13 ms·

Forget personalisation, it’s impossible and it doesn’t work

• mdoms 4y ago
• mhoad 4y ago
  As someone who works in that industry my overwhelming feeling after reading that article is that it’s largely junk for a couple of reasons. Without going super deep into the specifics they do make one good point that I agree with which is using 3rd party data brokers and sources to drive a personalisation strategy is going to give you terrible results precisely because that data is junk to begin with and is probably only going to get worse over time. That is however probably where the good points in that article end. In short, they take this ultra narrow view of what personalisation actually is and just straw man it to death. There is an underlying principle in the world of sales / marketing etc that basically boils down to show the right people the right message at the right time. The idea that this approach doesn’t work is not in anyway backed up by any evidence whatsoever and the second half of the article that just says “make something great for everyone because… movies” is just incredibly stupid advice. Like yes that is a great baseline to start from and is a goal in and of itself but what about when I start to know a bit more about what you’re actually looking for? Why would I not intentionally try to tweak my approach? A human salesperson who couldn’t adapt their approach would be out of a job within a short amount of time. The problem ultimately comes down to how can I understand 1. Who is the RIGHT audience 2. What is the RIGHT message for that audience 3. What is the RIGHT time to show that message? So it might come as no surprise to anyone that if you just outsourced that question to some 3rd party data source and had some incredibly broad and useless audience group like “women 18-24” then your results are going to suck for a multitude of reasons. Just for the sake of contrast let me demonstrate a simple but otherwise realistic example about how you may want to think about personalisation using a topic you’re all familiar with. Let’s say you’re working for GoDaddy and you’re trying to improve the revenue of users who land on your homepage for example. You are going to run a lot of A/B tests to figure out that first part I mentioned before regarding what’s the best possible version of this page I can show to people in general and tweak all kinds of things like the kinds of products / offers I push (domains vs hosting for example), the order I show them in, the way I talk about them etc. Cool? Concurrently to that I’m also going to start thinking about what are the kinds of customers we have. For example, GoDaddy have a pretty wide variety of customers when it comes to technical sophistication to just pick a random audience attribute that is actually relevant. There are a lot of HN crowd types who just want a cheap domain but want absolutely nothing to do with GoDaddy’s otherwise not great hosting plans. There are people who want very specific kinds of hosting like Wordpress, there are lots of non technical small business owners who are just trying to get setup with something basic and aren’t sure where to start among many other groups. So I’m going to start thinking about where could I find those specific groups of people both at a targeting level (ads, sponsorships etc) and also from an identification level (I.e. maybe the referrer string on the HTTP header shows HN for example, maybe I see they are coming in via one of the ad campaigns I set up earlier specifically targeting Wordpress hosting, maybe the user agent shows a windows vista user running IE which says maybe they aren’t likely to be technically savvy etc) Now I have some additional contextual information that I can use when I need to make a decision about what offers do I want to show in the hero section of the homepage for example. Do I push domains? Do I push how we specialise in working with non technical users etc. That kind of thing works, consistently. That’s the right message to the right audience and at the right time (to be fair I’ve not really done anything with the time angle in this example and am just assuming this is the first time they are interacting with our brand) concept in action. You can make things way more sophisticated obviously but that idea alone at GoDaddy scale would make meaningful amounts in additional revenue, no question. That is something very different to what the narrow example they used in the article however.
  • libertine 4y ago
    > There is an underlying principle in the world of sales / marketing etc that basically boils down to show the right people the right message at the right time. That's kind of the industry mantra for us, marketers. The reality is much more complex than that, goes beyond that to be quite honest. You just have to ask the question: "What's the right time to reach the right someone, with the right message?" And you'll find out the answer to that exercise is a game of Darts, with hits and misses, and as a consequence a lot of wastage. But that's the game we chose to play. Now, of course if you're reaching people who left your eCommerce shop and you retarget them with the items they have on their basket, it's a personalized ad that has a great probability to get results because you are reaching people who expressed a very specific behavior. But this, as you know, it's a rather small slice of your potential customers. But for example, when you say: >useless audience group like “women 18-24” then your results are going to suck for a multitude of reasons. If your product offer is a pill that helps to relief period pain and cramps, why isn't this a valid audience? Or the pill needs to be a "a pill for early teen women that like skateboards and scratch off tickets"? In my point of view the problem isn't the lack of personalization, or the need for it, but more a matter of saturation of some media channels.
