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>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 doin

>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.
  - pixl97 5y ago
    >No one thinks that showing the same ad to the same person 100 times is effective. No one told that to Coca-Cola
  - nobody9999 5y ago
    >No one thinks that showing the same ad to the same person 100 times is effective. That depends on what you consider "effective" advertising. Keeping a brand in your (and others') face is a key goal of advertising. In fact, two (of many) of those goals for advertisers are "top-of-mind awareness"[0]: In marketing, "top-of-mind awareness" refers to a brand or specific product being first in customers' minds when thinking of a particular industry or category. and "unaided awareness"[1]: Brand recall is also known as unaided recall or spontaneous recall and refers to the ability of the consumer to correctly generate a brand from memory when prompted by a product category. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-of-mind_awareness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-of-mind_awareness [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand_awareness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand_awareness
xmprt 5y ago
Because after making the purchase, the number of ads for the item INCREASE. I don't mind seeing a handful of ads for something I've already bought but what usually happens is that about 30-50% of ads that I see suddenly become ads for the item I just bought.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  > Because after making the purchase, the number of ads for the item INCREASE. Even if you've actually measured this and it's true (and not frequency illusion), that still doesn't mean they're not doing both.

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.
- pixl97 5y ago
  >No one thinks that showing the same ad to the same person 100 times is effective. No one told that to Coca-Cola
- nobody9999 5y ago
  >No one thinks that showing the same ad to the same person 100 times is effective. That depends on what you consider "effective" advertising. Keeping a brand in your (and others') face is a key goal of advertising. In fact, two (of many) of those goals for advertisers are "top-of-mind awareness"[0]: In marketing, "top-of-mind awareness" refers to a brand or specific product being first in customers' minds when thinking of a particular industry or category. and "unaided awareness"[1]: Brand recall is also known as unaided recall or spontaneous recall and refers to the ability of the consumer to correctly generate a brand from memory when prompted by a product category. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-of-mind_awareness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top-of-mind_awareness [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand_awareness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand_awareness

xmprt 5y ago

Because after making the purchase, the number of ads for the item INCREASE. I don't mind seeing a handful of ads for something I've already bought but what usually happens is that about 30-50% of ads that I see suddenly become ads for the item I just bought.

tshaddox 5y ago
> Because after making the purchase, the number of ads for the item INCREASE. Even if you've actually measured this and it's true (and not frequency illusion), that still doesn't mean they're not doing both.