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Scams upon scams: The data-driven advertising grift

248 points by headalgorithm 3y ago

_gllen 3y ago
It’s possible that an audience that is very likely to buy a mattress are recent mattress buyers.
- avidiax 3y ago
  It's good to point out this possibility, but outside of an institutional purchaser, people don't buy 2 mattresses with the purchases separated by a week. Knowing that you bought a mattress is useful for the ML to find the mattress-purchase-likely cohort. Filtering those people out just saves the advertisers money. Hence the grift.
  - multiplegeorges 3y ago
    > Filtering those people out just saves the advertisers money. Google Ads specifically has a feature to exclude targeting of customer's you've said have made purchases, ie. only target net new customers. The platforms aren't as dumb as the post author thinks they are.
    - dazc 3y ago
      I think the post was being sarcastic? People who have recently bought a mattress will see a lot of ads for mattresses.
    - jaclaz 3y ago
      >The platforms aren't as dumb as the post author thinks they are. Maybe the platforms are not that dumb, it is the mattress seller that doesn't properly make use of that feature, or there could be other reasons why they insist on suggesting over and over again a mattress. The experience described has happened to everyone for any (not very often replaced) item bought online, be it a printer, a wash machine or whatever, so if the platform is not dumb, it lacks data and the sellers are dumb, in any case the final effect of this "targeted" ads is 0 added sales.
  - Manfred 3y ago
    What if they bought a mattress and found out they didn't like it after one night? A lot of stores let you return them if you don't like them within a number of days. That would mean they are in the market for another one. I'm not saying it's likely, but there are scenarios.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > people don't buy 2 mattresses with the purchases separated by a week I did this. It’s because I’m incompetent. But I bought stuff for each room one at a time. Use an ad blocker, so no clue if it caught.
  - _gllen 3y ago
    Really 0%? It seems like some of the buyers would return their mattress and buy another. If 10% return and 90% of those buy another brand, that seems to me like an above average audience to market mattresses to.
  - nobody_nowhere 3y ago
    The ads are so inexpensive that just one repeat buyer pays for all the waste. Think of it — some people have a second home. Or a short term rental. Or a guest bedroom.
    - coffeebeqn 3y ago
      Or they returned the mattress or the data is not perfect and they’re still shopping etc
- 867-5309 3y ago
  but they no longer need a mattress..
  - achr2 3y ago
    I am willing to bet that statistically (with the number of mattress companies offering X night returns) that a recent mattress purchaser is more likely to purchase a different mattress within X days than the random public.
  - fullshark 3y ago
    Some % of the population buys more than one mattress in a 3 month period, intentionally. Perhaps they are landlords, or have 2nd homes, or want to stock their new home with new furniture.
    - jaclaz 3y ago
      Maybe, but (thank goodness) the mattress ads bombarding does not last 3 months, only a week or so, after 2 and 3/4 months have passed that % of population will either look where they bought the previous one (if they are satified with it) or make a new google search, in both cases the week long targeted campaign won't have much effect.
- dools 3y ago
  It's more likely that the mattress company couldn't be bothered creating a separate segment from their purchase order completion page and then excluding that from ads, because 95% of people who come to the page don't buy a mattress, and 95% of people who have bought a mattress don't click on ads when you show them, and the cost for AdRoll retargeting is per click not per impression.
- rcarmo 3y ago
  Well, according to Douglas Adams, somewhere in the Galaxy is a swampy planet populated by sentient mattresses named Zem: “No one really knows what mattresses are meant to gain from their lives either. They are large, friendly, pocket-sprung creatures that live quiet private lives in the marshes of Sqornshellous Zeta. Many of them get caught, slaughtered, dried out, shipped out and slept on. None of them seems to mind this and all of them are called Zem.” Maybe we should boycott mattress ads for the sake of preserving the species.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
pm90 3y ago
The only evidence the author offers are her personal experiences. While Im no fan of advertising and question its efficacy as well, I don’t really think this is a convincing argument against them. Statistically, these advertising segments will be very fuzzy and there will be outliers (probably many of them?).
- axlee 3y ago
  Since June 2022, we have stopped sending conversion signals back to our Google Ads account, and have completely disconnected Analytics and any Google-related tracking code from our site. We also started a new Ads property and retired the old, "enriched" one, starting 100% fresh (we were worried about breaking things, so we isolated the move and were ready to rollback quick). We have a yearly Gads budget around ~$5-$6M, of which is 95% SEA. We are selling an unchanged service in a very stable, slowly declining market with heavy ads competition for the top keywords. Roughly 60-65% of our customers are paid and come from Google. Since then, our ROI on that spending has not changed whatsoever. Paid traffic remains stable. Our CAC and conversion rates are virtually the same (even slightly better). Our new customer's LTV has increased compared to the previous cohorts as well, so it seems we're actually getting better quality leads (though I wouldn't attribute it necessarily to Google). So if reporting more data to Google was supposed to help us target our users more cost-efficiently, it did a piss poor job at it. In hindsight, we have wasted so much time trying to help Google make "smarter" decisions by providing it with more and more data (hello server-side tracking), while the most efficient thing to do would likely have been to do nothing at all. We have been working with GAds selling the the same service for more than 8 years now, so we have a large basis of comparison to be able to make that case. Maybe we're lucky, maybe this will turn out badly, but since then I have stopped blindly believing whatever the ads platforms are pretending to do behind the scenes with all this data. If they do anything with it, it doesn't seem to be for the advertiser. Our next step will be to gradually cut our SEA spending and follow the impact. And don't get me starting on Facebook's borderline fraudulent ad performance reporting that doesn't match our reality...
  - moneywoes 3y ago
    So effectively you stopped reporting back to google whether their ads traffic converted and you’ve noticed no difference in conversions?
Euphorbium 3y ago
Before reddit shit the bed, I wanted to advertise there, only to learn that the subreddits I wanted to target were too small to be able to be targeted. So much data wasted.
- neilv 3y ago
  Meanwhile, in some subreddits, your competitors are doing some combination of: * participating in the subs in good faith, with full disclosure; * astroturfing the posts&comments; * rigging upvotes/downvotes; * building relationships with (maybe bribing) the mods; and/or * entirely running the sub already.
  - kthejoker2 3y ago
    cough cough Snowflake and /r/dataengineering
  - moneywoes 3y ago
    Anything else in the Reddit playbook?
  - lencastre 3y ago
    It’s funny because it’s true. Often one needs to check the dedicated sub and a more general one to get unbiased takes/reviews, e.g. ubiquiti and networking
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - notjoemama 3y ago
