Is and another was about how European Socialism Doesn't Work. Neither of which had anything at all to do with the videos I was watching. I see what they are doing and I don't like it.
- nerdponx 7y ago
  Political organizations are paying YouTube to target you with manipulative ads. Maybe that's splitting hairs but we might as well be precise about who has what role.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    Yes, it's proper to blame everyone involved in this.
oarabbus_ 7y ago
>I wait for the day some newspaper actually does an in-depth investigative study into the level of manipulation that drives sales in ad-tech, because I suspect that the entire system feeds off low-educated and poor people, for example lower-class stressed-out people who struggle to lose weight and are prone to manipulative ads. This is the target audience that you can manipulate into spending 500$ instead of 50$. Why do you think you're immune or any different?
- user17843 7y ago
  because I never see any ads :P 20-30 percent of people use ad-blockers, and I think I already know the demographics compared to the exposed population. But for a serious argument, I refer to the studies on delayed gratification and the association with education and upbringing.
mochomocha 7y ago
> All of this money and effort to create something that has never scientifically been proven to work: Super-targeted ads, instead of contextual ads. Have you worked in the field? Because I have, and I can tell you that ads targeting works. I've built some of these systems that people love to hate on HN. Hundreds of PhDs at Yahoo Labs, Google, FB etc have worked on this for decades and run thousands of A/B experiments. Are you saying that all these people are fraudulent / incompetent and that somehow the whole market cap of Google and FB combined (above 1 trillion dollars) is just a complete fraud? Contextual advertising works, but much less than behavioral targeting. Anyone who has seen and worked on the data knows that. Knowing that you just visited Best Buy website 10 minutes ago and searched for a camera is _much_ more relevant to figure out which ad to show you on nytimes.com right now than the content of the article you're reading on nytimes.com
- Cpoll 7y ago
  > Knowing that you just visited Best Buy website 10 minutes ago and searched for a camera is _much_ more relevant to figure out which ad to show you on nytimes.com right now than the content of the article you're reading on nytimes.com The concern here is that you're just selling a camera that they were already going to buy. So the ad agency wins, Best Buy _thinks_ they win because they register a conversion, but you didn't actually create any value. In my experience when the PhDs say "this doesn't work," the PMs say "that's fine, because we still get to say we have machine learning [insert other buzzword] and the customer thinks it's delivering value." > Contextual advertising works, but much less than behavioral targeting. Anyone who has seen and worked on the data knows that. I admit this is possible, and my gut feeling is that properly implemented targetted ads should be immensely effective, but theory isn't implementation, and I'm taking your word on it either way.
  - hombre_fatal 7y ago
    Driving the user back to BestBuy.com to convert into a concrete sale seems much more valuable than "well, they searched for cameras so they might come back one day and pull the trigger. Fingers crossed!" Why wouldn't Best Buy pay for that? I search things on Amazon all the time without checking out. Those aren't locked in as eventual purchases at all. There are even things in my Amazon cart as we speak that I probably won't buy. I'm often a mere teeter from pulling the trigger. Coming home drunk or being reminded at the right moment sometimes push me over the edge. There's obvious value in giving me the right shove.
laughinghan 7y ago
> Super-targeted ads, instead of contextual ads. Did you read the article? The point of this new platform is contextual ads, instead of personally-targeted ads.
- user17843 7y ago
  It's more like a mixture of context and client-targeting (referer for example)
manigandham 7y ago
> "has never scientifically been proven to work" You mean like the petabytes of data generated every day by 2 of the biggest companies on the planet? Did you just make up this claim? The industry is not dumb, its more politics and technical wars that lead to bad experiences than anything else. There's a balance between detailed targeting and context, with the major problem in the former being data quality and identification. This is why Facebook can do a great job when you're logged in, but a generic ad network will suffer with crummy ads. You don't notice the good ads, only the bad ones, so you're skewed into thinking they never work even though that's far from the truth.
afiori 7y ago
> What is the true purpose of this? I believe that from the hosting site perspective one of the principal benefit is sweet talking investors.
dwild 7y ago
I have a pretty hard time believing it contextual ads works just as well as targeted ads because the ONLY time an ads ever worked for me, was because it was targeted. When the netbook trends started, I was interested in buying one. I made a few research on the subject but once done, that was it. A few days later, I got a Best Buy ads about the exact netbook I searched about and the price was great and I bought it. It wouldn't have happened if it was contextual. Sure it may have happened that later on I would have got an ads of that netbook on a technology website, but it would have been one out of thousands. People keep doing re-marketing campaigns. Theses have to provide a better return than normal advertising or else why would you do the effort? That show right there that targeting works.

