5 ms·

>I'm not going to buy a second one. I suspect the % of people who buy a second one for themselves, their spouse, kids, friends, etc. (or recommend someone else

>I'm not going to buy a second one. I suspect the % of people who buy a second one for themselves, their spouse, kids, friends, etc. (or recommend someone else to buy one) is higher than the % of other people who buy one for the first time. Neither number is large but as long as the former one is slightly larger it makes sense to pay money for that advertising.

danShumway 5y ago
I strongly suspect you're correct, but I still think it's terrible targeting. The "sell to people who already bought one" approach is only better when compared against awful targeting techniques. And it kind of misses the point anyway. For a niche product, a market that already knows about you is pretty much always going to be more likely to buy from you than a market that has never heard of you. But part of the job of an advertiser is to expand the market that has heard of you, not just wallow in it. Think of it this way: if I'm building a video recommendation system, I guarantee I can get much better click rates over random recommendations if instead I recommend you random videos only from your watch history. Heck, honestly I can probably boost click rates over almost any existing recommendation system by taking that system and filtering it so it only shows suggestions from channels in your watch history. People are repetitive. But is that system good? Is it innovative or useful for a recommendation be constantly asking you to re-watch videos from your history? Is that actually fulfilling any of the promises that the recommendation system was sold on? No, not really. I definitely wouldn't call that a 'smart' system. And if I had a company that had invested years of research into building an ad targeting system, and the result was just "sometimes people repeat themselves" -- that seems like a ton of wasted effort in order to get a pretty underwhelming result. Targeted ads are sold to consumers as an unobtrusive way to learn about new products (whether that's an honest representation of the system is a separate question). So targeting of this nature is still a pretty big failure, even if it does increase clicks.
- marcinzm 5y ago
  >But part of the job of an advertiser is to expand the market that has heard of you, not just wallow in it. Why do you assume so strongly that they're not doing both. Advertising isn't a zero sum game or something you can only do a limited quantity of. You advertise on all channels that bring you a positive ROI. The ROI is based on the cost of advertising, effort of advertising (ie: $ spent on human labor) and the generated profit from advertising. Assuming that number is positive you should advertise with that channel on top of everything else you do.
  - danShumway 5y ago
    > Why do you assume so strongly that they're not doing both. That's a good question. I guess I do assume they're doing both, but the extreme degree to which they lean on repeat targeting, to the point where it's this noticeable, and to the point where repeat targeting overwhelms other advertisers to this degree, still means that they're incredibly bad at expanding their market. Let's look at Youtube again. Youtube can both recommend new videos and old videos. It can do both at the same time. But if the majority of my feed is recommending repeat videos, that signifies to me that they're not very confident about the main part I care about as a consumer: showing me knew things. Looking back at what OP says in the linked article: > I don't mind letting your programs see my private data as long as I get something useful in exchange. But that's not what happens. > the dirty secret of the machine learning movement: almost everything produced by ML could have been produced, more cheaply, using a very dumb heuristic you coded up by hand, because mostly the ML is trained by feeding it examples of what humans did while following a very dumb heuristic. There's no magic here. I still don't think it's all that impressive to increase ROI using this kind of simplistic heuristic. More than that, I don't think it justifies the incredibly large amount of money and infrastructure that gets devoted to ad targeting online. If some of the most prominent parts of a gigantic system can be replicated by a couple of purchasing history lookups in a database. It would be impressive for them to increase advertising ROI in a way that increases value for consumers, or that justifies the tracking mechanisms or the extensive research and AI poured into the system, or in a way that is giving better ROI than ridiculously naive approaches, but repeat targeting doesn't seem to do any of that as far as I can tell. TLDR I assume they're trying to do both, but the proportion of repeat advertising indicates to me that it's giving them a lot better results than more sophisticated methods, which (to me) indicates that their sophisticated methods are all bad. If better targeting methods existed, repeat targeting wouldn't be so prominent and obvious because it would be getting crowded out by other targeting techniques.
    - mountainb 5y ago
      No one thinks that showing the same ad to the same person 100 times is effective. It does, however, make more money for the ad seller for ad customers to waste spending. Much of ad targeting is not automatic, but manually configured by advertisers in one way or another. Many of these users manually configure their ads poorly. If I tell the system "show this ad to everyone in this geography with no restriction on frequency" the only 'smart' targeting is the stuff that restricts it to users that appear to be in that geography. Everything else is the 'dumb' method specified by the user. I think also the purely automated methods are not necessarily incented to provide better targeting for the ad buyer. Their incentive is to spend all the budget and to try to get the user to refill the budget. For large sectors of this spending, there isn't that much sensitivity to waste so long as the people responsible for wasting the money don't lose their jobs. You wouldn't believe it just as an ordinary smart person but people do waste billions of dollars a year on this stuff. The 'smarts' of the system is dedicated to parting fools from their money repeatedly while giving them enough justification with 'greedy' attribution metrics to keep filling up the budget.