    • mhoad 4y ago
      Agree with you that IRL it’s more complicated than just 3 points but am writing this for an audience of developers and tech folk so figured simplicity was more important than exhaustiveness but is otherwise generally accurate as a high level mental model. As for the straight up demographics example I called out I think that would work ok in theory but suffers from the major problem that you can not accurately identify that audience group to begin with and often doing so gets into the sleezier side of marketing that I personally want nothing to do with if I can avoid it. On top of that, I think there are better approaches, women 18-24 are not one homogeneous group with the same wants and needs and treating them that way might work better than the idea of let’s just show the same message to everyone all the time but I hardly think it’s the pinnacle of tailoring your content either.
• sp332 4y ago
  Sorry, but is "creative" a noun now? In some of the article it sounds like advertising, but at the end it sounds like a product.
  • throwanem 4y ago
    Yes, it is, used to refer to advertising content. I suppose it helps disambiguate that from the content around which ads appear. Beyond that, I suppose language is no less subject to fads and trends than any other realm of human endeavor.
    • lumost 4y ago
      Referring to ad content as creative has been around since at least the days of Madison avenue ad agencies in the 1950s. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it's usage arose concurrently with advertising.
    • mdoms 4y ago
      The article refers to Disney movies as "a creative".
      • throwanem 4y ago
        Oh. In that case I have no idea what they're doing, unless it's just a shibboleth synonymous with "content" as it's typically used of late.
  • micromacrofoot 4y ago
    has been for decades, a kind of industry specific jargon though - can also be used to refer to people
  • harshreality 4y ago
    Mad Men used it like that all the time, so it's no longer a little-known term specific to the ad industry.
  • rexpop 4y ago
• draz 4y ago
  I think the authors are overlooking that a Disney movie is 1.5 hrs long and has the opportunity to cater to multiple audiences (eg, insert a joke that parents get but flies over the kids’ head), whereas an ad is viewed for a split second. Also, there is certainly specialization in content (BET vs MTV vs Disney Channel etc). The key to advertising is in going broad with the audiences to reach, but specific in the message for each segment. (I’ve worked for one of the top TV and cinema content companies in the world, and currently working for one of the top DSPs (advertising)).
  • greggsy 4y ago
    If you’re including Marvel in the scope of Disney movies, you might need to bump that runtime up to 120 minutes minimum, and all the way up to 150 minutes in many cases. There was a post a little while back arguing that Avengers isn’t even a kids franchise anyway, so your observation still stands.
  • ece 4y ago
    An ad campaign can be days on many websites.
• ceeplusplus 4y ago
  Disney targets everyone because they have 1 product they can show to everyone and it isn't technically possible to customize a movie per interest. If personalization didn't work then advertisers wouldn't see ROI on their ad spend on FB/IG/Google. Clearly the fact that these companies make hundreds of billions says otherwise. It doesn't need to be perfect, just good enough.
  • lumost 4y ago
    A more apt point would be that personalization doesn't scale. If you need to target a hyper specific audience, then you by definition, will have scaling problems. Now if you need to target 100k hyper specific audiences, then it's a different story.
  • headsoup 4y ago
    Does it really make more than creating ads and targeting them appropriately at the right interest groups (i.e. advertising footballs on a sport fan site)? Aside requiring snooping to be effective in the first place. Are there good studies on this to validate it? Companies spend a mint on this stuff because they are told it works and is necessary, I'm not sure that's true, especially when that comes from the sales/marketing arm of those ad companies...
    • ceeplusplus 4y ago
      If creating interest group ads was more effective and cheaper, you'd see it used more by marketers. Marketers might not be able to measure whether targeted ads are effective but they can definitely compare the ROI between interest group ads and targeted ads.
• hooloovoo_zoo 4y ago
  This just makes me wonder if it would be possible for a modern streaming platform to make movies that personalize to a user. There's no fundamental reason you couldn't shoot a movie that plays different versions of a scene to different users.
  • htrp 4y ago
    At that point you may as well shoot the movie in a custom PC rendering engine that lets you make all the decisions (aka a game) ....
