5 ms·

If I'm going to see ads, I'd prefer targeted ones personally. Show me something I might want - product discover is actually hard, if an ad can show me somethin

If I'm going to see ads, I'd prefer targeted ones personally. Show me something I might want - product discover is actually hard, if an ad can show me something that solves a need/want I have that's great for me and for the company.

Larrikin 6y ago
The ad is targeted by showing you a relevant ad on a relevant site. Looking at a hiking site, they'll have boot ads, looking at vacuum cleaner reviews, there are obviously going to be vacuum cleaner ads. Advertisers collecting every single personal detail they can so they can show you the boots you already bought months ago on an unrelated topic just makes the world a worse place.
Loughla 6y ago
I'm the literal opposite. If I have to see the ads, I don't want my data harvested, stored, and shared in an effort to serve them to me. Identify the target audience of the site you're buying ads from, and identify if that is a target audience that you can appeal to. Then buy ad time. Like TV. That way my data is safe, and I'm still exposed to your ads that are relevant to people visiting 'x' site.
- mFixman 6y ago
  I'm an immigrant, and Facebook shows me a lot of targeted ads for local companies that sell snacks from my native country. The TV constantly shows me ads for cars despite the fact that I don't even have a drivers licence. The first one is useful for me, but the niche of people who would buy it is so small that it wouldn't make sense to target it to everyone. I hate the second ones, but the majority of people love buying cars.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  You don't need your data harvested. Youtube could serve Sandvik ads beside This Old Tony videos just based on the content being served without knowing anything about the viewer
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
jellicle 6y ago
You would still see yacht ads on the site for Yachting Magazine. What you wouldn't see is hemorrhoid ads targeted to you because you searched for hemorrhoid cream three days ago on a different computer.
Nextgrid 6y ago
Targeting as it is currently done collects an insane amount of data which is an ever-growing liability which will inevitably blow up when that data leaks or becomes resold/misused.
- wtracy 6y ago
  I think there's a world of difference between saying that targeted advertising as it is done now is unacceptable, and saying that targeted advertising is fundamentally unacceptable. The first one I'm actually sympathetic to. The second I vehemently disagree with.
- GekkePrutser 6y ago
  It's already being misused, consider Cambridge Analytica.
  - Nextgrid 6y ago
    To be fair, Cambridge Analytica was just betting on idiots willingly granting access to their Facebook accounts and the data they ended up gathering was these people's social graph and had nothing to do with ad targeting.
ryandrake 6y ago
I'm of the opposite view: If I'm going to see ads, I'd rather they be irrelevant. That way I at least have a little more assurance that my privacy was not violated in order to produce them. I don't care what the content of the ad is, because I will not buy a product from an ad, so a non-privacy-violating ad that I ignore is strictly better to me than a privacy-violating ad that I also ignore.
cj 6y ago
I think the average (non-technical) person would agree. I know a lot of very non-technical people, some of who dislike facebook in general, talk about how good facebook is at showing them ads that actually get them to discover and buy new products. The people I've heard this sentiment from don't feel like they were manipulated into buying something that ultimately didn't meet expectations. I commonly hear things like "I can't believe how good the Facebook ads are. I only see ads for really nice Blouses in colors and sizes that I like. I've bought nice things via Facebook ads". Granted, it's usually followed up by "I can't believe Facebook is able to be that good at showing me the right ads" ... but people I've talked to seem to feel neutral about the creepiness of it, I'm guessing because the upside is they get to discover and buy cool new things that they otherwise wouldn't have known about. (Personally I don't like ad targeting on the basis of companies abusing / selling / harvesting data about me... but for the average person I think seeing well targeted ads is positive UX compared with showing non-targeted ads)
- thrwn_frthr_awy 6y ago
  My non technical friends and family do not like targets ads. Anytime they see specific ads for a store the just visited (online or brick-and-mortar) they think the microphones are on and being used. There’s a difference of an ad for a generic pet product you may like vs an ad for the exact product you viewed on another site. They do not understand how two completely different sites share their information. They do not like when they do a google search for an illness, view a webmd page, and then see ads for their illness on the phone apps. During my time at Apple one of the big things they impressed on new hires is that there are things we can do with technology, that may even be beneficial to the user, but will be perceived as creepy. For instance, Starbucks could use facial recognition to greet you by your name at a location you’ve never been to. They could have already started your drink with a high probability it is what you order based on time and weather. But these things are “creepy” to much of the population and should be avoided. Ad networks do not care because their customer is not the end-user.
Allower 6y ago
You are also implicitly agreeing to have this data harvested by governments, political parties and other nefarious groups that only wish to exploit such data to generate dystopian citizen scorecards, suppress dissent and generally destroy a free society.
