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As a neuroscientist, I can say that calling it "neurotargeting" vastly, vastly overstates the contribution of "neuro" to these ads. Advertising has had more tha

As a neuroscientist, I can say that calling it "neurotargeting" vastly, vastly overstates the contribution of "neuro" to these ads. Advertising has had more than a century of practical experience in manipulating the human mind. fMRI studies have added approximately zero to this understanding. Really, fMRI studies are their own form of neurotargeting, though aimed at ad buyers rather than ad consumers. Pretty colorful pictures of the brain convey the idea "Gosh, we're so smart and advanced and differentiated from those other ad agencies", even if those pretty pictures provided basically no new insights into how to sell anything.

parpfish 2y ago
Agreed. They may as well start calling the persuasive five paragraph essays we learned in school “brainwashing”. I think people just get freaked out when they remember that the psychological processes that make up their inner life have biophysical correlates
RcouF1uZ4gsC 2y ago
This whole article is an example of emotionally manipulative media, starting with the headline.
nostrademons 2y ago
The types of "neurotargeting" describes in the article - using data from emojis, personality tests, OCEAN models, fMRI studies - are all very noisy compared to what actually does work in advertising. You perturb the ad shown, measure conversions, and then just directly optimize for conversions. It's a variant of A/B testing described in the article, but you aren't comparing just two variants and having a human decide based on metrics, you're comparing thousands of variants and then training a machine learning model to predict conversion events. All of the major online ad networks - Google, Facebook, etc - actually function like this, and have for the past 15 years. And it is effective to the tune of about $300B/year, looking at Google's ad revenue.
- ethbr1 2y ago
  > And it is effective to the tune of about $300B/year, looking at Google's ad revenue. That's conflating total market with specific benefit though. If Google ran the dumbest, most basic ad-targeting, their ad revenue would still be >0.
  - nostrademons 2y ago
    It would be > 0, but pretty significantly < $300B. I think a lot of people underestimate the importance of good targeting to the online ads market. It's taken over from print/media/TV brand advertising because it's orders of magnitude more efficient. When Google was young (~2005) advertisers were reporting that they'd get 3-5x more conversions from Google at 1/10th the ad budget because the conversion rate was that much higher.
- onlytime 2y ago
  Barely related, but do you have advice for someone who wants to work on a very specific project at Google? I'm not at the point of hireability yet, but in the long-term I want to optimize my chances to get hired to work on AndroidXR. Should I just put my effort into writing tangentially-related open source projects? Should I be trying to grab positions at similarly-focused companies first? I don't really care about optimizing for comp, and I don't even really mind if I'm only contracting and not at Google proper, I just very specifically want to work on that project.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
kkfx 2y ago
I think it's "neuro" here is more "psychological", meaning the ability to automatically know en masse the people. In the past we have had ads almost "for everyone", it was not much possible choose a specific cohort with a specific message, yes you can send some brochures in specific places normally frequented by a certain cohort of people, you can use friends, but it's still not much targeted. Nowadays we are able to "know automatically" and separate specific cohort of people, let's say we want something pro-rail and we have some angry users waiting for a late train, a news arrive in their aggregator narrating another train delay somewhere else caused by a landslide, another one caused by a suicide, finally an article on the terrible current years of rails due to climate change and social unrest. The angry target probably remain a bit angry, but far less than before. Similarly in a campaign against rail another news can pops up just when someone look for a possible trip/to buy a ticket, about some horror story of passengers leaving at 40+℃ for some hours due to some malfunction and bad management plus another about an accident due to little maintenance and safety checks. Nothing new under the Sun, but the ability to get the right news/ads at the right time makes the level of effectiveness something much, much bigger than ever and the ability to target users is still in very few hands. They can't "rule the society" but being able to steer they are kind of ruler anyway.

parpfish 2y ago

Agreed. They may as well start calling the persuasive five paragraph essays we learned in school “brainwashing”. I think people just get freaked out when they remember that the psychological processes that make up their inner life have biophysical correlates

RcouF1uZ4gsC 2y ago

This whole article is an example of emotionally manipulative media, starting with the headline.

nostrademons 2y ago

The types of "neurotargeting" describes in the article - using data from emojis, personality tests, OCEAN models, fMRI studies - are all very noisy compared to what actually does work in advertising. You perturb the ad shown, measure conversions, and then just directly optimize for conversions. It's a variant of A/B testing described in the article, but you aren't comparing just two variants and having a human decide based on metrics, you're comparing thousands of variants and then training a machine learning model to predict conversion events. All of the major online ad networks - Google, Facebook, etc - actually function like this, and have for the past 15 years. And it is effective to the tune of about $300B/year, looking at Google's ad revenue.

ethbr1 2y ago
> And it is effective to the tune of about $300B/year, looking at Google's ad revenue. That's conflating total market with specific benefit though. If Google ran the dumbest, most basic ad-targeting, their ad revenue would still be >0.
- nostrademons 2y ago
  It would be > 0, but pretty significantly < $300B. I think a lot of people underestimate the importance of good targeting to the online ads market. It's taken over from print/media/TV brand advertising because it's orders of magnitude more efficient. When Google was young (~2005) advertisers were reporting that they'd get 3-5x more conversions from Google at 1/10th the ad budget because the conversion rate was that much higher.
onlytime 2y ago
Barely related, but do you have advice for someone who wants to work on a very specific project at Google? I'm not at the point of hireability yet, but in the long-term I want to optimize my chances to get hired to work on AndroidXR. Should I just put my effort into writing tangentially-related open source projects? Should I be trying to grab positions at similarly-focused companies first? I don't really care about optimizing for comp, and I don't even really mind if I'm only contracting and not at Google proper, I just very specifically want to work on that project.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

kkfx 2y ago

I think it's "neuro" here is more "psychological", meaning the ability to automatically know en masse the people. In the past we have had ads almost "for everyone", it was not much possible choose a specific cohort with a specific message, yes you can send some brochures in specific places normally frequented by a certain cohort of people, you can use friends, but it's still not much targeted. Nowadays we are able to "know automatically" and separate specific cohort of people, let's say we want something pro-rail and we have some angry users waiting for a late train, a news arrive in their aggregator narrating another train delay somewhere else caused by a landslide, another one caused by a suicide, finally an article on the terrible current years of rails due to climate change and social unrest. The angry target probably remain a bit angry, but far less than before. Similarly in a campaign against rail another news can pops up just when someone look for a possible trip/to buy a ticket, about some horror story of passengers leaving at 40+℃ for some hours due to some malfunction and bad management plus another about an accident due to little maintenance and safety checks. Nothing new under the Sun, but the ability to get the right news/ads at the right time makes the level of effectiveness something much, much bigger than ever and the ability to target users is still in very few hands. They can't "rule the society" but being able to steer they are kind of ruler anyway.