    • XorNot 4y ago
      Games generally don't let you make narrative decisions though - it is still rare and troubled that this implementation is attempted and executed. When they do, those decisions are still one of the more complex pieces of media humans ever create: an interaction of interpretation between the writers, artists and player interpretation as well as the technical limitations of the system. Story branch decisions in gaming are to some extent just an evaluation of what the writer's think of your world view - at least when it comes to consequences. Arguably they can only really be constructed as a trial between two opposing narrative voices - resolve questions of character via the wisdom of the crowd.
  • Gare 4y ago
    Isn't the point of a (good) movie creating a shared cultural experience? Discussion and memes based on movies don't work quite well if everybody is watching a different movie.
    • Gigachad 4y ago
      I had a long discussion on how ML/AI could be used in games to provide more personalized and realistic interactions. Which was countered by a convincing argument that this is not what players and the industry want. And how largely games have been focused on tightly controlled scripted gameplay that feels a lot like a movie. While an AI powered game would feel unfocused and likely nonsensical without any director oversight for the story. Similarly for a movie, perhaps we could personalize them, but would the result actually be desirable.
• twobitshifter 4y ago
  To the request to name a single brand based on personalization, music brands like Pandora and Spotify are built on personalization: Similarly, clothing brands like stitch-fix and trunk club are personalization specific. Regarding Disney, we just signed up for Disney+ and the first step was to decide if you wanted mature content and the second was to decide on your avatar. I think Disney+ will allow the company to cater to personal tastes more than they ever could through theaters and we will see that in the future. Finally, for the longest time marketers have looked at demographic groups to target with their products, this is a weaker form of personalization. Obviously that won’t be abandoned, so I wonder why the author thinks companies should only target mass markets?
  • hkt 4y ago
    While it is true that Spotify does recommendations, I'm sceptical that the majority of users value this part most. I'm happy to be corrected, but I'd guess it is simply the ability to stream music on demand that remains its main selling point. Put another way, the value of Spotify is its expansive collection, not its personalisation. (Or so it seems to me)
    • nelsondev 4y ago
      It’s both
    • leephillips 4y ago
      I know that some people find value in this, but for me, I wish I could turn off the recommendation engines on Netflix, Amazon, Spotify, and wherever else they are in services that I use. Whatever notions of similarity that they use to generate recommendations have nothing to do with how I judge things, and for me this is just noise that makes those services slower to navigate.
      • rightbyte 4y ago
        I feel Spotify's recommendation engine works kinda OK since music is many small songs rather than long and few movies. I mean if you are into a movie there might be only three ones like it which you allready have watched and surely are not on Netflix. However, as soon as you use your Spotify account for kids or parties the engine gets messed up forever. It is a shame since it helped me find alot of artists.
• aaron695 4y ago
• anothernewdude 4y ago
  I fucking hate generic crap that "resonates with everyone" And to run counter to this article - people have been going after niches for centuries. To great success.
• Supermancho 4y ago
  We know marketing works, under specific constraints. Sophisticated marketing does A/B testing to confirm the efficacy. Data collection is part of it. This article is making sweeping inaccurate statements, muddling the long-standing debates about marketing methodology. > Personalisation assumes that marketers have perfect data on every individual customer. No individual believes this, so it's hard to believe an extrapolation into organizational commitment. > Marketers infer who customers are based on their browsing behavior. Not in isolation. This is mischaracterization. > So, how accurate is gender targeting? It’s accurate 42.3% of the time. Probably not. There is no access to the datasets (https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/epdf/10.1287/mksc.2019.1188 https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/epdf/10.1287/mksc.2019.11...). "Gender accuracy ranges from25.7% to 62.7% with an overall average of 42.3%" without explaining how "no data" is handled. Having the actual data 42% of the time and not having it 58% of the time isn't the same as measuring how accurate it is. This looks like using bad statistics paired with confirmation bias. On and on and on. This is an article built on a quick summary of a questionable paper to push some anti-marketing prattle. Not to say that DSPs are reliable or that everyone is handling legitimate data, but bad data is filtered out pretty quickly in AdTech where there are means-tested costs...although it sometimes takes time to present.