libraryatnight 6y ago
Have you ever had that experience though? For me targeted ads just show me things I've already bought. "Great google, yep, last month I was reading midi controller reviews, and I bought one last month. " Amazon does the same thing after I've bought something from them. Just bought a printer? Amazon's gonna email me shit about other printers I might like for a week, not accessories that go with the machine I purchased, just other printers. So not only am I not really comfortable with tracking, I don't think the experience justifies it.
Dahoon 6y ago
Like ads for a TV because you just bought a TV? Target ads are crap. I have never in my life seen an ad that was useful. They miss the target 100% of the time.
LeifCarrotson 6y ago
Many of the comments in this thread are talking past each other, by ignoring one side or the other of the cost/benefit balance. It's pointless to shout "But it has benefits, leave it the way it is!" and "But it has costs, eliminate the entire industry!" without engaging with the opposing value set. I don't think that anyone would disagree with you that true product discovery - educating you about a thing you didn't know about that solves a problem you have - is a benefit of good advertising. Lots of advertising isn't about product discovery, for sure, it's about persuading you to buy a thing you don't want and reminding you about a product you already know about and building an image about the product, and many people want to get off the hedonistic, materialistic treadmill that such persuasion pulls towards, but let's ignore that for now and assume that targeted ads lead to a benefit to the consumer of improved product discovery. However, I don't think this is a very big benefit, in the real world. I can count maybe 3 things that I've bought in the past year or so where product discovery was important to me, where I was genuinely surprised that the solution was that easy and available. Heck, one was such a big benefit, I'll share: I changed the faucet hardware in my bathroom vanity, but instead of laying on my back and trying to turn the nuts by hand or squeeze in a pair of channel-locks between the sink and the wall, this time I got a targeted ad in my Amazon search results for the faucet advertising a basin wrench, which I didn't know was a thing. That's genuine product discovery, it saved me a little discomfort and a little time, and cost $6. I like the basin wrench, but if targeted ads didn't exist and I could pay a third party to provide me with the same advice I get from targeted ads, I'd value the service at maybe $2/year. Targeted ads, especially as they're currently implemented, do have a cost to you as a consumer. It's largely invisible to non-technical users, but they do have a significant cost to your privacy. They cost computing cycles and battery life. They cost control of your devices, of your software, and of the websites you browse. Personally, those are pretty significant costs to me. And worst of all, IMO, they have a huge cost in mental fatigue, clamoring for my attention, because for every targeted ad that matches the "has this problem/wants to solve it with this product" combination there are 10,000 that fail one or the other condition. I value these costs pretty high, I bought an SBC just to run PiHole, I pay for Netflix so my TV is ad-free, I buy songs on my phone and wear noise-cancelling headphones in the shop at work so I don't have to listen to the incessant f*ing radio ads. Ugh. And there's little chance I can do anything about the billboards on my commute, though those are contextually targeted to my area rather than invasively targeted. I've probably spent hundreds of dollars avoiding ads, if I could pay someone hundreds more to make the entire industry disappear from my perception I would do so in a heartbeat. That said, it's not possible to put a number on either the cost or the benefit that's true for everyone. Personally, I feel that those advocating targeted ads generally underestimate how much data is being collected, overestimate the benefits of product discovery, and underestimate the benefits available from alternative, less consumer-costly mechanisms for targeting, like content/context-based targeting. How many dollars per year do you think the benefits of product discovery, as provided by non-GPDR, non-CCPA, no-holds-barred targeted advertising is worth to you? What price would you put on its costs?
smileybarry 6y ago
This sounded good to me on paper, so years ago I turned ad personalization back on for a while. At the time I was checking Pebble's site on a daily basis because they had short-term sales not announced anywhere. AdSense then proceeded to push just that one "Pebble Smartwatch" ad on me, everywhere. Even a page with multiple ad blocks just had several of them -- sometimes all of them -- the same text ad for Pebble. It became more annoying than helpful because I was already going to buy one, it just tried to push me to buy it for a higher price. I turned ad personalization off again and now any ads I get are mostly just related to the current page's content.
dekerta 6y ago
Why can't ads simply be targeted based on the content of the page or type of website? Show ads related to programming on /r/programming, ads for cars on /r/cars, and ads for antidepressants on r/wallstreetbets

Larrikin 6y ago

The ad is targeted by showing you a relevant ad on a relevant site. Looking at a hiking site, they'll have boot ads, looking at vacuum cleaner reviews, there are obviously going to be vacuum cleaner ads. Advertisers collecting every single personal detail they can so they can show you the boots you already bought months ago on an unrelated topic just makes the world a worse place.

