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It's not just them. Anyone who still has the wrong assumption that targeted advertising even works is in for a massive revelation.
by nojito 6y ago
It's not just them. Anyone who still has the wrong assumption that targeted advertising even works is in for a massive revelation.
- tudelo 6y agoAre you suggesting there is no difference between targeted and non-targeted advertisement?
- notyourday 6y agoAt scale? Margin of error at best. I will tell you what my interests are by vising web properties that cater to them in that specific time. You deciding to keep showing me ads for a Nespresso machine when I'm reading about circular saws is idiotic.
- edmundsauto 6y agoThat doesn’t pass the sniff test. Would you say that in general, you wouldn’t expect a difference in results if you sold Taylor swift albums to white suburban women in Iowa, versus black urban men in Atlanta?
- notyourday 6y agoYou know what would blow both of those out of the water? Selling it to those that have indicated that they are interested in Taylor Swift as white suburban women in Iowa do not buy Taylor Swift albums. They buy mom jeans. Instead they are getting ads for Taylor Swift.
- edmundsauto 6y agoHow do you increase your market past people who have already liked Ms. Swift? The argument still stands - just replace TS with mom jeans. My point wasn't actually about Taylor Swift marketing - it was that demographic targeting is a reasonable way to identify an audience. Those mom jeans are not going to sell very well in a younger, urban demographic compared to Iowa.
- nojito 6y agoYup. Ebay for example gained revenue when they stopped buying targeted ads. More information here. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-2/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-2/
- RHSeeger 6y agoGiven that ebay is a worldwide company that is relevant to pretty much everyone on the plant, it seems like they are exactly the case for targeted ads being least useful. Nearly every company in the world does not fit that description, and I would bet that the vast majority of them would benefit from targeted advertising. One example being local stores targeted only to local people.
- chillacy 6y agoEbay didn't stop buying targeted ads, afaik they stopped buying a specific type of ad in google search that had the keyword 'ebay' in it. Most companies bid up their own searches with the theory that they have to or else their competitor would, but ebay showed that people who search 'ebay magic cards' would most likely skip the search ads and go straight to ebay.
- nojito 6y agoNo they completely stopped buying ads. The brand keyword experiment gave them the confidence to run an experiment to completely turn everything off. >TADELIS: Yes. So, for non-branded search, we actually had no idea what the results are going to be. Because here, if I am searching for, example, a studio microphone I’m sure that on eBay I might find a variety of used ones. But if I’m not thinking about eBay, and I just search for “studio microphone,” if eBay doesn’t pay an ad, they might not even show up on the first page. And by the way, the automated machines at eBay that were doing the online bidding, they had a basic library of close to 100 million different combinations of keywords, because eBay has practically everything you could imagine for sale on the site. So, we really had no idea what the returns for the non-branded searches would be. >TADELIS: And we took a third of these D.M.A.’s, and we turned off all paid-search advertising. This was an extremely blunt experiment where we’re saying, “What would happen if we didn’t advertise at all?” And to our surprise the impact on average was pretty much zero.
- CodesInChaos 6y agoSome level of targeting is necessary, for example it clearly makes no sense for a typical restaurant to advertise globally. The interesting question is much tracking adds on top of simpler targeting based on location and context.
- runarberg 6y agoBe careful not to conflate necessary with convenient. Static ads can still be local, e.g. in the local newspaper, on the radio station, on a sign post, or websites for local businesses/communities.
- CodesInChaos 6y agoI consider these targeting based on context or location. I'm fine with that, since it doesn't require invading the privacy of the user.
- runarberg 6y agoAgree. The spying part is what is wrong (and should be illegal without a consent and paid compensation). Ad agencies should not be allowed to track and model my behavior, and then use these models to sell me stuff. Or if they do they should pay me for it.
- harrisonjackson 6y agoFacebook should just make a user's location required - not the ios permission to constantly track a user all over... but just a field on a user - city/state/country. Or make it optional and just show that ad to users that have set their location field.
- esrauch 6y agoI don't think that's relevant here: the new prompts aren't about collecting gps data but correlating your identity across contexts. If you manually chose a city in Facebook, I think the ad in the other random app which used fb ad network would only be able to use it if the user said "yes" to the prompt.