    Can I call it ideological infiltration? Whether by social group principals (grassroots), or self interest promotion (corporate), this is the thing that has been infecting the Reddit platform for years making it less fun to use.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  Small subreddit targeting is just a matter of shilling. I’ve seen it on certain niche subreddits, brands becoming the subreddit darlings and added to the faq and wiki and sidebars, constantly recommended in the comments under any “what do I buy for x” thread. Even if its a junk product. Sometimes the brand even has an account active on the subreddit giving away coupons or free stickers and such.
yarekt 3y ago
Hmm, I feel like this analysis comes from trying to rationalise what’s happening. From my experience the truth is simpler, and much more disappointing: Advertising is about statistics, and if some wonky new data model creates better conversions the advertisers don’t care how it’s underlying rule sets work. The cost of pushing ads to people who already have mattresses is insignificant to capturing those that are about to buy them, statistically speaking. The disappointing thing about this trend is that even if the rule sets are obviously wrong, yet still provide positive results means that their operators have little reason to change them. Statistics don’t work for individuals. Case in point is credit rating and insurance underwriting
- blowski 3y ago
  Those advertisers are responding to signals in the junk data the OP is talking about. You’re both right.
  - aCoreyJ 3y ago
    Yup this is addressed in the article, it seems there isn't actually data backing up the idea that this way is better
- AJ007 3y ago
  This is yet another of the recurring "online advertising doesn't work" articles, which have been published regularly for the past 20 years.
  - raincole 3y ago
    Some people are just so confident. All the companies, from startups to giants, across different countries and cultures, must be wrong. Only few (and they all write blogs) can see through the vile of disguise and tell the readers how online advertising doesn't work.
    - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
      All the oil companies investing billions into destroying ecosystem we depend on can't be wrong!
Ozzie_osman 3y ago
The way to measure whether the data-driven ads are a scam is not by saying "this ad is irrelevant to me". It's by the advertiser looking at their ROAS (return on ad spend). If the algorithm is optimizing for showing you an ad, there's a pretty fair chance that the advertiser has done that math and decided that in a world of imperfect data and algorithms, you approximate enough the type of person who is worth showing an ad to... statistically. In fact, getting to a world where ads are perfectly targeted would be one hell of a privacy nightmare.
- Swizec 3y ago
  > there's a pretty fair chance that the advertiser has done that math As an occasional admittedly naive experimenter with ads – it’s far more likely that the platform has done the math and showing you the ad is profitable to them, not the advertiser. Google et al love nothing more than to burn your entire ad budget on cheap clicks from countries that will never buy anything. But the number of “ad conversions” looks high and graph go up! Getting these platforms to do what you want is a literal full-time job. Hell, in bigger companies you have entire teams doing nothing more than bending over backwards to get these platforms to do the useful thing instead of setting money on fire. The algorithms love setting money on fire. It’s a lot like giving your 3 wishes to a genie, you have to be very specific.
  - crobertsbmw 3y ago
    I’m not sure this is true. Facebook makes a lot more money from me if my ads are converting, and I continue to spend money day after day. If they just burn my money and I’m not seeing enough conversions out of it, then I kill my ads and start trying my luck with Twitter or Pinterest ads..
    - Swizec 3y ago
      > I’m not sure this is true I can assure you it is very true that it takes a lot of skill to get ad platforms to do what you want. They do not care about you. The algorithm will make The Metric go up and that’s a threat. It’s your job to make it a good metric.
seydor 3y ago
Their job is to sell advertising to advertisers, not to please their users. I thought it was common knowledge. The more complicated and graph-filled the dashboard is, the more work that the advertiser can claim to have done to their bosses
nobody_nowhere 3y ago
There’s one thing that advertisers agree on: ads work in the aggregate. You can tell by turning them all off. Ask Kraft Heinz. Beyond that it gets fuzzy. Is it inefficient? Yes. Does anyone agree on the actual mechanics? No. Is the data wildly inaccurate? Sure. Is there grift? Totally.
- nobody_nowhere 3y ago
  People also forget how inexpensive and ephemeral individual ads are. A display banner on a quality site costs less than a tenth of a penny. And it’s like a room on a cruise ship — the boat is gonna sail one way or another. So it has to be sold. Advertisers might choose to let Facebook arbitrage those impressions into a cost per click model — at pennies per click instead of hundredths per view. Tradeoffs galore in that model. When you aggregate these numbers into a $600b industry, you start to see how sweating some of the finer details just doesn’t matter.
  - somsak2 3y ago
    >it’s like a room on a cruise ship — the boat is gonna sail one way or another. So it has to be sold. super shaky reasoning. the less rooms that get sold, the less likely future ships are to sail or even be built. individual decisions matter in aggregate
  - prepend 3y ago
    > you start to see how sweating some of the finer details just doesn’t matter. I think it’s an opportunity. The original premise of google is that targeted ads would let you benefit from “sweating some of the finer details.” If 1/3 of a $600B market is wastage or fraud, then that’s an opportunity to give advertisers better response for their spend. Really massive. I’m sure advertisers would like more sales by being able to remove the waste ads. Currently they can’t do that. But if some new company or tech allows for that, it’s worth trying to figure out.
- jfengel 3y ago
  What happened to Kraft Heinz?
eduction 3y ago
I’m very curious what events she is seeing that exclude people over 30.
- jprete 3y ago
  I can't speak to her specific observations, but a lot of Meetup events specify an age range of, roughly, 20 to somewhere between 30 and 40. I think most of them are implicitly (or explicitly) dating events, although there are group-interest events that do it too, which I'd think would be less picky about who attends.
  - BobbyTables2 3y ago
    I was curious and started looking at Meetup lately… At first I was amazed at the number of interesting local groups and their member counts. I felt I missed out on so much, but activity seems to have not recovered since 2019. Then after browsing around, I realized that there a huge number of single women living in the region, in their 20s-40s, whose main interests are hiking, real estate, and *Kubernetes*. This seems incredibly odd since I do not live in California… The dating scene must be brutal for “on-prem” kinds of people…
sega_sai 3y ago
Many here already pointed at the fact that likely P(buying mattress in the future|googled mattress) is much higher than P(buying mattress in the future) thus for an advertiser with a finite budget it makes perfect sense to target users who googled mattress irrespective of whether they bought it already or not.
- Kapura 3y ago
  The author's point is that, with the data available to the platform owners, they could easily deduce the subset where that P value is nearly zero (having already bought the mattress). Places that would also make sense to advertise mattresses: around universities and dense rental housing, or new developments of single family houses. I required no spy networks to make this list.
  - tcbawo 3y ago
    It seems that P(returning a bought mattress) is more than 10%, so it probably makes sense to continue advertising to those people. Also, there are probably people who buy multiple mattresses (eg. parents), that might buy a second mattress.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - prepend 3y ago