- actually_a_dog 5y ago
  > But is that system good? Is it innovative or useful for a recommendation be constantly asking you to re-watch videos from your history? Is that actually fulfilling any of the promises that the recommendation system was sold on? No, not really. I definitely wouldn't call that a 'smart' system. It seems to work well enough for Netflix. I probably end up watching stuff in the "Watch it Again" list almost as often as I do anything else.
  - danShumway 5y ago
    That's what I mean: it works in the sense that it does the strict job it was designed to do. It definitely works, strictly speaking. But is it working in a way that gives you any value? Are you happy that you're just clicking "Watch it Again", or did you want a system that would actually find new shows for you and let you know about new release that you'd be likely to enjoy? If you are happy with that, then from an engineering perspective, was it necessary to build a complicated algorithm to show you a "Watch it Again" list, or could we have used a single database query and about a hundred lines of code instead? There are lots of simple heuristics to make a recommendation engine have better success rates. I can build a pretty good movie recommendation engine by just recommending every single Marvel movie that comes out: they're already popular so on average people will click on them. That's not hard. But that's also not the promise that we were sold when companies started proposing/building these systems into their products.
    - actually_a_dog 5y ago
      Specifically regarding Netflix, they show me several recommendation lists, based on stuff I've watched before, e.g. because I watched 30 Rock, they recommend I watch Schitts Creek. They also have "Trending Now," "New Releases," and "Popular on Netflix," but I'm not sure how personalized those recommendations are. There's also a "Watch Something" feature, where they show you things they think you might want to watch, but just start playing the episode and make you reject the selection if you don't want to watch it. But, like I said, almost as often as I end up picking from any of those, I end up picking from stuff I've previously watched, which I'm not sure actually is anything more than a database query and ~100 LoC. Given the state of Netflix's catalog, I think these recommendations are okay. If I want better recommendations, I can always go through and "like" some more things that I enjoy. I do wish they had better discoverability beyond these preconstructed lists. They definitely don't make it easy to search. But, here's another question back: why do they need a great recommendation engine? All they really want is for me to not cancel my subscription. And, all they have to do to accomplish that is show me that there are things I might want to watch that I probably haven't seen yet, which I think they accomplish fairly well.
- yawaworht1978 5y ago
  While I agree that much of targeted advertising is very intrusive and not accurate, it's still very much cost efficient compared to anything. Initially, acquisition cost are there, either by generating SEO content or marketing or lead generation. Retargeting is one step beyond that, off course if you get ads for a car you've just bought, it's pretty bad. The ads should display aftermarket parts for that car or insurance offers, but these wouldn't come from the same vendor. At least it leaves some branding impact. Or if it's food items, it had led me to buy the same things a few times again. Source, very good friend is head of online advertising in a company. He swears up and down, it can be a very good product if you have a large online audience.
disgruntledphd2 5y ago
it's stupid though. Like, they are normally my top ad in Facebook, and have been since well before I bought it. And I did buy it, so score 1 for them. And then i recommended it to everyone I know who likes technical PDF's (which was a lot of people, it turns out). But now, it's just wasted inventory (for FB), and a minor annoyance (for me), along with a bunch of money (for Remarkable).
Joker_vD 5y ago
Dude, come on: after I've bought a new dinner table, I am not going to buy another one just because. Or buy it for my friend. Seriously. It's similar to how people don't generally go around recommending OSes to their friends and relatives.
- WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
  Or fridges, or vacuum cleaners you usually keep one per household. One of my friends was being haunted by vacuum cleaners for months.
mountainb 5y ago
It's easier to set up remarketing than it is to manage the remarketing ads to put people who have purchased on a blacklist or to put a frequency cap on the ads. Lots of times companies just turn it on without configuring anything, making more money for the platform and wasting spending on showing the same ad to the same user 800 times.
cronix 5y ago
I don't know, maybe if the product is subpar to begin with additional "reminders" help? If I buy something and I like it, or especially really like it, I usually tell everyone I know who I think might like it or benefit from it as well - for free. And if I like it I usually don't have to be reminded of it. It's already in the "good stuff" section of my brain. I've already been sold. I really don't see ads as helpful for things you've already been sold on and use. At that point, at least for me and I assume the poster you're responding to, the opposite effect starts happening and it taints the product negatively, even if you like it.