avn2109 7y ago

You’re waiting for newspapers to investigate why their own primary revenue stream is unethical?

untog 7y ago
Newspapers get huge amounts of referral traffic from Facebook, it hasn't stopped them investigating Facebook's practises.
- toasterlovin 7y ago
  Facebook is an adversary, though. Big difference.
ChrisSD 7y ago
Technically the journalists should have editorial independence and a firewall between them and marketing. So they could in theory investigate their own paper's revenue stream. Although in this case they wouldn't have to frame it in such stark terms because ad tech is widely used.
user17843 7y ago
there are state-sponsered media like BBC, etc.
- Lio 7y ago
  Even with the BBC though there are conflicts of interest. For example, when the BBC introduced compulsory logins for its iPlayer service so that it could, amongst other things, form political profiles on users just in case viewers decided to be in the audience of it's political shows such as Question Time. I distinctly remember hearing the BBC News team interviewing the BBC's own staff and coming to the consensus with themselves that they were "striking the right balance". There were no descenting voices on the programme and discussion about why creating political profiles for people might be a bad thing.
  - Aethelwulf 7y ago
    Do you have a reference for that discussion?
    - Lio 7y ago
      Not to hand but I'm just having a search for it. I'm pretty sure it was PM with Eddy Mare on Radio Four and from memory would have been back in 2017.
    - michaelt 7y ago
      Radio 4's 'Feedback' [1] bills itself as "The programme that holds the BBC to account on behalf of the radio audience" and frequently interviews BBC employees. Obviously there are fraught incentives from them paying for their own criticism. Not sure cancelling the program would improve the situation though. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006slnx/episodes/downloads https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006slnx/episodes/downloads
moviuro 7y ago
Le Canard Enchaîné disagrees [0]. Still stuck in the old ways of paper printing though. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Canard_encha%C3%AEn%C3%A9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Canard_encha%C3%AEn%C3%A9
- souterrain 7y ago
  “Stuck” may not be the best word for a profitable journalism company that ensures its readers that they aren’t being tracked nor individually manipulated. Are there any digital news outfits that don’t subject their paying readers to unethical (IMHO) advertising? If no, I’ll continue to read via dead trees.

Donzo 7y ago

I'm not sure what scientific bar of proof you would need to see passed, but Google stalks users and targets them because it makes them more money. The ads perform better. Their systems fall back on context, when they can't do the more lucrative stalking.

user17843 7y ago
Probably. I think it's a downward spiral, it only works because each player is forced to play along due to fundamentals of game theory. So what we are seeing is that the methods become more ruthless every day, but everyone needs to conform, and it's a race to the bottom. The end result is spending-fatigue and numbness in response to normal ads that are not hyper-addictive. I also think it does not really pay off for publishers. It only really pays off for the middle men and those players who sell unethical products aimed at manipulation.

titzer 7y ago

> All of this money and effort to create something that has never scientifically been proven to work: Super-targeted ads, instead of contextual ads. Oh, it works to some extent. Trust me, advertisers and ad networks look at this stuff very, very closely. They have the data. I know only rough numbers, but a.) the difference is surprisingly small, yet b.) big enough that they can't just stop.

jefftk 7y ago

> All of this money and effort to create something that has never scientifically been proven to work There are parts of the online ads business that are very scientific. They run A/B tests to figure out what will make them the most money, and they're very good at it. Amazon, for example: say you look at a blender there and don't buy it. Amazon has cookied you, and can then target that cookie on other websites, showing you pictures of the blender trying to get you to come back and complete your purchase. They have very good metrics showing how much they should pay for these remarketing ads, and they make a lot of money from it. > Each article on a newspaper already provides the context. The article you're reading does give some information. There are a few kinds of articles that people are especially likely to read before spending money ("what kind of phone should I buy", "which credit card should I get", "what do I do if I've been diagnosed with mesothelioma") and ads on those pages are worth a lot. But if you look over the front page of the Washington Post ("Opioid death rates soared in areas where pain pills flowed", "At rally, crowd responds to Trump’s criticism of Rep. Omar with chants of ‘Send her back!’", "House votes to kill impeachment resolution", "This German city had few foreigners. Then refugees changed it in some surprising ways") or any other general interest publication you'll see that most articles are targeted at, and going to be read by, a very wide range of people. (Disclosure: I work on ads at Google)