      The point of the article is that platforms know that both your examples aren’t true. The author isn’t a parent and isn’t in the market for buying a second mattress or returning. I think the issue is that the platforms don’t want to actually target, they just want to pretend and allow for the narrative for why. I would expect that the search pattern of multiple mattress buyers is very different than single (ie, single searches and buys one and stops searching; multiple searches, buys one, keeps searching). And for returners have identifiable patterns (ie, searches, buys, searches for “how to return”). Remember that google knows pretty much every single search you run and every page you visit and every checkout you complete successfully (if you’re using chrome).
masswerk 3y ago
> Marketing theory is never tested rigorously. The <del>common sense</del> incredibly sound scientific view based on heaps of scientific evidence view – showing your ads to people more likely to buy your product is more efficient because they’re more likely to buy your product anyway – is entirely untested. Before this, the classic life style segment in media analysis was magazine audiences aged 15-25. Notably, this was not the part of the population that could afford the goods advertised immediately, or even anywhere in the near future. The idea was that this would be formative, that this would effect in an invaluable baseline of expectations and anticipations that could not be competed with, when it came to real acquisitions. Well, nowadays it's all just-in-time, often even just-after-buy, which seems to be the most efficient.
adrr 3y ago
> Marketing theory is never tested rigorously. Of course its tested "rigorously". Performance marketing is always about testing and optimizing CAC/CPA. It can make or break your company. If you can acquire customers at 10% lower rate(at the same volumes) than you competitors and you have similar COGS, you will dominate them and will ultimately will be the market leader. Monetary incentives are there to ensure efficiency just like there are incentives around COGS for efficiency.
soared 3y ago
Woman who knows nothing about digital marketing claims an entire multiple-billion dollar industry is scam, nice.
- kryz 3y ago
  Exactly. As someone who operates within this industry. This piece read like it could be wholly made up
- RistrettoMike 3y ago
  (But they mention that they work in marketing.)
  - soared 3y ago
    I can’t find her LinkedIn and the about page has no info, but with this blog post she definitely does not work in digital marketing as she has no idea how it functions. It’s just wild baseless claims that everyone is marketing is either dumb or not trying at all.
- Woodi 3y ago
  Maybe it is just so easy to point idiocy in ad biz ? Look: you buy X so you do not need X a n y m o r e - and then you are spammed with ads for X. Brain deadness no 1 proved. But ads still ar payed for, LOL ! I see time machine just right here :>
thethethethe 3y ago
Ehh I find it hard to believe that a multi-trillion dollar industry is a grift based on this single person's collection of anecdotes. If online ads didn't result in measurable customer conversions, I have a feeling that the millions of business using them would stop. Disc: Google employee, not ads though
- agentgumshoe 3y ago
  Perhaps, people are sold on the idea that it works even if it doesn't at all, and so the people selling those ideas make lots of money. Like gambling.
  - thethethethe 3y ago
    Again, it seems unlikely that millions of people running businesses are that stupid.
    - kjkjadksj 3y ago
      It seems even more unlikely that millions of business owners would be sufficiently knowledgable in statistics to even test these things.
    - agentgumshoe 3y ago
      Remember, we're talking 'targeted advertising' here, where I imagine it is not easy for general business owners to understand whether it is more, or even as effective as 'traditional' advertising. Easy money for advertisers just by showing some fancy irrelevant graphs.
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  > I find it hard to believe that a multi-trillion dollar industry is a grift Have you ever seen a real estate agent?
  - thethethethe 3y ago
    Yeah I have and they provided guidance and knowledge surrounding financing, bidding, regulations, etc that I did not have. Can we build a society without the need for real estate agents? Perhaps. Would that society be better? Probably. But saying they are simply a grift is obviously untrue
marginalia_nu 3y ago
I always feel that a good deal of data-driven anything is basically modern divination. The median data-driven decision might as well have been based on haruspicy. You can construct experiments to demonstrate damn near anything is true, and without (or even with) a rigorous background in statistics and scientific methodology, it's very hard to examine the supposed evidence. I know I say this a lot, but constructing solid experiments is time consuming and difficult. It's hard even if you you're trying to be fair. Professors routinely get this wrong despite a literal decade of formal training in the scientific method and half a lifetime of practical experience with this exact craft; despite how fucking up puts their career, reputation and livelihood in jeopardy. Not only does this happen a lot, bad science routinely slips through peer review as well. That's the state of affairs in the spaces that in general aren't extremely adversarial, where the people involved in constructing the experiments in general don't have a a vested interest in trying to mislead you. (Scientific fraud still happens of course, but Jan Hendrik Schön is the exception and not the rule)
- User23 3y ago
  > You can construct experiments to demonstrate damn near anything is true, and without (or even with) a rigorous background in statistics and scientific methodology, it's very hard to examine the supposed evidence. One time I was at this silly daylong corporate team building event where they assigned us to groups and had us do "experiments." As it happened one of my group members has a PhD in Particle Physics and the look on his face was something else. Needless to say he didn't bother telling the take charge type that her experiment design was entirely nonsensical, because why bother, but I was amused.
  - marginalia_nu 3y ago
    ANOVA is that PBS show right?
- kurthr 3y ago
  Which explains why I've been getting ads for brides' maid dresses. However, it also seems as if a tuned LLM could look at the corpus of my on-line profile (mail, FB, HN) and produce a model of my attention and commentary (positive/negative). Then that model (or several models) could be tested against various ads to determine which are more likely to produce positive responses. Right now I think that would be too expensive except for very high value ads/targets, but perhaps pricing will come down and non-keyword based advertising might appear.
alex_young 3y ago
Maybe advertisers don’t actually get signals when people click pay in some third party site? I mean, why would that third party want to expose your purchase to the advertisers? So, you’re left with this great signal that someone is shopping for a mattress. Seems like a very good reason to recommend other mattresses to them.
zoogeny 3y ago
