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I've got a question for anybody who works in ad/marketing tech - is what Robert is describing something that you've worked on/with and seen successful results?

• beermonster 5y ago
  A lot of this is described in the book ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’ by author Professor Shoshana Zuboff[1]. There’s also a good documentary on Netflix (I forget which, I think it’s ‘The Great Hack’[2]), explaining how the ‘Cambridge Analytica’ scandal utilised personal data and more importantly behaviour. They’re just scarily good at predicting what you are going to do. They’re not listening in. It’s far scarier/more insidious than that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capita... [2] https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/80117542 https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/80117542
  • samanator 5y ago
    Why is this downvoted? It provides useful information with sources.
• ir77 5y ago
  My wife works with digital ads - on sale side, not tech - and the products that they offer in terms of geofencing goes something like this: they have a bucket of tracked people that went to a car show or a dodge dealer that they can then push ads from a local Toyota, or whomever her customer is. They further can track and determine how many of those people actually went to the said advertised dealer. They did a compare for one dealer: out of 150 people that got pushed ads for the dealership 12 ended up buying cars there afterwards - on a higher $ purchase that’s pretty significant conversion.
  • juskrey 5y ago
    Did they compare to the similar group of people who did not get ads?
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • Scoundreller 5y ago
    Ads are a pretty good proxy for how much profit a sale is. While a car is a high $ purchase, moving your $40/month cellular plan from one provider to another is $thousands of profit loss for one provider and $thousands profit for another.
  • secondcoming 5y ago
    These days this is a basic offering of any adtech company and is full of quite a lot of BS.
• djhworld 5y ago
  > To me, the stupidest simplest solution is probably the most likely - some naive marketing analyst probably just grouped all traffic coming from the same IP address into the same bucket and blasted ads to them based on recent Amazon purchases at the same IP address. I agree with this as well. I've been living back at my parents house for a bit while I'm between properties, and I definitely see ads for stuff targeted at my parents. Sometimes I worry there might be a privacy breach there, e.g. my Dad has been suffering from a condition recently and I've seen ads for coping with it come up on my computer, most likely based on his google searches or whatever.
• dalbasal 5y ago
  Yes. Many times, and at scale. While not strictly accurate, it's easiest to think about it as a simple machine learning system. The system can't be interrogated, so you don't really know what correlations are being made. The actual way it works is in layers. There's a human layer, using logic to create segments or other targeting methods. There's the ad network's automated optimisation options. FB really took this to the next level. There's retargeting. Bidding, and the economics of advertising plays a big role in giving the system intelligence. 3rd party ad management software. Each piece/layer typically ads additional data to the set. The human/advertiser generally does this this by uploading or tagging their own customers. FB, for example, will allow you to create a "similar" list, where it finds user similar to those you designate. Similarity is somewhat ambiguous. FB/Adwords is where the heavy lifting happens, most commonly via bid optimisation. The only intention is "goals per $." Price, and volume. As I said, the sausage factor is complex and no one sees the whole thing. In practical terms, a massive NN optimizing for sales/signups/etc itself is a decent analogy... and increasingly not an analogy.
  • cordite 5y ago
    How is this going to work with carrier grade NAT? Edit: commercial to carrier, thanks justusthane
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • tharkun__ 5y ago
      I think the question isn't so much how it works with that (as in you are pointing towards it just not working) and instead just how well it works with that. Do you have numbers on how many consumers in say NA, various European countries etc are behind CGNs? I would guess most are used by mobile carriers (but I have no data) and I would gather that this particular technology is not going to be used to try and associate random mobile users anyway. It's more about who likely lives in the same household.
      • ipython 5y ago
• hagy 5y ago
  Yep, this is called cross-device matching. Generally consists of some modeling for devices seen together on the same IP address. One of the notable AdTech companies in cross-device modeling is Drawbridge (purchased by LinkedIn). Here's a 2015 Kaggle competition that they hosted, which provides sample data that they use in modeling, https://www.kaggle.com/c/icdm-2015-drawbridge-cross-device-connections https://www.kaggle.com/c/icdm-2015-drawbridge-cross-device-c... And here's a technical writeup of one of the well-performing solutions from that competition, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1510.01175.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1510.01175.pdf
  • secondcoming 5y ago
    Tapad are probably bigger than Drawbridge
• klyrs 5y ago
  It works, and it's awful. I was looking for a present for my girlfriend, and she started seeing ads for the things I was looking at. About a week later, she was excited to show me her new purchase... and I'm scrambling to find a new gift idea. And now I'm paranoid -- it seems that the only way to stop this is to make a cash purchase in meatspace.