user17843 7y ago
Aren't A/B tests super short-term and specific to single advertisers? In the end the money in the system is limited, and if one competitor achieves a high level of revenue via A/B testing, someone else probably loses that amount of money. I wonder whether Ad-tech has seen a reduction in revenue after Apple introduced Intelligent Tracking Protection, as these users can not be tracked via cookies. This source claims there was no significant dip for Criteo for example: https://www.thedrum.com/news/2018/08/01/despite-apple-s-game-changing-itp-update-criteos-revenues-have-dipped-just-1-year https://www.thedrum.com/news/2018/08/01/despite-apple-s-game...
- nerdponx 7y ago
  The conspiracy theorist in me suspects that they only introduced cookie blocking after they were sure that other fingerprinting methods were reliable enough that they didn't need cookies anymore. They can pretend like they're "doing something" when blocking cookies in and of itself is another variable they can use to fingerprint you.

untog 7y ago

> The context is already there. Each article on a newspaper already provides the context. While that's true, I'd imagine the vast majority of articles aren't all that useful to sell against. What ads do you put next to "Trump racist tweet controversy"? Flights to Canada, perhaps...

superhuzza 7y ago
That's an easy one, you sell #IStandWithIlhan shirts. Next ad? MAGA hats, so you can sell to both sides.
stubish 7y ago
'Take back control of your health cover' Trump tweets are clickbait and generate outrage. You just need an targeted to people in that mood. And probably a much better return per click than selling ads targeted to people who have been searching for health cover, because they are already in the comparison stage or are no longer in the market, where as the clickbait ad targeted at people pissed off at the government gets to make some first impressions.

mindslight 7y ago

> Each article on a newspaper already provides the context That doesn't work when the articles are optimized for creating fear and panic to drive "engagement". In the best case, it would look like they're trying to tastelessly profit from the problem - eg an ad for Suboxone. Psychological manipulation does not require persistent personalized targeting, it just helps. Base consumerism is driven by contrasting a horrible hyperreality with stability/escape - the context of the ad must be different from the context of the story.

mikeash 7y ago

It’s always hilarious to look at ads and try to figure out why they think I’m the right audience for them. Facebook keeps showing me ads for a cup with a hidden compartment for alcohol in the lid, and for various gun safes. Apparently they’ve decided I’m an alcoholic who attends a lot of festivals, and a gun owner. Neither one is remotely correct. The other day a different site showed me an ad for a capsule containing a 360° panoramic camera that a proctologist can use to inspect people’s digestive tracts. I’m not any sort of doctor. It would be one thing if all this abusive technology was used to show me relevant stuff. But they do all this nonsense and end up showing me ads for butt cameras?!

dorfsmay 7y ago
I'm surprised Facebook's showing irrelevant ads to you. The few times I have to use Facebook the ads are so relevant that it is downright creepy. They are known for buying people purchase history from credit card company, but they are still stuff I have not figured out how they made the connection, for example, I get ads for very specific product that family members with a different last name and who don't have facebook, bought recently.
- T1glober 7y ago
  It gets really spooky when you start getting ads for something that was mentioned a couple times in Messenger. Wouldn't be surprised if they are scraping DMs now, too.
  - afiori 7y ago
    And the alternative explanation is even worse: modern behavioral model (at times) as so good that they know what product to sell you before you do.
srrr 7y ago
Facebook will always show you an ad. First the system tries to select a relevant ad with the highest predicted income ($$$) for FB winning the auction for your screenspace (the placement). If FB can't find a perfectly relevant ad the algorithm will choose a less relevant ad, But it will always show you an ad. The thing is FB does not select a relevant ad from all available ads on FB, but only from a subset of ads matching a certain targeting setting that in turn matches your profile or interest. And this targeting setting is set by the uploader of the ad. And in some cases advertisers select a targeting that does not make any sense at all. (They target you by error.) Does the placement algorithm like to show you a non relevant ad? Most likely not because on average it yields less money for FB. It could be that FB does not have much information on your interests or your privacy settings disallow using this information and the algorithm does not know what is relevant to you. And/Or the advertiser had a very high bid for the placement and the placement algorithm decided a less relevant ad with a high bid yields more money than a more relevant ad with a low bid. (This is often the case if the advertiser decided to pay per ad-view and not per ad-click. Pay-per-click ads only yield money to FB if they are relevant, because users don't click on non relevant ads. Per-per-view ads always yield money for FB.) But in the end it's not facebook who is to blame. It's the advertiser setting up stupid targeting and placement bids. (I once burned through 10000€ in one minute because of an erroneous targeting setting while showing the right advertisement to the wrong people...)