This entire essay is just full of ideas I disagree with. First is the old chestnut: Why does company keep advertising product to me after I've already bought it!? This is one of those child-like criticisms that keeps rearing it's ignorant head. Literally, you are ignorant as to why they are doing it. Your ignorance as to why doesn't imply their stupidity. Amazon does it. Google does it. I'm sure Facebook does it. So either three of the biggest companies in the world are full of stupid idiots or perhaps you are just ignorant to the reason they are doing it. > Their ethos is that if a human can do a task, a machine can do that task better, and not cost them anything such as salary, pensions or or a basic level of respect No, their ethos is - we can't possibly have any reasonable number of humans do the task. In what universe could we imagine hiring a sufficient number of humans to sift through the data Google has collected? They have immense data on literal billions of humans. How much time would it take any person to understand you as a person sufficiently by painstakingly reviewing your data so that Google could send you perfect ads? The very premise of this is ridiculous beyond reason. So the conclusion is based on the premise that having humans do the task is impossible. We have no other option than to use machines and algorithms to attempt the task because it is the only viable alternative. > Advertisers, then, are getting served a steaming turd on a plate rather than the medium-rare filet mignon they were promised. Advertisers are making a value judgement based on the options they have available to them. They can advertise on TV, radio, or magazines. They can advertise on podcasts, YouTube channels or Instagram feeds by directly contacting the creators and doing sponsored content. They can put up billboards and wrap public buses. They can put people in public squares and hand out flyers, do personal demos and offer prizes. I couldn't even scratch the surface of what is available to modern companies for promotional purposes. The fact that Facebook, Amazon and Google are as large as they are suggest there is some value being derived by companies given that they have plenty of alternate options available to them. > There isn’t any evidence to suggest that an ad targeted to 35 year old men with children with an interest in football is any more likely to result in sales of Football Dad socks than a poster for Football Dad socks at a bus stop. But an entire industry is based on pretending that this is the case. I really don't think they are. But let's compare the idea to the other advertising avenues I listed. TV ads are broadly targeted based on the time of day the show runs at as well as the content of the show. Magazine ads are broadly targeted based on the content of the magazine. Junk mail and flyers are broadly targeted to people living in a particular geographic area. But I guess this MSc in marketing knows more than the entire industry they claim to be from.
ncr100 3y ago
I do dislike digital ads refining their profile of me, via my involuntary contributions to their models. Definitely feels like I'm being spied upon.
izzydata 3y ago
I really hope in the near future there is some shift in the advertising business where they realize the ridiculous amounts of money they are lighting on fire and decimates the ad driven internet as we know it.
erehweb 3y ago
We can argue about whether data-driven ads work for the OP or for buying an extra mattress, but in aggregate they absolutely work. Contra OP's anecdote, if FB ad targeting stopped working, then FB would notice the difference in engagement within a day - probably within the hour.
kamma4434 3y ago
At some point we tried using a major network…. That predicted our target market to be 50% female, and heavily present in middle east. Had a laugh and moved on.
mcpackieh 3y ago
Remember, the primary job of an advertiser is to sell their advertising services to companies, not to sell a company's products to consumers. That comes second and is only done insofar as it facilitates the first.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  Same is true for consultancies. They effectively offshore the brainstorming for you, but the ideas they sell you on don’t have to work and the consultants usually aren’t even incentivized for it to work after the duration of the contract. I wonder if there are any good books out there for these sorts of businesses in modern times, doing a kind of shovel selling during a gold rush sort of business plan, not really caring if the ore vein is even real, just serving the lemmings their desires.
Skunkleton 3y ago
I have a friend with a business in a niche market. His business is driven almost entirely by ads place with google. He’s tried other platforms and had much worse results. Something must be working.
angarg12 3y ago
So OP claims that data-driven ads are a scam using the anecdata that she is getting served irrelevant ads. I'm not going to argue about whether ads are "worth it", but working on the other side (serving and optimizing ads), I can tell that yes, we run the numbers, and the math (mostly) works out. As per your examples, we have run experiments by applying targeting ads based on narrow segments, and others without. As it turns out the data shows that "casting a wider net" works better, statistically. Make of it what you will.
reillyse 3y ago
So much of advertising is lies that I don't do any advertising online any more. I've pulled all my google ads, facebook ads, instagram ads and podcast ads. After about 10 years of doing ads (for my coffee club) and really attempting to track what was happening (from a technical point of view) I couldn't actually attribute any of it (the holy grail of digital marketing). "Word of mouth" is still our biggest channel. And all the time whenever I speak to "marketing" people it's the same low value analysis with zero mathematical or scientific vigor. They look at what happened (High CTR on this ad) and draw some conclusion from it, and then next week when CTR flatlines on the ad they have no comment and are busy looking at the non-significant noise coming from another ad. And that's before even talking about the pure lies coming from the podcast people who swear up and down they know exactly how far into a podcast someone plays, when the spec they quote explicitly states it doesn't really work on apple products and 90% of the listernship is Apple. So many lies. It is a grift built on grift. Somebody in the organization knows it's a pile of lies, but the sales people actually believe it I think or don't care.
- therealdrag0 3y ago
  Sorry for the hijack. What roast level do you do?
  - reillyse 3y ago
    Lol :) we are one of the pioneers of the super light nordic roast in the US.
pmcgrathm 3y ago
Contrary to the belief that advertising is less data-driven, the complexity and dependency on feature-rich data sets has increased over time. Redundant targeting sometimes happens due to the ad objective of maximizing expected revenue over cost. However, it's more nuanced in practice. Advertisers aim to optimize expected revenue over cost within a 'payback period', which is typically 1-3 years for large advertisers. This is calculated through customer acquisition cost, retention, and incrementality (the probability of an ad causing conversion). Only advertisers themselves can effectively calculate incrementality due to access to their specific conversion/retention metrics. This incrementality, along with the optimal mix of channels and ad spend, is the ongoing challenge for sophisticated advertisers. It involves multi-objective optimization across millions of ad assets, campaigns, and targeting criteria. Privacy regulations since 2015 and subsequent laws like GDPR and CCPA have led to more reliance on probabilistic modeling for targeting. The entire pipeline of targeting, engagement, conversion, and retention forecasts are now based on probabilistic models. While ad networks offer simplified scaling solutions like 'target roas' and 'campaign budget optimization', they're more useful for average advertisers with limited internal resources - eg, they can't justify hiring ML SWEs, quant traders, technical PMs, etc. Advertising has become even more data-driven and arbitrage gains for sophistication have increased. Profound gains can be made with investments in marketing and forecasting science, similar to the operations of a quant trading firm. Source: I've managed $10B+ through automated ad spend systems since 2012.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  How much more effective would ad spend be if ads were solely served to people with a decent bit of disposable income? I would guess the return on investment is almost all due to buyers with cash to spend more than anything, and those 40% of Americans with like $400 in the bank (if those popular stats are to be believed) are merely an expense serving them advertising content for products they are unlikely to ever buy. You already see this with some goods so its certainly at least somewhat effective, e.g. luxury watch ads in beverly hills contrasted with military recruitment billboards in south LA.
hotcrossbunny 3y ago
"Amazon knows exactly when you have an outbreak of aphids because you buy things to kill the nasty little beasties, and it probably also knows when you’ve had a nasty breakup because nobody listens to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours on repeat at 3am when they’re in a good place." Just great writing, this.