• mattkevan 4y ago
  Personalisation as a concept needs to die. It’s sold as a shiny cutting-edge thing and sounds like it should be a good idea, but no one seems to realise that beyond the hype the tech is surprisingly shitty, like Web3 or voice apps. And the ones that do know aren’t going to let on because they’re the ones trying to sell personalisation software. Personalised ads result in vast amounts of corporate surveillance and still don’t work. I’ve never understood why contextual ads aren’t seen as good enough. If I’m looking at reviews for baby products, for example, then probably going to be interested in ads for similar baby products. And with personalised content or product recommendations, very few companies have the breadth and depth of content that even begin to make it worthwhile, and even those that do can’t seem to do more than show you more of what you’ve encountered before. YouTube and Instagram’s personalisation algos can be downright annoying ‘You watched that one video randomly? Okay, here’s hundreds more like it, crowding out all the things you do watch regularly.’ Good search and discovery tools are always better than a stupid recommendation engine, and they’re all stupid.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • __alias 4y ago
    This article is an incredible oversimplification. Personalisation is effective. I've tested enough personalisation campaigns to be convinced. And as a counter argument to Youtube/Instas algos. The reason TikTok has become so popular is that it simply better at personalising content, than say instagram reels.
• imglorp 4y ago
  Does this mean all the billions spent on targeted ads, all the gigatons of CO2 emitted running that crap JS in browsers worldwide, all the people annoyed, all the hours wasted, all the malware pumped and all the privacy violated, ... it was all for nothing? Suck it, marketers.
  • ______-_-______ 4y ago
    Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.
• __alias 4y ago
  Yeah sure. Regarding advertising, i'm sure the clothing labels that target young female demographics on instagram would thrive by changing their branding to target all genders of all ages.
  • mobjack 4y ago
    The argument is if you specialize in young women's clothing, instead of trying to micro target messaging to different personas, have a single message that can work with everyone you are trying to sell to.
• donatj 4y ago
  > should be replaced with creative that resonates with everyone Literally no such thing.
  • LigmaYC 4y ago
    Agreed, its a mass marketers pipedream. If you're actually involved in creative work, knowing your niche is extremely important.
• Invictus0 4y ago
  Suppose it's my job to market Viagra and I'm paying for each impression. Doesn't it make sense that I would want to avoid paying for a 25 year old to see the ad? Clearly my customer base is not 25. If I'm selling bras, I don't want to pay for a male to see the ad. The desire for relatively low-level personalization is so obvious I don't see how the author can ignore it, accuracy of the data notwithstanding. > Recently, Professor Nico Neumann partnered with the brilliant marketing team at HP to replicate this research for B2B. The results were unsurprising – but horrifying. Many enterprise technology companies spend millions of dollars ‘hyper-targeting’ IT decision makers (ITDMs) using third-party data. But if we get gender wrong more often than 50% of the time, what percentage of ITDMs do you think are actually ITDMs, according to the research? > Do you want to guess? It’s 14.3%. And for ‘senior ITDMs’, that number drops to 7.5%. > Super impressive! That’s about as precise as… a drunk monkey throwing darts? That... seems... like a great result? How many ITDMs are there in a random sample of 10,000 people? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics [0], there are 715,000 people working as IT managers in the USA. So the incidence in a random population of 10,000 is 715,000/300,000,000 = 24 people. Seems like the ads are working really well. I think it's interesting to see when you get a targeted ad you benefit from. I attended HackMIT for the first time after seeing a Facebook ad for it--I had an amazing experience at the event and that ad is possibly the reason I am a software engineer today. I doubt I would have received that ad if targeting weren't possible. If I had to put my imagination to work where ads and humans can coexist peacefully, I could imagine a world where ads are required to be hyper targeted, and you would be shown no ads unless the ad was specifically targeted to you. If the ad wasn't relevant to you, you could click an x on it to make it disappear, and the advertiser would have to pay a penalty to the host of the ad (google, facebook, whatever) for inconveniencing their users. I suppose marketers at Disney and P&G would suffer, but I am really sick of seeing liberty mutual ads when I don't even have a car. [0] https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm
  • _vdpp 4y ago
    I’m pretty ignorant of the marketing industry, but it seems like maybe you’re lumping demographic targeting in with personalization - broad categories like age, geographic location and gender are probably good ways to target advertising. Hyper-individualized ads are just plain creepy. I’m glad to hear they’re generally ineffective at reaching their intended audience, and I’d hope that when they are effective, that the sense of invasion people feel causes them to turn the other way.