Loughla 6y ago

I'm the literal opposite. If I have to see the ads, I don't want my data harvested, stored, and shared in an effort to serve them to me. Identify the target audience of the site you're buying ads from, and identify if that is a target audience that you can appeal to. Then buy ad time. Like TV. That way my data is safe, and I'm still exposed to your ads that are relevant to people visiting 'x' site.

mFixman 6y ago
I'm an immigrant, and Facebook shows me a lot of targeted ads for local companies that sell snacks from my native country. The TV constantly shows me ads for cars despite the fact that I don't even have a drivers licence. The first one is useful for me, but the niche of people who would buy it is so small that it wouldn't make sense to target it to everyone. I hate the second ones, but the majority of people love buying cars.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
You don't need your data harvested. Youtube could serve Sandvik ads beside This Old Tony videos just based on the content being served without knowing anything about the viewer

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jellicle 6y ago

You would still see yacht ads on the site for Yachting Magazine. What you wouldn't see is hemorrhoid ads targeted to you because you searched for hemorrhoid cream three days ago on a different computer.

Nextgrid 6y ago

Targeting as it is currently done collects an insane amount of data which is an ever-growing liability which will inevitably blow up when that data leaks or becomes resold/misused.

wtracy 6y ago
I think there's a world of difference between saying that targeted advertising as it is done now is unacceptable, and saying that targeted advertising is fundamentally unacceptable. The first one I'm actually sympathetic to. The second I vehemently disagree with.
GekkePrutser 6y ago
It's already being misused, consider Cambridge Analytica.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  To be fair, Cambridge Analytica was just betting on idiots willingly granting access to their Facebook accounts and the data they ended up gathering was these people's social graph and had nothing to do with ad targeting.

ryandrake 6y ago

I'm of the opposite view: If I'm going to see ads, I'd rather they be irrelevant. That way I at least have a little more assurance that my privacy was not violated in order to produce them. I don't care what the content of the ad is, because I will not buy a product from an ad, so a non-privacy-violating ad that I ignore is strictly better to me than a privacy-violating ad that I also ignore.

cj 6y ago

I think the average (non-technical) person would agree. I know a lot of very non-technical people, some of who dislike facebook in general, talk about how good facebook is at showing them ads that actually get them to discover and buy new products. The people I've heard this sentiment from don't feel like they were manipulated into buying something that ultimately didn't meet expectations. I commonly hear things like "I can't believe how good the Facebook ads are. I only see ads for really nice Blouses in colors and sizes that I like. I've bought nice things via Facebook ads". Granted, it's usually followed up by "I can't believe Facebook is able to be that good at showing me the right ads" ... but people I've talked to seem to feel neutral about the creepiness of it, I'm guessing because the upside is they get to discover and buy cool new things that they otherwise wouldn't have known about. (Personally I don't like ad targeting on the basis of companies abusing / selling / harvesting data about me... but for the average person I think seeing well targeted ads is positive UX compared with showing non-targeted ads)

thrwn_frthr_awy 6y ago
My non technical friends and family do not like targets ads. Anytime they see specific ads for a store the just visited (online or brick-and-mortar) they think the microphones are on and being used. There’s a difference of an ad for a generic pet product you may like vs an ad for the exact product you viewed on another site. They do not understand how two completely different sites share their information. They do not like when they do a google search for an illness, view a webmd page, and then see ads for their illness on the phone apps. During my time at Apple one of the big things they impressed on new hires is that there are things we can do with technology, that may even be beneficial to the user, but will be perceived as creepy. For instance, Starbucks could use facial recognition to greet you by your name at a location you’ve never been to. They could have already started your drink with a high probability it is what you order based on time and weather. But these things are “creepy” to much of the population and should be avoided. Ad networks do not care because their customer is not the end-user.