248 points by headalgorithm 3y ago

_gllen 3y ago

It’s possible that an audience that is very likely to buy a mattress are recent mattress buyers.

avidiax 3y ago
It's good to point out this possibility, but outside of an institutional purchaser, people don't buy 2 mattresses with the purchases separated by a week. Knowing that you bought a mattress is useful for the ML to find the mattress-purchase-likely cohort. Filtering those people out just saves the advertisers money. Hence the grift.
- multiplegeorges 3y ago
  > Filtering those people out just saves the advertisers money. Google Ads specifically has a feature to exclude targeting of customer's you've said have made purchases, ie. only target net new customers. The platforms aren't as dumb as the post author thinks they are.
  - dazc 3y ago
    I think the post was being sarcastic? People who have recently bought a mattress will see a lot of ads for mattresses.
  - jaclaz 3y ago
    >The platforms aren't as dumb as the post author thinks they are. Maybe the platforms are not that dumb, it is the mattress seller that doesn't properly make use of that feature, or there could be other reasons why they insist on suggesting over and over again a mattress. The experience described has happened to everyone for any (not very often replaced) item bought online, be it a printer, a wash machine or whatever, so if the platform is not dumb, it lacks data and the sellers are dumb, in any case the final effect of this "targeted" ads is 0 added sales.
- Manfred 3y ago
  What if they bought a mattress and found out they didn't like it after one night? A lot of stores let you return them if you don't like them within a number of days. That would mean they are in the market for another one. I'm not saying it's likely, but there are scenarios.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > people don't buy 2 mattresses with the purchases separated by a week I did this. It’s because I’m incompetent. But I bought stuff for each room one at a time. Use an ad blocker, so no clue if it caught.
- _gllen 3y ago
  Really 0%? It seems like some of the buyers would return their mattress and buy another. If 10% return and 90% of those buy another brand, that seems to me like an above average audience to market mattresses to.
- nobody_nowhere 3y ago
  The ads are so inexpensive that just one repeat buyer pays for all the waste. Think of it — some people have a second home. Or a short term rental. Or a guest bedroom.
  - coffeebeqn 3y ago
    Or they returned the mattress or the data is not perfect and they’re still shopping etc
867-5309 3y ago
but they no longer need a mattress..
- achr2 3y ago
  I am willing to bet that statistically (with the number of mattress companies offering X night returns) that a recent mattress purchaser is more likely to purchase a different mattress within X days than the random public.
- fullshark 3y ago
  Some % of the population buys more than one mattress in a 3 month period, intentionally. Perhaps they are landlords, or have 2nd homes, or want to stock their new home with new furniture.
  - jaclaz 3y ago
    Maybe, but (thank goodness) the mattress ads bombarding does not last 3 months, only a week or so, after 2 and 3/4 months have passed that % of population will either look where they bought the previous one (if they are satified with it) or make a new google search, in both cases the week long targeted campaign won't have much effect.
dools 3y ago
It's more likely that the mattress company couldn't be bothered creating a separate segment from their purchase order completion page and then excluding that from ads, because 95% of people who come to the page don't buy a mattress, and 95% of people who have bought a mattress don't click on ads when you show them, and the cost for AdRoll retargeting is per click not per impression.
rcarmo 3y ago
Well, according to Douglas Adams, somewhere in the Galaxy is a swampy planet populated by sentient mattresses named Zem: “No one really knows what mattresses are meant to gain from their lives either. They are large, friendly, pocket-sprung creatures that live quiet private lives in the marshes of Sqornshellous Zeta. Many of them get caught, slaughtered, dried out, shipped out and slept on. None of them seems to mind this and all of them are called Zem.” Maybe we should boycott mattress ads for the sake of preserving the species.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

pm90 3y ago

The only evidence the author offers are her personal experiences. While Im no fan of advertising and question its efficacy as well, I don’t really think this is a convincing argument against them. Statistically, these advertising segments will be very fuzzy and there will be outliers (probably many of them?).

axlee 3y ago
Since June 2022, we have stopped sending conversion signals back to our Google Ads account, and have completely disconnected Analytics and any Google-related tracking code from our site. We also started a new Ads property and retired the old, "enriched" one, starting 100% fresh (we were worried about breaking things, so we isolated the move and were ready to rollback quick). We have a yearly Gads budget around ~$5-$6M, of which is 95% SEA. We are selling an unchanged service in a very stable, slowly declining market with heavy ads competition for the top keywords. Roughly 60-65% of our customers are paid and come from Google. Since then, our ROI on that spending has not changed whatsoever. Paid traffic remains stable. Our CAC and conversion rates are virtually the same (even slightly better). Our new customer's LTV has increased compared to the previous cohorts as well, so it seems we're actually getting better quality leads (though I wouldn't attribute it necessarily to Google). So if reporting more data to Google was supposed to help us target our users more cost-efficiently, it did a piss poor job at it. In hindsight, we have wasted so much time trying to help Google make "smarter" decisions by providing it with more and more data (hello server-side tracking), while the most efficient thing to do would likely have been to do nothing at all. We have been working with GAds selling the the same service for more than 8 years now, so we have a large basis of comparison to be able to make that case. Maybe we're lucky, maybe this will turn out badly, but since then I have stopped blindly believing whatever the ads platforms are pretending to do behind the scenes with all this data. If they do anything with it, it doesn't seem to be for the advertiser. Our next step will be to gradually cut our SEA spending and follow the impact. And don't get me starting on Facebook's borderline fraudulent ad performance reporting that doesn't match our reality...
- moneywoes 3y ago
  So effectively you stopped reporting back to google whether their ads traffic converted and you’ve noticed no difference in conversions?