• dotcoma 4y ago
  I’m puzzled: The authors say it’s impossible to accurately guess who the consumer is, and that the idea that you can show them the ‘right’ ad and that this quasi magical targeting will make broad-reach, low-impact ads (also called banner ads) work is BS; and people here on HN go on arguing about Spotify’s recommendation engine and if it’s any good or not. Please read the article again.
  • Dylan16807 4y ago
    The difference you're alluding to between music targeting and ad targeting isn't obvious. Can you explain more? By default I would think they're pretty similar. Trying to find a unit that will resonate with you specifically. And if they're similar then it's entirely fair to talk about both as different angles on the same problem. Unless you're maybe saying "the problem isn't the targeting, it's the type of ad"? But I don't see anything in the article that makes it specific to banners.
    • ClumsyPilot 4y ago
      The similarity isnt obvious - all if music lies in a well categorised spectrum. Ads deal with real life, does your AI engine know that because of a deadly heatwave sales will change?
      • dotcoma 4y ago
        Agree. Guessing which songs I may like based on 10 or 100 songs I like, while not trivial, is possible. Guessing who I am and if I am the right target for a kind of ad (broad-reach, low-impacts ads) nobody pays any attention to anyway is delusional.
    • dotcoma 4y ago
      > Proponents believe we are entering a new era in marketing, where every creative message will be tailored to the specific needs of individual buyers. They are talking about ads, not about which songs are suggested to us. > Most personalisation efforts are powered by third-party data. Marketers infer who customers are based on their browsing behavior. In order to deliver personalised ads, they use cookies — third-party cookies, by companies that invade our privacy and track our every move. Spotify does not rely exclusively on poor quality third-party data: they also have first-party data about us: the songs we listen to, like etc; how often we listen to them; if we put them in our playlists etc. This is one reason why their guesses as to what we may like are better. Another reason is that they are ‘only’ trying to suggest another song to a person who, apparently, likes music; they are not trying to guess my gender, age, job, wealth, type of person I am, mood, interests etc and find a match between these tracts and the fact that I may be interested in… an ad I never requested from a company I don’t know… > “We determined there was simply too much waste in the old model of activating this third-party cookie-based data across high-reach, low-impact placements. My guess is that the type of ads they are talking about here are general rotation banner ads, i.e. garbage worth nothing which gets sold for good money under the (false) promise that companies have ways to show your ads to the ‘right’ people. Problem is, they don’t.
• aeternum 4y ago
  The stats in this don't pass the smell test and seem made-up. For example gender targeting at 42%? That means they somehow did 8% worse than random chance. Their data somehow resulted in a statistically significant anti-correlation. This is a pretty unlikely result from a stats POV.
  • csande17 4y ago
    > For example gender targeting at 42%? That means they somehow did 8% worse than random chance. This is a lot more plausible than you might think. Simply build a machine-learning model that is accurate 58% of the time (maybe because it takes the "gender" field people manually entered on their online profiles and adds noise) and accidentally invert its output.
  • WorldMaker 4y ago
    There's more than two gender options for ad targeting.
    • iiiIiiiIiiiiIi 4y ago
      • WorldMaker 4y ago
        You are badly confusing sex and gender (and wrong about sex, too, but that's not my job to educate you past your ignorance). Advertisers do care about the gender differences between "people who menstruate", "people who have facial hair", "people who are post-menopausal", "people who like masculine aesthetic products", "people who like feminine aesthetic products", "people who would prefer not to answer any such questions on a survey" and several more. They overlap more than a lot of people would like (there are "people who menstruate" that are also "people who have facial hair", etc), but that doesn't mean that they aren't "real" genders that real people experience. Advertisers continue to mistake sex for gender themselves, often thinking that sex plus age range equals gender. It is a first approximation and it sort of accounts for the distinctions between "people who like feminine aesthetic products" who are also "people who menstruate" versus the ones that are "people who are post-menopausal", but they are wrong about that too and it is still only a bad first approximation. Those are all real categories (the word gender is just one of several English borrowed from other languages for the word "category", along with genre), whether or not you believe people should be allowed to choose the category they best identify with and that category should be distinct from assigned sex at birth. It's all real, whether you choose to believe in it or not.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• dusted 4y ago
  Remember back when programs could be personalized, not by some algorithm or data, but by the people using them ?