Allower 6y ago

You are also implicitly agreeing to have this data harvested by governments, political parties and other nefarious groups that only wish to exploit such data to generate dystopian citizen scorecards, suppress dissent and generally destroy a free society.

libraryatnight 6y ago

Have you ever had that experience though? For me targeted ads just show me things I've already bought. "Great google, yep, last month I was reading midi controller reviews, and I bought one last month. " Amazon does the same thing after I've bought something from them. Just bought a printer? Amazon's gonna email me shit about other printers I might like for a week, not accessories that go with the machine I purchased, just other printers. So not only am I not really comfortable with tracking, I don't think the experience justifies it.

Dahoon 6y ago

Like ads for a TV because you just bought a TV? Target ads are crap. I have never in my life seen an ad that was useful. They miss the target 100% of the time.

LeifCarrotson 6y ago

Many of the comments in this thread are talking past each other, by ignoring one side or the other of the cost/benefit balance. It's pointless to shout "But it has benefits, leave it the way it is!" and "But it has costs, eliminate the entire industry!" without engaging with the opposing value set. I don't think that anyone would disagree with you that true product discovery - educating you about a thing you didn't know about that solves a problem you have - is a benefit of good advertising. Lots of advertising isn't about product discovery, for sure, it's about persuading you to buy a thing you don't want and reminding you about a product you already know about and building an image about the product, and many people want to get off the hedonistic, materialistic treadmill that such persuasion pulls towards, but let's ignore that for now and assume that targeted ads lead to a benefit to the consumer of improved product discovery. However, I don't think this is a very big benefit, in the real world. I can count maybe 3 things that I've bought in the past year or so where product discovery was important to me, where I was genuinely surprised that the solution was that easy and available. Heck, one was such a big benefit, I'll share: I changed the faucet hardware in my bathroom vanity, but instead of laying on my back and trying to turn the nuts by hand or squeeze in a pair of channel-locks between the sink and the wall, this time I got a targeted ad in my Amazon search results for the faucet advertising a basin wrench, which I didn't know was a thing. That's genuine product discovery, it saved me a little discomfort and a little time, and cost $6. I like the basin wrench, but if targeted ads didn't exist and I could pay a third party to provide me with the same advice I get from targeted ads, I'd value the service at maybe $2/year. Targeted ads, especially as they're currently implemented, do have a cost to you as a consumer. It's largely invisible to non-technical users, but they do have a significant cost to your privacy. They cost computing cycles and battery life. They cost control of your devices, of your software, and of the websites you browse. Personally, those are pretty significant costs to me. And worst of all, IMO, they have a huge cost in mental fatigue, clamoring for my attention, because for every targeted ad that matches the "has this problem/wants to solve it with this product" combination there are 10,000 that fail one or the other condition. I value these costs pretty high, I bought an SBC just to run PiHole, I pay for Netflix so my TV is ad-free, I buy songs on my phone and wear noise-cancelling headphones in the shop at work so I don't have to listen to the incessant f*ing radio ads. Ugh. And there's little chance I can do anything about the billboards on my commute, though those are contextually targeted to my area rather than invasively targeted. I've probably spent hundreds of dollars avoiding ads, if I could pay someone hundreds more to make the entire industry disappear from my perception I would do so in a heartbeat. That said, it's not possible to put a number on either the cost or the benefit that's true for everyone. Personally, I feel that those advocating targeted ads generally underestimate how much data is being collected, overestimate the benefits of product discovery, and underestimate the benefits available from alternative, less consumer-costly mechanisms for targeting, like content/context-based targeting. How many dollars per year do you think the benefits of product discovery, as provided by non-GPDR, non-CCPA, no-holds-barred targeted advertising is worth to you? What price would you put on its costs?

smileybarry 6y ago

This sounded good to me on paper, so years ago I turned ad personalization back on for a while. At the time I was checking Pebble's site on a daily basis because they had short-term sales not announced anywhere. AdSense then proceeded to push just that one "Pebble Smartwatch" ad on me, everywhere. Even a page with multiple ad blocks just had several of them -- sometimes all of them -- the same text ad for Pebble. It became more annoying than helpful because I was already going to buy one, it just tried to push me to buy it for a higher price. I turned ad personalization off again and now any ads I get are mostly just related to the current page's content.

dekerta 6y ago

Why can't ads simply be targeted based on the content of the page or type of website? Show ads related to programming on /r/programming, ads for cars on /r/cars, and ads for antidepressants on r/wallstreetbets