Euphorbium 3y ago

Before reddit shit the bed, I wanted to advertise there, only to learn that the subreddits I wanted to target were too small to be able to be targeted. So much data wasted.

neilv 3y ago
Meanwhile, in some subreddits, your competitors are doing some combination of: * participating in the subs in good faith, with full disclosure; * astroturfing the posts&comments; * rigging upvotes/downvotes; * building relationships with (maybe bribing) the mods; and/or * entirely running the sub already.
- kthejoker2 3y ago
  cough cough Snowflake and /r/dataengineering
- moneywoes 3y ago
  Anything else in the Reddit playbook?
- lencastre 3y ago
  It’s funny because it’s true. Often one needs to check the dedicated sub and a more general one to get unbiased takes/reviews, e.g. ubiquiti and networking
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- notjoemama 3y ago
  Can I call it ideological infiltration? Whether by social group principals (grassroots), or self interest promotion (corporate), this is the thing that has been infecting the Reddit platform for years making it less fun to use.
kjkjadksj 3y ago
Small subreddit targeting is just a matter of shilling. I’ve seen it on certain niche subreddits, brands becoming the subreddit darlings and added to the faq and wiki and sidebars, constantly recommended in the comments under any “what do I buy for x” thread. Even if its a junk product. Sometimes the brand even has an account active on the subreddit giving away coupons or free stickers and such.

yarekt 3y ago

Hmm, I feel like this analysis comes from trying to rationalise what’s happening. From my experience the truth is simpler, and much more disappointing: Advertising is about statistics, and if some wonky new data model creates better conversions the advertisers don’t care how it’s underlying rule sets work. The cost of pushing ads to people who already have mattresses is insignificant to capturing those that are about to buy them, statistically speaking. The disappointing thing about this trend is that even if the rule sets are obviously wrong, yet still provide positive results means that their operators have little reason to change them. Statistics don’t work for individuals. Case in point is credit rating and insurance underwriting

blowski 3y ago
Those advertisers are responding to signals in the junk data the OP is talking about. You’re both right.
- aCoreyJ 3y ago
  Yup this is addressed in the article, it seems there isn't actually data backing up the idea that this way is better
AJ007 3y ago
This is yet another of the recurring "online advertising doesn't work" articles, which have been published regularly for the past 20 years.
- raincole 3y ago
  Some people are just so confident. All the companies, from startups to giants, across different countries and cultures, must be wrong. Only few (and they all write blogs) can see through the vile of disguise and tell the readers how online advertising doesn't work.
  - ClumsyPilot 3y ago
    All the oil companies investing billions into destroying ecosystem we depend on can't be wrong!

Ozzie_osman 3y ago

The way to measure whether the data-driven ads are a scam is not by saying "this ad is irrelevant to me". It's by the advertiser looking at their ROAS (return on ad spend). If the algorithm is optimizing for showing you an ad, there's a pretty fair chance that the advertiser has done that math and decided that in a world of imperfect data and algorithms, you approximate enough the type of person who is worth showing an ad to... statistically. In fact, getting to a world where ads are perfectly targeted would be one hell of a privacy nightmare.

Swizec 3y ago
> there's a pretty fair chance that the advertiser has done that math As an occasional admittedly naive experimenter with ads – it’s far more likely that the platform has done the math and showing you the ad is profitable to them, not the advertiser. Google et al love nothing more than to burn your entire ad budget on cheap clicks from countries that will never buy anything. But the number of “ad conversions” looks high and graph go up! Getting these platforms to do what you want is a literal full-time job. Hell, in bigger companies you have entire teams doing nothing more than bending over backwards to get these platforms to do the useful thing instead of setting money on fire. The algorithms love setting money on fire. It’s a lot like giving your 3 wishes to a genie, you have to be very specific.
- crobertsbmw 3y ago
  I’m not sure this is true. Facebook makes a lot more money from me if my ads are converting, and I continue to spend money day after day. If they just burn my money and I’m not seeing enough conversions out of it, then I kill my ads and start trying my luck with Twitter or Pinterest ads..
  - Swizec 3y ago
    > I’m not sure this is true I can assure you it is very true that it takes a lot of skill to get ad platforms to do what you want. They do not care about you. The algorithm will make The Metric go up and that’s a threat. It’s your job to make it a good metric.

seydor 3y ago

Their job is to sell advertising to advertisers, not to please their users. I thought it was common knowledge. The more complicated and graph-filled the dashboard is, the more work that the advertiser can claim to have done to their bosses

nobody_nowhere 3y ago

There’s one thing that advertisers agree on: ads work in the aggregate. You can tell by turning them all off. Ask Kraft Heinz. Beyond that it gets fuzzy. Is it inefficient? Yes. Does anyone agree on the actual mechanics? No. Is the data wildly inaccurate? Sure. Is there grift? Totally.

nobody_nowhere 3y ago
People also forget how inexpensive and ephemeral individual ads are. A display banner on a quality site costs less than a tenth of a penny. And it’s like a room on a cruise ship — the boat is gonna sail one way or another. So it has to be sold. Advertisers might choose to let Facebook arbitrage those impressions into a cost per click model — at pennies per click instead of hundredths per view. Tradeoffs galore in that model. When you aggregate these numbers into a $600b industry, you start to see how sweating some of the finer details just doesn’t matter.
- somsak2 3y ago
  >it’s like a room on a cruise ship — the boat is gonna sail one way or another. So it has to be sold. super shaky reasoning. the less rooms that get sold, the less likely future ships are to sail or even be built. individual decisions matter in aggregate
- prepend 3y ago
  > you start to see how sweating some of the finer details just doesn’t matter. I think it’s an opportunity. The original premise of google is that targeted ads would let you benefit from “sweating some of the finer details.” If 1/3 of a $600B market is wastage or fraud, then that’s an opportunity to give advertisers better response for their spend. Really massive. I’m sure advertisers would like more sales by being able to remove the waste ads. Currently they can’t do that. But if some new company or tech allows for that, it’s worth trying to figure out.
jfengel 3y ago
What happened to Kraft Heinz?

eduction 3y ago

I’m very curious what events she is seeing that exclude people over 30.

jprete 3y ago
I can't speak to her specific observations, but a lot of Meetup events specify an age range of, roughly, 20 to somewhere between 30 and 40. I think most of them are implicitly (or explicitly) dating events, although there are group-interest events that do it too, which I'd think would be less picky about who attends.
- BobbyTables2 3y ago
  I was curious and started looking at Meetup lately… At first I was amazed at the number of interesting local groups and their member counts. I felt I missed out on so much, but activity seems to have not recovered since 2019. Then after browsing around, I realized that there a huge number of single women living in the region, in their 20s-40s, whose main interests are hiking, real estate, and *Kubernetes*. This seems incredibly odd since I do not live in California… The dating scene must be brutal for “on-prem” kinds of people…

sega_sai 3y ago

Many here already pointed at the fact that likely P(buying mattress in the future|googled mattress) is much higher than P(buying mattress in the future) thus for an advertiser with a finite budget it makes perfect sense to target users who googled mattress irrespective of whether they bought it already or not.