danShumway 5y ago

I strongly suspect you're correct, but I still think it's terrible targeting. The "sell to people who already bought one" approach is only better when compared against awful targeting techniques. And it kind of misses the point anyway. For a niche product, a market that already knows about you is pretty much always going to be more likely to buy from you than a market that has never heard of you. But part of the job of an advertiser is to expand the market that has heard of you, not just wallow in it. Think of it this way: if I'm building a video recommendation system, I guarantee I can get much better click rates over random recommendations if instead I recommend you random videos only from your watch history. Heck, honestly I can probably boost click rates over almost any existing recommendation system by taking that system and filtering it so it only shows suggestions from channels in your watch history. People are repetitive. But is that system good? Is it innovative or useful for a recommendation be constantly asking you to re-watch videos from your history? Is that actually fulfilling any of the promises that the recommendation system was sold on? No, not really. I definitely wouldn't call that a 'smart' system. And if I had a company that had invested years of research into building an ad targeting system, and the result was just "sometimes people repeat themselves" -- that seems like a ton of wasted effort in order to get a pretty underwhelming result. Targeted ads are sold to consumers as an unobtrusive way to learn about new products (whether that's an honest representation of the system is a separate question). So targeting of this nature is still a pretty big failure, even if it does increase clicks.

marcinzm 5y ago
>But part of the job of an advertiser is to expand the market that has heard of you, not just wallow in it. Why do you assume so strongly that they're not doing both. Advertising isn't a zero sum game or something you can only do a limited quantity of. You advertise on all channels that bring you a positive ROI. The ROI is based on the cost of advertising, effort of advertising (ie: $ spent on human labor) and the generated profit from advertising. Assuming that number is positive you should advertise with that channel on top of everything else you do.
- danShumway 5y ago
  > Why do you assume so strongly that they're not doing both. That's a good question. I guess I do assume they're doing both, but the extreme degree to which they lean on repeat targeting, to the point where it's this noticeable, and to the point where repeat targeting overwhelms other advertisers to this degree, still means that they're incredibly bad at expanding their market. Let's look at Youtube again. Youtube can both recommend new videos and old videos. It can do both at the same time. But if the majority of my feed is recommending repeat videos, that signifies to me that they're not very confident about the main part I care about as a consumer: showing me knew things. Looking back at what OP says in the linked article: > I don't mind letting your programs see my private data as long as I get something useful in exchange. But that's not what happens. > the dirty secret of the machine learning movement: almost everything produced by ML could have been produced, more cheaply, using a very dumb heuristic you coded up by hand, because mostly the ML is trained by feeding it examples of what humans did while following a very dumb heuristic. There's no magic here. I still don't think it's all that impressive to increase ROI using this kind of simplistic heuristic. More than that, I don't think it justifies the incredibly large amount of money and infrastructure that gets devoted to ad targeting online. If some of the most prominent parts of a gigantic system can be replicated by a couple of purchasing history lookups in a database. It would be impressive for them to increase advertising ROI in a way that increases value for consumers, or that justifies the tracking mechanisms or the extensive research and AI poured into the system, or in a way that is giving better ROI than ridiculously naive approaches, but repeat targeting doesn't seem to do any of that as far as I can tell. TLDR I assume they're trying to do both, but the proportion of repeat advertising indicates to me that it's giving them a lot better results than more sophisticated methods, which (to me) indicates that their sophisticated methods are all bad. If better targeting methods existed, repeat targeting wouldn't be so prominent and obvious because it would be getting crowded out by other targeting techniques.
  - mountainb 5y ago
    No one thinks that showing the same ad to the same person 100 times is effective. It does, however, make more money for the ad seller for ad customers to waste spending. Much of ad targeting is not automatic, but manually configured by advertisers in one way or another. Many of these users manually configure their ads poorly. If I tell the system "show this ad to everyone in this geography with no restriction on frequency" the only 'smart' targeting is the stuff that restricts it to users that appear to be in that geography. Everything else is the 'dumb' method specified by the user. I think also the purely automated methods are not necessarily incented to provide better targeting for the ad buyer. Their incentive is to spend all the budget and to try to get the user to refill the budget. For large sectors of this spending, there isn't that much sensitivity to waste so long as the people responsible for wasting the money don't lose their jobs. You wouldn't believe it just as an ordinary smart person but people do waste billions of dollars a year on this stuff. The 'smarts' of the system is dedicated to parting fools from their money repeatedly while giving them enough justification with 'greedy' attribution metrics to keep filling up the budget.