• bjg2 4y ago
  I mostly agree, most of the companies try to personalize marketing on bad data, but I think the main power for personalization is not acquisition but retention. In retention, you already have a lot of data bout the customer you collected yourself. One of the most interesting usecases of my company (videobolt.net) is personalized videos at scale (via API or one time video creation on a bunch of data). We powered some very interesting campaigns this way.
  • bjg2 4y ago
    Since this comment seems popular, this is an example of a campaign we powered: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ufTiBRMnxo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ufTiBRMnxo (we built ~750k personalized videos for this one, all the data in the video is user specific). If you want to discuss something like this, drop an email at aleksandar@videobolt.net (or just chat here).
    • csmpltn 4y ago
      Rendering some stats you have about your users in a "video" (could just as-well be a PowerPoint presentation turned into a GIF) is a pretty weak form of "personalisation". This perfectly demonstrates the point of this article - it's a canned and mass-produced product.
      • bjg2 4y ago
        I'm not sure I understand, can you elaborate? As far as I understand the article, two main points are that data on which you think you're doing personalization is often inaccurate, and that even if it is accurate you cannot hit the person well enough because that data is not enough. As said, I pretty much agree on acquisition level, but don't on retention level. On retention level, data should be good, since you are the one that is collection the data through your app / service usage. You should collect important data and trust your data. If you are sure you have that data, you may very much provide your customer with interesting personalized marketing experience. For given example, people use that platform every day, enjoy it, and are proud of their achievements there. They very much liked and shared these videos, as they are telling story of their journey on a platform that is important for them. PS. I agree this is not for everyone. You should have immersive platform users are spending a lot of time at, with a bunch of interesting data. These would maybe even work on remarketing level, if you collected enough data in your system for given customer. PPS. And difference between good quality video and PPT / GIF is... just huge.
• panda88888 4y ago
  Personalization work but companies tend to overfit which reduces the benefits of personalization. Let’s forget the obvious demographics correlation with products and just start with an example. Simply knowing that someone is active on HN, I wills bet ads on tech product and services would be more effective on them compared to a random person on the internet. The problem comes when the personalization gets too personal and stuck in the past, like how Amazon recommends another of the same product category after you bought one.
• seqizz 4y ago
  Oh nice whole screen cookie banner you have there. I am sure nothing personal..
• achooie 4y ago
  > Is Disney making personalised creative? > Disney only invests in creative that works across all segments – angsty superheroes, lost animals, magical princesses. Are these quotes typos, or is "creative" as a noun some sort of jargon? I find it really grating; what was wrong with "media?"
  • libertine 4y ago
    Creative(s) is the industry jargon for the execution of a creative concept in a media asset. >I find it really grating; what was wrong with "media?" We use "media/medium" to address the distribution channels of the creatives.
    • unwind 4y ago
      It sounds like the insider's version of "content", or perhaps it's just a more recent term. As a non-native speaker, it was really grating and hard to read, but obviously you're not supposed to understand other industry's jargon.
      • libertine 4y ago
        Creative is a very old term in the advertising industry. "Content" is used more for long form/non advertorial type of content, like blog posts, video expanding on a subject, etc. > As a non-native speaker, it was really grating and hard to read, but obviously you're not supposed to understand other industry's jargon. Yes these are industry terms, for example: the term "copy" is also a very old term used to address the "written" part of ads (of course is more than this). In the end it's all content and media, but it would be very hard to specify what type of content and media using these broad terms in this context.
• mathattack 4y ago
  Yet the author’s employer (LinkedIn) floods my inbox with pseudo-personalized crap. This reads more like the first part of an “only trust us” note.
• Yizahi 4y ago
  It is quite obvious that it doesn't work, not even close. Anyone using some big tech software can see it with his own eyes - ADs are atrociously tailored to the viewer. Facebook shows me total bullcrap for as long as I'm using it. And using it regularly I can see how AD cycles come and go, sponsored posts unified by some theme change every several months - it can be an avalanche of t-shirts, then creepto, then some political party, then creepto again, then meme groups, then some China sponsored posts masquerading as personal blogs, etc. etc. All of them are a complete miss, then can see that there are clickthroughs, no related searches, no views. Same with Google, MS, anyone. Trillion dollar corps specializing at harvesting and selling personal data can't figure it out. Personalized ADs are a myth.
  • moolcool 4y ago
    Yes! It's just bots targeting bots in a giant chain of grifts where each player thinks they're the grifter. Authenticity on the internet is dead, read about the Dead Internet Theory. AdTech is a con and only serves to do damage to the world and enrich itself.
