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> 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 th

> 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
  - mountainb 5y ago
    That's not how it works. You are supposed to cycle creative to prevent people from going 'ad blind.' People tune out creative they have seen too many times. Any book on advertising, any of the best practices documentation provided by Google, FB, or other ad sellers, all of them will support the practice of cycling creative, even if the variations are minor. Think of Budweiser cycling the 'Wazzap' joke in the 90s/2000s through variations on the commercial.
    - nobody9999 5y ago
      Yours is a good point. It's orthogonal to mine, however. I noted the importance of brand awareness, not specific ad awareness. There's miles of difference between those and nothing I said isn't consistent with "cycling creative."
tshaddox 5y ago
> 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. > 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 I don't think you can conclude anything about how they are "leaning" or what "proportion" of their ad budget is being spent on different things, if the only evidence you have is the portion of ads shown to you. The fact that their "post-sales targeting" can overwhelm other advertisers who are just doing "market expansion" targeting doesn't tell you much at all, because the number of people who would be eligible for post-sales targeting would obviously be vastly smaller than the number of people eligible for market expansion targeting. It seems very reasonable that the company you just spent hundreds of dollars at would be willing to bid more for an ad on your timeline than the thousands of other companies who want to show you an ad about something you've never heard of.
- danShumway 5y ago
  > The fact that their "post-sales targeting" can overwhelm other advertisers who are just doing "market expansion" targeting doesn't tell you much at all It shows me that the simplistic method of "advertise to people who have already bought our product" performs vastly better than any of the other sophisticated targeting that advertisers like to tout. To clarify -- I'm not talking about the proportion of an individual company's budget -- I'm talking about the proportion of the overall market for that product. Every time that someone is shown an ad, that ad is the result of a bidding war. If a large proportion of those ads are retargeted that means the market has decided that the vast majority of advertisers are less confident about their targeting systems then they are about a simplistic, vaguely annoying heuristic. We can make an assumption about the market as a whole because we believe that the market is at least somewhat efficient. If advanced, targeted advertising that used tons of demographic data and personal information was competitive with these naive targeting techniques, then a higher proportion of those ads would outbid retargeted ads on any given page. > doesn't tell you much at all I also want to broaden out a little bit here. In the OP's article, the main complaint being made is not that advertising has zero ROI (although the author is critical of the effectiveness as well). The criticism is that the ads provide no benefit to the user, that they're annoying and reductionist, and that they fail to live up to the promises of companies like Facebook that claim targeted ads connect people to new products that they'll love. Independent of whether or not we can be critical of the effectiveness of ads for companies, the proportion of retargeted ads also tells us that advertisers broadly, as a market, are incapable of delivering on their promises to consumers and are incapable of building a system that is mutually beneficial to both companies and consumers. See also some of the authors criticism of recommendation algorithms, which fall into the same boat. Who cares if Netflix's recommendation algorithm increases clicks? Consumers don't sign up for Netflix out of charity, they want a system that serves their interests, not just the company's. For advertisers to try and make the case that access to private data is good for consumers, they need to have something to show that's better than this.

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
- mountainb 5y ago
  That's not how it works. You are supposed to cycle creative to prevent people from going 'ad blind.' People tune out creative they have seen too many times. Any book on advertising, any of the best practices documentation provided by Google, FB, or other ad sellers, all of them will support the practice of cycling creative, even if the variations are minor. Think of Budweiser cycling the 'Wazzap' joke in the 90s/2000s through variations on the commercial.
  - nobody9999 5y ago
    Yours is a good point. It's orthogonal to mine, however. I noted the importance of brand awareness, not specific ad awareness. There's miles of difference between those and nothing I said isn't consistent with "cycling creative."

tshaddox 5y ago

> 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. > 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 I don't think you can conclude anything about how they are "leaning" or what "proportion" of their ad budget is being spent on different things, if the only evidence you have is the portion of ads shown to you. The fact that their "post-sales targeting" can overwhelm other advertisers who are just doing "market expansion" targeting doesn't tell you much at all, because the number of people who would be eligible for post-sales targeting would obviously be vastly smaller than the number of people eligible for market expansion targeting. It seems very reasonable that the company you just spent hundreds of dollars at would be willing to bid more for an ad on your timeline than the thousands of other companies who want to show you an ad about something you've never heard of.

danShumway 5y ago
> The fact that their "post-sales targeting" can overwhelm other advertisers who are just doing "market expansion" targeting doesn't tell you much at all It shows me that the simplistic method of "advertise to people who have already bought our product" performs vastly better than any of the other sophisticated targeting that advertisers like to tout. To clarify -- I'm not talking about the proportion of an individual company's budget -- I'm talking about the proportion of the overall market for that product. Every time that someone is shown an ad, that ad is the result of a bidding war. If a large proportion of those ads are retargeted that means the market has decided that the vast majority of advertisers are less confident about their targeting systems then they are about a simplistic, vaguely annoying heuristic. We can make an assumption about the market as a whole because we believe that the market is at least somewhat efficient. If advanced, targeted advertising that used tons of demographic data and personal information was competitive with these naive targeting techniques, then a higher proportion of those ads would outbid retargeted ads on any given page. > doesn't tell you much at all I also want to broaden out a little bit here. In the OP's article, the main complaint being made is not that advertising has zero ROI (although the author is critical of the effectiveness as well). The criticism is that the ads provide no benefit to the user, that they're annoying and reductionist, and that they fail to live up to the promises of companies like Facebook that claim targeted ads connect people to new products that they'll love. Independent of whether or not we can be critical of the effectiveness of ads for companies, the proportion of retargeted ads also tells us that advertisers broadly, as a market, are incapable of delivering on their promises to consumers and are incapable of building a system that is mutually beneficial to both companies and consumers. See also some of the authors criticism of recommendation algorithms, which fall into the same boat. Who cares if Netflix's recommendation algorithm increases clicks? Consumers don't sign up for Netflix out of charity, they want a system that serves their interests, not just the company's. For advertisers to try and make the case that access to private data is good for consumers, they need to have something to show that's better than this.