  • Scoundreller 5y ago
    Reminds me when I was getting relentlessly retargeted ads to purchase something. So when I did, I paid cash to keep the ads coming and mitigate any attempts at offline attribution. I’m guessing the present wasn’t a PiHole or VPN?
  • beagle3 5y ago
    Use Firefox and install uBlock Origin. Your credit card company will still sell you out - but that does take a little more time, and will only include one item (rather than your entire browsing history) - meatspace cash is likely to help with that, but that’s much less of a problem in your context, I think.
    • hinkley 5y ago
      That won’t help with IP tracking. Buying presents from work sounds like a better option. Assuming we ever go back to work.
      • cozzyd 5y ago
        Ublock presumably will block the tracking code, if it's a third-party tracker.
    • klyrs 5y ago
      Don't forget, a VPN, a new email account and a new phone number for "2fa". Also, where is it getting shipped? I can't receive packages at work. The "convenience" of shopping online is a legend from my youth
    • 5y ago
• slothtrop 5y ago
  When I was shopping for wedding rings, I started seeing ads for Peoples when streaming on tv and on the SO's own phone. This despite the fact I usually browse with an ad-blocker, no-script, and delete cookies. The tracking is remarkably invasive.
  • akersten 5y ago
    How do you know your SO wasn't getting ads for wedding rings simply because she was thinking about getting married too?
    • slothtrop 5y ago
      First the timeline, second that she confirmed she wasn't shopping around or investigating wedding-related items.
• nonameiguess 5y ago
  Ultimately, all attempts at attribution are heuristic in nature. Marketers know a single IP doesn't represent a single person, but if it's the best they can do, it's the best they can do. Even for services with accounts, tracking can't be perfect. When my wife's phone or laptop is closer than mine and she's logged into Amazon Prime or Uber Eats, I'm ordering through her account. Now she's gonna see ads for gym equipment she has no interest in. Oh well. It doesn't matter how good your location, device, browser fingerprinting is when people share locations, devices, and browsers. The only way to know it's really me is to get my actual fingerprint or some other truly unique biometric identifier.
• koonsolo 5y ago
  Let me tell you this: I'm from the Flemish part of Belgium. YouTube and other sites with ads can't figure out that I don't speak French. So even with this simplest of use-cases: GPS says I live in Flemish part, never search in French, etc. Still they sometimes show me French ads, which is a total waste of course. So I don't believe the tech is so crazy advanced already.
  • brnt 5y ago
    There are a surprising amount of people that think Belgium is majority French speaking. While I understand Belgium is tipping few foreign curricula with such trivia, I blame it for this default across the many services that do it wrong. Also, non-Belgians I meet rarely know two-thirds speak Dutch rather than French.
• Ozzie_osman 5y ago
  It's a little different. Targeting these days is more and more machine learning driven. So it's not really someone sitting down and saying "show an ad to anyone who stayed at a house with someone who bought this toothpaste". Rather, a bunch of data flows into Facebook and it uses those signals to decide who should see what. It's not a naive analyst. It's a statistical engine (and yes, that engine can sometimes be naive, and it's working off of really noisy data). For example, any good Facebook marketer probably uses "lookalike audiences". You upload some existing customers and then tell Facebook to show ads to people who are "like" your customers. Facebook then used whatever data it has to find similar users (demographic, interest, geographic, behavior etc). In fact, lookalikes can be so good that any good marketer also knows to _exclude_ existing customers from the lookalike audience (unless you're actually retargeting your existing customers).
• Eridrus 5y ago
  > To me, the stupidest simplest solution is probably the most likely - some naive marketing analyst probably just grouped all traffic coming from the same IP address into the same bucket and blasted ads to them based on recent Amazon purchases at the same IP address. Yes, the dirty secret of basically all discussions about tracking on the internet is that IP+User-Agent is a pretty good baseline that is commonly used.
• magicalhippo 5y ago
  > seen successful results For about a week now, about 80% of the YouTube videos I've watched on my Android TV has been tampon ads, body hair removal machines (legs, not beard) and similar. My SO never uses this device nor the account. I've disabled personalized ads, so YouTube tells me it's showing me these ads mainly due to time of day and the type of video I'm watching... I can't be certain, but I'm pretty confident the number of tampon users watching videos about repairing parts for earth movers at 2am is rather low compared to those not using tampons... So while others may have cracked the code, YouTube certainly has not.