tinus_hn 7y ago

It’s proven to work in the area where it matters: convincing people to buy ads. Marketeers pay more for showing ads to targeted audiences than for showing them to random audiences. The Washington Post doesn’t care if you buy the toothpaste that is in the ad on their page.

darepublic 7y ago
I guess they should care in the sense that poor ad performance will cause marketers to question the effectiveness of ad buying with WP?
- mr_crankypants 7y ago
  The open secret there is that it's infeasible to accurately measure ad performance, and embarrassingly easy to come up with metrics that would make basically any ad campaign look like a success without looking suspect to anyone but a trained statistician. Which will work out just fine, so long as your advertising client isn't someone like RStudio.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Yup. There's no reason to expect that an industry whose sole specialty is being manipulative and dishonest to behave virtuously when dealing within the industry. Adtech companies compete against each other too.
  - riku_iki 7y ago
    > it's infeasible to accurately measure ad performance, how come? You can measure your conversion rate, cost per conversion, etc.
    - mr_crankypants 7y ago
      That's about the only gimme, and it'll only cover a portion of the hypothetical payoff for the ad - some other, potentially larger, number of people never click, but do remember and come back later. Or if you're trying to sell things in meatspace, it's really hard to ever be able to say, "More people came to our store because we ran an ad." If you do get enough profit from directly traceable conversions to cover the campaign, yeah, that's a gimme - you may not know your actual ROI, but you do know that its lowest possible value is still positive. That said, I don't work in adtech, so I don't really have any way of knowing how common that is.

neuronexmachina 7y ago

From the article, better contextual targeting appears to be the goal of WaPo's project: > The Zeus platform monitors contextual data such as what article a person is reading or watching, what position they have scrolled to on a page, what URL they have used to arrive there and what they’re clicking on. The publisher will then match that data to its existing audience data pools, which it has accumulated over the last four years, to create assumptions on what that news user’s consumption intent will be. The technology uses machine learning to decipher the patterns.

JohnFen 7y ago
Yes, that's why I'm hesitant to call this move unambiguously good. But it does seem better than most.

dehrmann 7y ago

Contextual ads work fine for some things (printer ads for "printers" searches and reviews), but for things that aren't e-commerce, context is much less interesting, and it's more effective to show a retargeted ad for printers on a news article on the latest laser research than an ad for laser pointers.

michaelt 7y ago

Each article on a newspaper already provides the context. What is the true purpose of this? I'm no ad lover, but I can't imagine stories like "Care worker found guilty of murdering 13-year-old girl" and "Foreign oil tanker seized in Gulf, state TV reports" really lend themselves to contextual ads?

owenversteeg 7y ago
For the first, security cameras, background check services, etc. For the second, political ads on all sides, as well as ads targeted to the reader. (Perhaps a book about geopolitics? A fancy globe/map?) I shared your initial reaction, but after thinking about it a bit more deeply I feel like it could actually work.
- lenzm 7y ago
  People reading an article about a tragedy are no more likely to be interested in background check services than the population as whole. That's useless targeting, it's not even targeting. How many fancy globes and maps do you think are sold? Enough to fund all of the geopolitical news being reported?
  - dhimes 7y ago
    People reading an article about a tragedy are no more likely to be interested in background check services than the population as whole. Are you sure about that? New mother, wondering where she is going to find a babysitter, wouldn't feel an increased pressure to think about security cameras and background checks after seeing something like that? I can't speak for all of them, of course, but of the few I've known such things become topics of neighborhood conversation. Perhaps you have better data.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      I suspect parents are a particularly juicy target. Being a fresh parent myself, I've already noticed I have much different emotional reactions to news reports and even movie scenes involving safety of children. I totally buy that in the above murder example, an ad for security cameras would be very effective.

mywittyname 7y ago

Bingo. YouTube is targeting me with hyper-manipulative ads. I had one that was a five minute explanation about What Racism Really Is and another was about how European Socialism Doesn't Work. Neither of which had anything at all to do with the videos I was watching. I see what they are doing and I don't like it.