• larsrc 4y ago
  As someone working for a company that is big on personalization (but working on totally different things): Yes! Thank you! Even if personalization worked, I wouldn't want it. Not just for the obvious privacy reasons, but because it would not be relevant to my current context most of the time. If I'm looking at a camera review page, I don't want ads for flower bulbs or shirts or whatever else I may be interested in. If there has to be ads, make them relevant to the context. I would be much more likely to buy some camera accessories from such a page than something irrelevant and distracting.
  • the_gipsy 4y ago
    The thing is, you don't want ads, period. There are no relevant ads you would want, it's either unbiased information or someone trying to con you into buying their crap.
    • nebulous_two 4y ago
      And yet we are bombarded with them. Thanks, market. You really gave us what we wanted. Oh wait -- that's not actually your objective!
    • bluGill 4y ago
      That is false. If I have a mouse problem I want to know about your better mousetrap. It doesn't do me any good if you invent it but I never find out about it. Most ads are for garbage I don't want/need, and many are scams, but there are still a number of ads out there for things that I would buy if only I knew they exists.
      • amelius 4y ago
        But do you want to be distracted by mouse traps every time you search for work related things? Why not put all ads into a website that is dedicated to ads, so that users who want them can look them up?
      • shkkmo 4y ago
        If you have a mouse problem, you want to hear from an expert which trap works best in which circumstance. Having each mouse trap company bombard you with half truths and lies about their traps isn't really helpful.
• koliber 4y ago
  How should I interpret this statement from this article: > In an academic study from MIT and Melbourne Business School, researchers decided to test the accuracy of third-party marketing data. So, how accurate is gender targeting? It’s accurate 42.3% of the time. If this statement is correct, does it mean that gender targeting is worse-than-chance? I am willing to believe that the data is poor, but find it had to believe that it is THAT poor. Am I misunderstanding something?
  • karamanolev 4y ago
    So ... invert the original data and get 57.7%? Fishy.
    • thecleaner 4y ago
      This is not correct.
  • thecleaner 4y ago
    No it's not correct to say it's worse than chance. That only works for binary classification problems. Without knowing how many categories people were sorted into, we can't quite say how bad chance (or random label assignment) would do. But anything less than 1/ (number of categories) is worse than random.
    • Mandatum 4y ago
      Even allowing for gender fluidity or non-binary, this is still WAY off.
    • koliber 4y ago
      You're right. There are more than two categories of gender. 1/(number of categories) works if the categories are the same size. They are not the same size. Male and female cover a vast majority of cases. What percentage would all the categories that are not male and not female need to be in order for 42.3% to be better-than-chance?
• criddell 4y ago
  How do you reconcile this study with Facebook saying Apple's iOS privacy changes will cost the company billions in revenue this year?
  • avocad 4y ago
    I suppose they sell ads with the promise that personalization does work.
    • criddell 4y ago
      But it does work. If you open a cafe and want to let people know the cafe is there, sending an ad (either by mail or on Facebook or via Google) to 10,000 people in your zipcode is going to be more effective than sending it to 10,000 random people around the planet.
  • cainxinth 4y ago
    Just because it doesn’t work doesn’t mean Facebook can’t make money convincing brands that it might.
• bsenftner 4y ago
  The manner in which personalization is achieved is backwards: do not get the information from 3rd parties, get it directly from the consumer. I've had an idea for a marketing company for some time, and it is quite simple: consumer signs up and states their interests explicitly, and their non-interests explicitly. Then the marketing company simply uses that direct information of what the customer wants, with a small widget to tune what is presented so the recommendations refine with time. Why not just get accurate info from the consumer, why not provide a ready interface for them to tune their preferences?
• heavenlyblue 4y ago
  I remember there was an ad "myth" about the fact that adtech companies become so good at targeting they would start advertising nappies to a household and parents would be surprised as to why when their daughter had been pregnant and didn't know about that (or along those lines). None of that were ever true (well, unless you accept the simplest explanation for that anecdote that the daughter accidentally Googled something related), this is definitely not true as of today.