Kapura 3y ago
The author's point is that, with the data available to the platform owners, they could easily deduce the subset where that P value is nearly zero (having already bought the mattress). Places that would also make sense to advertise mattresses: around universities and dense rental housing, or new developments of single family houses. I required no spy networks to make this list.
- tcbawo 3y ago
  It seems that P(returning a bought mattress) is more than 10%, so it probably makes sense to continue advertising to those people. Also, there are probably people who buy multiple mattresses (eg. parents), that might buy a second mattress.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - prepend 3y ago
    The point of the article is that platforms know that both your examples aren’t true. The author isn’t a parent and isn’t in the market for buying a second mattress or returning. I think the issue is that the platforms don’t want to actually target, they just want to pretend and allow for the narrative for why. I would expect that the search pattern of multiple mattress buyers is very different than single (ie, single searches and buys one and stops searching; multiple searches, buys one, keeps searching). And for returners have identifiable patterns (ie, searches, buys, searches for “how to return”). Remember that google knows pretty much every single search you run and every page you visit and every checkout you complete successfully (if you’re using chrome).

masswerk 3y ago

> Marketing theory is never tested rigorously. The <del>common sense</del> incredibly sound scientific view based on heaps of scientific evidence view – showing your ads to people more likely to buy your product is more efficient because they’re more likely to buy your product anyway – is entirely untested. Before this, the classic life style segment in media analysis was magazine audiences aged 15-25. Notably, this was not the part of the population that could afford the goods advertised immediately, or even anywhere in the near future. The idea was that this would be formative, that this would effect in an invaluable baseline of expectations and anticipations that could not be competed with, when it came to real acquisitions. Well, nowadays it's all just-in-time, often even just-after-buy, which seems to be the most efficient.

adrr 3y ago

> Marketing theory is never tested rigorously. Of course its tested "rigorously". Performance marketing is always about testing and optimizing CAC/CPA. It can make or break your company. If you can acquire customers at 10% lower rate(at the same volumes) than you competitors and you have similar COGS, you will dominate them and will ultimately will be the market leader. Monetary incentives are there to ensure efficiency just like there are incentives around COGS for efficiency.

soared 3y ago

Woman who knows nothing about digital marketing claims an entire multiple-billion dollar industry is scam, nice.

kryz 3y ago
Exactly. As someone who operates within this industry. This piece read like it could be wholly made up
RistrettoMike 3y ago
(But they mention that they work in marketing.)
- soared 3y ago
  I can’t find her LinkedIn and the about page has no info, but with this blog post she definitely does not work in digital marketing as she has no idea how it functions. It’s just wild baseless claims that everyone is marketing is either dumb or not trying at all.
Woodi 3y ago
Maybe it is just so easy to point idiocy in ad biz ? Look: you buy X so you do not need X a n y m o r e - and then you are spammed with ads for X. Brain deadness no 1 proved. But ads still ar payed for, LOL ! I see time machine just right here :>

thethethethe 3y ago

Ehh I find it hard to believe that a multi-trillion dollar industry is a grift based on this single person's collection of anecdotes. If online ads didn't result in measurable customer conversions, I have a feeling that the millions of business using them would stop. Disc: Google employee, not ads though

agentgumshoe 3y ago
Perhaps, people are sold on the idea that it works even if it doesn't at all, and so the people selling those ideas make lots of money. Like gambling.
- thethethethe 3y ago
  Again, it seems unlikely that millions of people running businesses are that stupid.
  - kjkjadksj 3y ago
    It seems even more unlikely that millions of business owners would be sufficiently knowledgable in statistics to even test these things.
  - agentgumshoe 3y ago
    Remember, we're talking 'targeted advertising' here, where I imagine it is not easy for general business owners to understand whether it is more, or even as effective as 'traditional' advertising. Easy money for advertisers just by showing some fancy irrelevant graphs.
ClumsyPilot 3y ago
> I find it hard to believe that a multi-trillion dollar industry is a grift Have you ever seen a real estate agent?
- thethethethe 3y ago
  Yeah I have and they provided guidance and knowledge surrounding financing, bidding, regulations, etc that I did not have. Can we build a society without the need for real estate agents? Perhaps. Would that society be better? Probably. But saying they are simply a grift is obviously untrue

marginalia_nu 3y ago

I always feel that a good deal of data-driven anything is basically modern divination. The median data-driven decision might as well have been based on haruspicy. You can construct experiments to demonstrate damn near anything is true, and without (or even with) a rigorous background in statistics and scientific methodology, it's very hard to examine the supposed evidence. I know I say this a lot, but constructing solid experiments is time consuming and difficult. It's hard even if you you're trying to be fair. Professors routinely get this wrong despite a literal decade of formal training in the scientific method and half a lifetime of practical experience with this exact craft; despite how fucking up puts their career, reputation and livelihood in jeopardy. Not only does this happen a lot, bad science routinely slips through peer review as well. That's the state of affairs in the spaces that in general aren't extremely adversarial, where the people involved in constructing the experiments in general don't have a a vested interest in trying to mislead you. (Scientific fraud still happens of course, but Jan Hendrik Schön is the exception and not the rule)

User23 3y ago
> You can construct experiments to demonstrate damn near anything is true, and without (or even with) a rigorous background in statistics and scientific methodology, it's very hard to examine the supposed evidence. One time I was at this silly daylong corporate team building event where they assigned us to groups and had us do "experiments." As it happened one of my group members has a PhD in Particle Physics and the look on his face was something else. Needless to say he didn't bother telling the take charge type that her experiment design was entirely nonsensical, because why bother, but I was amused.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  ANOVA is that PBS show right?
kurthr 3y ago
Which explains why I've been getting ads for brides' maid dresses. However, it also seems as if a tuned LLM could look at the corpus of my on-line profile (mail, FB, HN) and produce a model of my attention and commentary (positive/negative). Then that model (or several models) could be tested against various ads to determine which are more likely to produce positive responses. Right now I think that would be too expensive except for very high value ads/targets, but perhaps pricing will come down and non-keyword based advertising might appear.

alex_young 3y ago

Maybe advertisers don’t actually get signals when people click pay in some third party site? I mean, why would that third party want to expose your purchase to the advertisers? So, you’re left with this great signal that someone is shopping for a mattress. Seems like a very good reason to recommend other mattresses to them.

