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There are already fully generated display ads running on e.g. Apple News. They are not very good. Meta's thing is different. It's three specific workflows whe

There are already fully generated display ads running on e.g. Apple News. They are not very good. Meta's thing is different. It's three specific workflows when you upload ads in narrow product categories that make sense. This isn't meant to be a big educational comment about the digital ad industry which I work in. It's complicated, but Meta already knows who the clickers and buyers are, they tend to click and buy everything; if you select the conversion optimizations, track a purchase and report it to Meta, it isn't super material what the creative is. You pay an exorbitant cost per conversion, which doesn't change here. You save a ton of time setting up display ad assets though. It's a good, narrow, sensible application, but it isn't the Big Thing you'd expect them to do.

TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
I tried to train Facebook. First thought: I absolutely do not want it to advertise to me anything I might actually want to buy (like books): that feels creepy. So maybe I could deliberately interact with ads for things I'll never buy, like fashion? (I dress myself out of charity shops, mostly.) Second thought: If I interact with ads with hot guys in them, Facebook will show me more hot guys, which is nice eye candy. It seemed to work, for a while. Some of the ads were for underwear, definitely targetted at gay men, and bordering on being NSFW (which is fine, as I don't Facebook at W). And then I mostly abandoned Facebook. --- For YouTube, before I got a free deal on YouTube Premium with my phone plan, things were weirder. YouTube's video recommendation algorithm knew me well, but its ad recommendations were very confused, including about which language I spoke. It weirdly often gave me ads for scientific lab equipment, sometimes in Hebrew. (I'm a web developer, am Irish, and live in Ireland, and don't speak any Hebrew. I have an interest in linguistics, and have read up on the origin of the Semitic trisyllabic root, but that doesn't mean I speak Hebrew.)

TRiG_Ireland 3y ago

I tried to train Facebook. First thought: I absolutely do not want it to advertise to me anything I might actually want to buy (like books): that feels creepy. So maybe I could deliberately interact with ads for things I'll never buy, like fashion? (I dress myself out of charity shops, mostly.) Second thought: If I interact with ads with hot guys in them, Facebook will show me more hot guys, which is nice eye candy. It seemed to work, for a while. Some of the ads were for underwear, definitely targetted at gay men, and bordering on being NSFW (which is fine, as I don't Facebook at W). And then I mostly abandoned Facebook. --- For YouTube, before I got a free deal on YouTube Premium with my phone plan, things were weirder. YouTube's video recommendation algorithm knew me well, but its ad recommendations were very confused, including about which language I spoke. It weirdly often gave me ads for scientific lab equipment, sometimes in Hebrew. (I'm a web developer, am Irish, and live in Ireland, and don't speak any Hebrew. I have an interest in linguistics, and have read up on the origin of the Semitic trisyllabic root, but that doesn't mean I speak Hebrew.)