- Razengan 6y agoIt’s an insidious racket at worst, and at best a case of an emperor with no clothes. Mass advertising needs to die off already. Just hold better search and filtering tools and empower people to discover what they want instead of telling them what they should want.
- helsinkiandrew 6y agoWhy do you say this? What evidence? There are hundreds of thousands of businesses that happily pay for ads on Facebook over other platforms and see improved results after tweaking the targeting. The issue is the privacy loss we get, not the efficacy of targeting.
- nojito 6y agoNo...targeted advertising only enriches ad platforms not the buyers of the ads. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-2/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/advertising-part-2/
- notriddle 6y ago> No...targeted advertising only enriches ad platforms not the buyers of the ads. No... ~targeted~ advertising only enriches ad platforms not the buyers of the ads. > In our previous episode, we learned that TV advertising is much less effective than the industry says. Sounds like almost all advertising is just a zero-sum game.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- runarberg 6y agoI’m also skeptical of the claim that targeted ads don’t work better then static ads. However I think the default assumption should be that they don’t until we find evidence that they do. That is the burden of proof should be on the targeted ads. All that said, I am not an authority on if any evidence exists, I have never looked into the literature my self, so perhaps this evidence already exists and I just don’t know about it.
- jonathanstrange 6y agoThe problem is that it works very well in certain areas.
- dfgdghdf 6y agoTargeted advertising works extremely well. I actually stopped using Instagram because the adverts were so accurate that it scared me.
- HDMI_Cable 6y agoto be fair, that could in part be the Baader-Meinhoff effect [1], where you'll only remember the ones that were scarily accurate (though I do agree with you). --- [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
- dfgdghdf 6y agoI don't know what the hit rate was, because as you suggest I likely ignored the irrelevant ads. However, the ads that were relevant were so eerily accurate (including things many of my friends and acquaintances wouldn't know about me) that I didn't want anything more to do with the platform.
- runarberg 6y agoTargeted ads don’t work any better then static ads. This is new for me. Actually now that I think about it, all evidence I remember at the moment is anecdotal. So perhaps you are right. Regardless of its efficacy, the legality should be out of the question.
- nullserver 6y agoWas in adtech for awhile. Targeted ads work really well for many scenarios, b2b software.
- runarberg 6y agoLike I said, all evidence I know of is anecdotal. Which—for sure—is indicative, but by no means conclusive.
- edmundsauto 6y agoI’m not sure it makes sense to speak this broadly about efficacy, since there are probably variations in returns amongst different targeting groups and value props. Execution matters. I’m also not sure if it matters whether they are actually effective. At least for the short term. If people believe they are effective, is there any difference in the dynamic?
- dillondoyle 6y agoYes they do. It really bugs me all these HN threads state this and rely on their own personal experience not as an ad buyer but as a consumer. It's not true. One can directly measure ROI and prove the value of this advertising. Especially FB provides for my business (political marketing) at least 10X better direct response value and that is mostly using 1:1 targeting and lookalike modeling.
- runarberg 6y agoCool. Just as I thought. It seemed wrong that such an easily measurable thing would never have been tested and a whole industry (arguable the biggest industry in the western world at the moment) had never measured it (or they had and found no effect). What I like about the HN discourse is that if someone slings out a statement which is demonstrably false, someone that knows better might respond with a correction. That is why I left this comment, as I all my knowledge with the targeted ad business was anecdotal, and I desperately needed a correction.
- Nextgrid 6y agoI think it's less to do with targeting and more to do with a noxious business model. When your business model literally relies on wasting people's time and/or compromising their privacy, it shouldn't be surprising that people eventually develop workarounds (ad blocking) or provide a business incentive for a third-party company (like Apple) to implement countermeasures.
- twobitshifter 6y agoIt is clear that an ad on a search page for a product works much better than something that is not relevant. What I’ve seen from my wife’s Facebook is that Facebook heavily promotes ads based on your search activity elsewhere. If they know that you are more likely to buy a product than a random person, it would definitely improve the ad effectiveness. In other words they’re skimming intent based on google searches.