zoogeny 3y ago

This entire essay is just full of ideas I disagree with. First is the old chestnut: Why does company keep advertising product to me after I've already bought it!? This is one of those child-like criticisms that keeps rearing it's ignorant head. Literally, you are ignorant as to why they are doing it. Your ignorance as to why doesn't imply their stupidity. Amazon does it. Google does it. I'm sure Facebook does it. So either three of the biggest companies in the world are full of stupid idiots or perhaps you are just ignorant to the reason they are doing it. > Their ethos is that if a human can do a task, a machine can do that task better, and not cost them anything such as salary, pensions or or a basic level of respect No, their ethos is - we can't possibly have any reasonable number of humans do the task. In what universe could we imagine hiring a sufficient number of humans to sift through the data Google has collected? They have immense data on literal billions of humans. How much time would it take any person to understand you as a person sufficiently by painstakingly reviewing your data so that Google could send you perfect ads? The very premise of this is ridiculous beyond reason. So the conclusion is based on the premise that having humans do the task is impossible. We have no other option than to use machines and algorithms to attempt the task because it is the only viable alternative. > Advertisers, then, are getting served a steaming turd on a plate rather than the medium-rare filet mignon they were promised. Advertisers are making a value judgement based on the options they have available to them. They can advertise on TV, radio, or magazines. They can advertise on podcasts, YouTube channels or Instagram feeds by directly contacting the creators and doing sponsored content. They can put up billboards and wrap public buses. They can put people in public squares and hand out flyers, do personal demos and offer prizes. I couldn't even scratch the surface of what is available to modern companies for promotional purposes. The fact that Facebook, Amazon and Google are as large as they are suggest there is some value being derived by companies given that they have plenty of alternate options available to them. > There isn’t any evidence to suggest that an ad targeted to 35 year old men with children with an interest in football is any more likely to result in sales of Football Dad socks than a poster for Football Dad socks at a bus stop. But an entire industry is based on pretending that this is the case. I really don't think they are. But let's compare the idea to the other advertising avenues I listed. TV ads are broadly targeted based on the time of day the show runs at as well as the content of the show. Magazine ads are broadly targeted based on the content of the magazine. Junk mail and flyers are broadly targeted to people living in a particular geographic area. But I guess this MSc in marketing knows more than the entire industry they claim to be from.

ncr100 3y ago

I do dislike digital ads refining their profile of me, via my involuntary contributions to their models. Definitely feels like I'm being spied upon.

izzydata 3y ago

I really hope in the near future there is some shift in the advertising business where they realize the ridiculous amounts of money they are lighting on fire and decimates the ad driven internet as we know it.

erehweb 3y ago

We can argue about whether data-driven ads work for the OP or for buying an extra mattress, but in aggregate they absolutely work. Contra OP's anecdote, if FB ad targeting stopped working, then FB would notice the difference in engagement within a day - probably within the hour.

kamma4434 3y ago

At some point we tried using a major network…. That predicted our target market to be 50% female, and heavily present in middle east. Had a laugh and moved on.

mcpackieh 3y ago

Remember, the primary job of an advertiser is to sell their advertising services to companies, not to sell a company's products to consumers. That comes second and is only done insofar as it facilitates the first.

kjkjadksj 3y ago
Same is true for consultancies. They effectively offshore the brainstorming for you, but the ideas they sell you on don’t have to work and the consultants usually aren’t even incentivized for it to work after the duration of the contract. I wonder if there are any good books out there for these sorts of businesses in modern times, doing a kind of shovel selling during a gold rush sort of business plan, not really caring if the ore vein is even real, just serving the lemmings their desires.

Skunkleton 3y ago

I have a friend with a business in a niche market. His business is driven almost entirely by ads place with google. He’s tried other platforms and had much worse results. Something must be working.

angarg12 3y ago

So OP claims that data-driven ads are a scam using the anecdata that she is getting served irrelevant ads. I'm not going to argue about whether ads are "worth it", but working on the other side (serving and optimizing ads), I can tell that yes, we run the numbers, and the math (mostly) works out. As per your examples, we have run experiments by applying targeting ads based on narrow segments, and others without. As it turns out the data shows that "casting a wider net" works better, statistically. Make of it what you will.

reillyse 3y ago

So much of advertising is lies that I don't do any advertising online any more. I've pulled all my google ads, facebook ads, instagram ads and podcast ads. After about 10 years of doing ads (for my coffee club) and really attempting to track what was happening (from a technical point of view) I couldn't actually attribute any of it (the holy grail of digital marketing). "Word of mouth" is still our biggest channel. And all the time whenever I speak to "marketing" people it's the same low value analysis with zero mathematical or scientific vigor. They look at what happened (High CTR on this ad) and draw some conclusion from it, and then next week when CTR flatlines on the ad they have no comment and are busy looking at the non-significant noise coming from another ad. And that's before even talking about the pure lies coming from the podcast people who swear up and down they know exactly how far into a podcast someone plays, when the spec they quote explicitly states it doesn't really work on apple products and 90% of the listernship is Apple. So many lies. It is a grift built on grift. Somebody in the organization knows it's a pile of lies, but the sales people actually believe it I think or don't care.

therealdrag0 3y ago
Sorry for the hijack. What roast level do you do?
- reillyse 3y ago
  Lol :) we are one of the pioneers of the super light nordic roast in the US.

pmcgrathm 3y ago

Contrary to the belief that advertising is less data-driven, the complexity and dependency on feature-rich data sets has increased over time. Redundant targeting sometimes happens due to the ad objective of maximizing expected revenue over cost. However, it's more nuanced in practice. Advertisers aim to optimize expected revenue over cost within a 'payback period', which is typically 1-3 years for large advertisers. This is calculated through customer acquisition cost, retention, and incrementality (the probability of an ad causing conversion). Only advertisers themselves can effectively calculate incrementality due to access to their specific conversion/retention metrics. This incrementality, along with the optimal mix of channels and ad spend, is the ongoing challenge for sophisticated advertisers. It involves multi-objective optimization across millions of ad assets, campaigns, and targeting criteria. Privacy regulations since 2015 and subsequent laws like GDPR and CCPA have led to more reliance on probabilistic modeling for targeting. The entire pipeline of targeting, engagement, conversion, and retention forecasts are now based on probabilistic models. While ad networks offer simplified scaling solutions like 'target roas' and 'campaign budget optimization', they're more useful for average advertisers with limited internal resources - eg, they can't justify hiring ML SWEs, quant traders, technical PMs, etc. Advertising has become even more data-driven and arbitrage gains for sophistication have increased. Profound gains can be made with investments in marketing and forecasting science, similar to the operations of a quant trading firm. Source: I've managed $10B+ through automated ad spend systems since 2012.

kjkjadksj 3y ago
How much more effective would ad spend be if ads were solely served to people with a decent bit of disposable income? I would guess the return on investment is almost all due to buyers with cash to spend more than anything, and those 40% of Americans with like $400 in the bank (if those popular stats are to be believed) are merely an expense serving them advertising content for products they are unlikely to ever buy. You already see this with some goods so its certainly at least somewhat effective, e.g. luxury watch ads in beverly hills contrasted with military recruitment billboards in south LA.

hotcrossbunny 3y ago

"Amazon knows exactly when you have an outbreak of aphids because you buy things to kill the nasty little beasties, and it probably also knows when you’ve had a nasty breakup because nobody listens to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours on repeat at 3am when they’re in a good place." Just great writing, this.