  • regularfry 4y ago
    Do you mean this? https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
• temptemptemp111 4y ago
• schaunwheeler 4y ago
  This article is a combination of a straw-man argument and a bad analogy. The authors say [personalization] = [3rd-party data categories] * [appeals to non-universal emotional associations]. They show that 3rd-party data categories are crap. Anyone who has worked with those sources knows about the bad quality, so the criticism is an easy sell. Then they use an analogy of Disney/Pixar movies to argue that messages should have universal appeal. Most everyone feels all the feels when they watch a Disney/Pixar movie, so this is also an easy sell. Pull the straw-man apart a little bit: 3rd-party data isn't the only data out there. There's at least one solutions (full-disclosure: I'm building it) that uses high-frequency communication channels like push notifications as a factory to originate 1st-party data that's tailored to your business needs and exists at the individual level. In other words, saying personalization based on 3rd-party data doesn't work is like saying a car that with water in the gas tank doesn't work. Of course it doesn't. Stop putting water in the gas tank. Now look closer at the analogy: like a good movie, a good marketing strategy will expose customers to a wide variety of reasons to engage, so they can take what is personally meaningful to them and leave the rest. You can't fit the whole strategy into a single message. Of course you can't, just as Disney/Pixar can't fit every emotional association into a single scene scene. The authors point out the obvious fact that personalization can't fully happen at any single point in time, and miss the point that personalization necessarily happens progressively over multiple points in time. I don't mean to come down hard on the authors of this post. They're reacting to what most marketing platforms call personalization. The problem isn't that personalization is impossible and doesn't work. The problem is that so many platforms have implemented something that doesn't work and have called it personalization. For anyone interested, my co-founders and I have written several blog posts covering both what real personalization should look like, and many of the technical aspects of how it can be both possible and effective: www.aampe.com/blog
  • taeric 4y ago
    I think the point is more along the lines of there not being a personalization story for most product companies that really makes sense. That is, the dream that a bike company can use personalization to get better market penetration with their emails is dubious. Even a category store can only tailor their message so much. Is why most bookstores all have the same books. This goes as far as medicine. People want to think that a personalized prescription would be far more unique for individuals than the truth of it just being slightly tweaked.
• troupe 4y ago
  I would be happier if AT&T would personalize their mailers just enough to stop sending me ads for internet services they don't offer at my address.
  • fatnoah 4y ago
    My local natural gas company does the same thing. "Contact us now to upgrade your service!" "Oh, sorry, we don't offer service at that address." Similarly, I've used the same tax preparer for the last 10 years, and never, ever, ever have I had a refund. Every year, I get the emails about "your refund is waiting for you". I get that the marketing is outsourced, but it's so annoying that the one thing I'd expect tax company to know about me isn't used.
• thecleaner 4y ago
  This question isreally weird. > Can you name a single brand built on personalization ? What does this even mean. Brands which rely on personalization on a product-by-product basis ? This seems only possible at scale for digital products. Tik tok comes to mind. How can a brand rely on personalization ? Either the product is tailor-made or it isn't. It's not like the McDonald's logo looks different to different people.
• brycewray 4y ago
  “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
• SergeAx 4y ago
  Of course personalization works. On my previous job, we achieved two times action rate using trivial collaborative filtering, e.g. without using any prior knowledge of users except their actions history. Also, exactly half of this website is taken by popup "Subscriiibeee!!" pane without close button. What a waste of time.
• xivzgrev 4y ago
  I work in marketing. Personalization can provide incremental benefit. It’s particularly effective for owned channels (email, in product) or retargeting. This author is clearly engaging in hyperbole to gain attention and drive new clients. Zig when others zag.
• Smithalicious 4y ago
  What in the name of God is "a piece of creative"?
• toss1 4y ago
  Spot on And meanwhile, can we also junk all those massive steaming piles of cruft code attempting to personalize web & app experience? What an enormous waste of every user's time, and many coders' creativity. Ugh Over the decades, I've seen a literal handful (as in <5) adverts that worked for me extremely well - brought me relevant news of something that I didn't know about and was useful, and sometimes even lead to a purchase. Those were ALL clearly based on the context of what I'd been reading, and not some "personalization". The other 99.99999% of the adverts I've seen browsing in the past 25+ years is utter trash. Remember that old saw about "half of all marketing dollars are wasted, but no one can tell what half"? Wrong number - it's 99.99999% wasted.
• kazinator 4y ago
  If you use personalization to market a product that is itself not personalized, that could be construed as false advertizing. :)