nerdponx 7y ago
Political organizations are paying YouTube to target you with manipulative ads. Maybe that's splitting hairs but we might as well be precise about who has what role.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  Yes, it's proper to blame everyone involved in this.

oarabbus_ 7y ago

>I wait for the day some newspaper actually does an in-depth investigative study into the level of manipulation that drives sales in ad-tech, because I suspect that the entire system feeds off low-educated and poor people, for example lower-class stressed-out people who struggle to lose weight and are prone to manipulative ads. This is the target audience that you can manipulate into spending 500$ instead of 50$. Why do you think you're immune or any different?

user17843 7y ago
because I never see any ads :P 20-30 percent of people use ad-blockers, and I think I already know the demographics compared to the exposed population. But for a serious argument, I refer to the studies on delayed gratification and the association with education and upbringing.

mochomocha 7y ago

> All of this money and effort to create something that has never scientifically been proven to work: Super-targeted ads, instead of contextual ads. Have you worked in the field? Because I have, and I can tell you that ads targeting works. I've built some of these systems that people love to hate on HN. Hundreds of PhDs at Yahoo Labs, Google, FB etc have worked on this for decades and run thousands of A/B experiments. Are you saying that all these people are fraudulent / incompetent and that somehow the whole market cap of Google and FB combined (above 1 trillion dollars) is just a complete fraud? Contextual advertising works, but much less than behavioral targeting. Anyone who has seen and worked on the data knows that. Knowing that you just visited Best Buy website 10 minutes ago and searched for a camera is _much_ more relevant to figure out which ad to show you on nytimes.com right now than the content of the article you're reading on nytimes.com

Cpoll 7y ago
> Knowing that you just visited Best Buy website 10 minutes ago and searched for a camera is _much_ more relevant to figure out which ad to show you on nytimes.com right now than the content of the article you're reading on nytimes.com The concern here is that you're just selling a camera that they were already going to buy. So the ad agency wins, Best Buy _thinks_ they win because they register a conversion, but you didn't actually create any value. In my experience when the PhDs say "this doesn't work," the PMs say "that's fine, because we still get to say we have machine learning [insert other buzzword] and the customer thinks it's delivering value." > Contextual advertising works, but much less than behavioral targeting. Anyone who has seen and worked on the data knows that. I admit this is possible, and my gut feeling is that properly implemented targetted ads should be immensely effective, but theory isn't implementation, and I'm taking your word on it either way.
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  Driving the user back to BestBuy.com to convert into a concrete sale seems much more valuable than "well, they searched for cameras so they might come back one day and pull the trigger. Fingers crossed!" Why wouldn't Best Buy pay for that? I search things on Amazon all the time without checking out. Those aren't locked in as eventual purchases at all. There are even things in my Amazon cart as we speak that I probably won't buy. I'm often a mere teeter from pulling the trigger. Coming home drunk or being reminded at the right moment sometimes push me over the edge. There's obvious value in giving me the right shove.

laughinghan 7y ago

> Super-targeted ads, instead of contextual ads. Did you read the article? The point of this new platform is contextual ads, instead of personally-targeted ads.

user17843 7y ago
It's more like a mixture of context and client-targeting (referer for example)

manigandham 7y ago

> "has never scientifically been proven to work" You mean like the petabytes of data generated every day by 2 of the biggest companies on the planet? Did you just make up this claim? The industry is not dumb, its more politics and technical wars that lead to bad experiences than anything else. There's a balance between detailed targeting and context, with the major problem in the former being data quality and identification. This is why Facebook can do a great job when you're logged in, but a generic ad network will suffer with crummy ads. You don't notice the good ads, only the bad ones, so you're skewed into thinking they never work even though that's far from the truth.

afiori 7y ago

> What is the true purpose of this? I believe that from the hosting site perspective one of the principal benefit is sweet talking investors.

dwild 7y ago

I have a pretty hard time believing it contextual ads works just as well as targeted ads because the ONLY time an ads ever worked for me, was because it was targeted. When the netbook trends started, I was interested in buying one. I made a few research on the subject but once done, that was it. A few days later, I got a Best Buy ads about the exact netbook I searched about and the price was great and I bought it. It wouldn't have happened if it was contextual. Sure it may have happened that later on I would have got an ads of that netbook on a technology website, but it would have been one out of thousands. People keep doing re-marketing campaigns. Theses have to provide a better return than normal advertising or else why would you do the effort? That show right there that targeting works.