actually_a_dog 5y ago
> But is that system good? Is it innovative or useful for a recommendation be constantly asking you to re-watch videos from your history? Is that actually fulfilling any of the promises that the recommendation system was sold on? No, not really. I definitely wouldn't call that a 'smart' system. It seems to work well enough for Netflix. I probably end up watching stuff in the "Watch it Again" list almost as often as I do anything else.
- danShumway 5y ago
  That's what I mean: it works in the sense that it does the strict job it was designed to do. It definitely works, strictly speaking. But is it working in a way that gives you any value? Are you happy that you're just clicking "Watch it Again", or did you want a system that would actually find new shows for you and let you know about new release that you'd be likely to enjoy? If you are happy with that, then from an engineering perspective, was it necessary to build a complicated algorithm to show you a "Watch it Again" list, or could we have used a single database query and about a hundred lines of code instead? There are lots of simple heuristics to make a recommendation engine have better success rates. I can build a pretty good movie recommendation engine by just recommending every single Marvel movie that comes out: they're already popular so on average people will click on them. That's not hard. But that's also not the promise that we were sold when companies started proposing/building these systems into their products.
  - actually_a_dog 5y ago
    Specifically regarding Netflix, they show me several recommendation lists, based on stuff I've watched before, e.g. because I watched 30 Rock, they recommend I watch Schitts Creek. They also have "Trending Now," "New Releases," and "Popular on Netflix," but I'm not sure how personalized those recommendations are. There's also a "Watch Something" feature, where they show you things they think you might want to watch, but just start playing the episode and make you reject the selection if you don't want to watch it. But, like I said, almost as often as I end up picking from any of those, I end up picking from stuff I've previously watched, which I'm not sure actually is anything more than a database query and ~100 LoC. Given the state of Netflix's catalog, I think these recommendations are okay. If I want better recommendations, I can always go through and "like" some more things that I enjoy. I do wish they had better discoverability beyond these preconstructed lists. They definitely don't make it easy to search. But, here's another question back: why do they need a great recommendation engine? All they really want is for me to not cancel my subscription. And, all they have to do to accomplish that is show me that there are things I might want to watch that I probably haven't seen yet, which I think they accomplish fairly well.
yawaworht1978 5y ago
While I agree that much of targeted advertising is very intrusive and not accurate, it's still very much cost efficient compared to anything. Initially, acquisition cost are there, either by generating SEO content or marketing or lead generation. Retargeting is one step beyond that, off course if you get ads for a car you've just bought, it's pretty bad. The ads should display aftermarket parts for that car or insurance offers, but these wouldn't come from the same vendor. At least it leaves some branding impact. Or if it's food items, it had led me to buy the same things a few times again. Source, very good friend is head of online advertising in a company. He swears up and down, it can be a very good product if you have a large online audience.

disgruntledphd2 5y ago

it's stupid though. Like, they are normally my top ad in Facebook, and have been since well before I bought it. And I did buy it, so score 1 for them. And then i recommended it to everyone I know who likes technical PDF's (which was a lot of people, it turns out). But now, it's just wasted inventory (for FB), and a minor annoyance (for me), along with a bunch of money (for Remarkable).

Joker_vD 5y ago

Dude, come on: after I've bought a new dinner table, I am not going to buy another one just because. Or buy it for my friend. Seriously. It's similar to how people don't generally go around recommending OSes to their friends and relatives.

WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
Or fridges, or vacuum cleaners you usually keep one per household. One of my friends was being haunted by vacuum cleaners for months.

mountainb 5y ago

It's easier to set up remarketing than it is to manage the remarketing ads to put people who have purchased on a blacklist or to put a frequency cap on the ads. Lots of times companies just turn it on without configuring anything, making more money for the platform and wasting spending on showing the same ad to the same user 800 times.

cronix 5y ago

I don't know, maybe if the product is subpar to begin with additional "reminders" help? If I buy something and I like it, or especially really like it, I usually tell everyone I know who I think might like it or benefit from it as well - for free. And if I like it I usually don't have to be reminded of it. It's already in the "good stuff" section of my brain. I've already been sold. I really don't see ads as helpful for things you've already been sold on and use. At that point, at least for me and I assume the poster you're responding to, the opposite effect starts happening and it taints the product negatively, even if you like it.