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GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

blogs.harvard.edu

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Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#321

Post by hammock »

madeofpalk wrote: post #112
rossdavidh wrote: post #59

Oddly, I think the article underestimates the size of the change coming. I think one side affect of the surge of IT into advertising, is that it has become easier to measure exactly how well advertising works. By and large, it doesn't, very well. I am reminded of this, from Paul Graham, about his time at Yahoo: http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html "...The reason Yahoo didn't care about a technique that extracted the…

> By and large, it doesn't, very well. I know Twitter isn't known for being the best at advertising, but it was made exceptionally clear to me that online advertising is a massive bunch of lies when I did my GDPR Twitter data export and it included me in a bunch of incorrect, non-sensical and contradictory ad targeting groups. Twitter claims I: * Own a cat, dog and other animal (I don't) * Have between $100k- $999k l…

Would like to see my own. How do you do that?

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#322

Post by manigandham »

majani wrote: post #218
rossdavidh wrote: post #59

Oddly, I think the article underestimates the size of the change coming. I think one side affect of the surge of IT into advertising, is that it has become easier to measure exactly how well advertising works. By and large, it doesn't, very well. I am reminded of this, from Paul Graham, about his time at Yahoo: http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html "...The reason Yahoo didn't care about a technique that extracted the…

The only way to eliminate all waste in advertising is to use an affiliate marketing model and that's the biggest cesspool of them all.

Affiliate marketing does not magically get rid of waste. It just transfers the risk involved to another downstream party, while buying a shield of deniability of the unethical and scam tactics commonly used by affiliates.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#323

Post by manigandham »

solomatov wrote: post #163
clatan wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot more stuff to do with ML and make money than ad targeting

Adtech is the highest paid application of ML.

Based on what exactly? ML is not that common in adtech companies, many just lie about some basic regression testing. Some even just put up a facade in front of grunts with excel.

Even the most sophisticated ad modeling pales in comparison to fintech and bioscience/pharma where the real money is.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#324

Post by manigandham »

solomatov wrote: post #30

One surprising side effect of this might be that the hordes of machine learners and data scientists who used to work for adtech might go to healthcare/bioinformatics where we might get new breakthroughs.

There are not that many actual hard data science experts in adtech. Much of it is smoke and mirrors with every vendor claiming "AI" even if it's just some excel tweaking. The industry can't even agree on standard metrics or run a campaign without 20% discrepancies.

Also you can definitely apply ML techniques to data without PII, it's just harder, which actually makes the job more in-demand for high-quality talent.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#325

Post by scrollaway »

TylerE wrote: post #300
hadrien01 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took ten minutes to implement GDPR on a small ecommerce website: we deleted Google Analytics (HTTP logs and carts tracking is more than enough) and replaced Facebook widgets by a simple link. Newsletter was already opt-in only, we don't sell private data, and user account deletion was already possible.

That seems extraordinarily flippant. I can't imagine giving up Google Analytics for http logs on a content-driven site.

GA is useless if you don't know how to use it.

I can't imagine giving it up either, but that's because we actually use it to produce useful insights, not just look at our traffic and referrers which is probably what most people use it for in aggregate.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#326

Post by scrollaway »

taysic wrote: post #291
hadrien01 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took ten minutes to implement GDPR on a small ecommerce website: we deleted Google Analytics (HTTP logs and carts tracking is more than enough) and replaced Facebook widgets by a simple link. Newsletter was already opt-in only, we don't sell private data, and user account deletion was already possible.

'user account deletion was already possible.' Do you not use backups? How was this done within 10 minutes?

As long as the backups expire within a reasonable amount of time there's no problem with this.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#327

Post by hsod »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #233
zerostar07 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Business models are arbitrary and orthogonal to services provided. that doesn't change the fact that the business model depends on that orthogonal action. Is it unlawful for gyms to charge by subscription instead of per-use knowing that most people don't use them? Should the NYTimes be forced to go pay-per article instead of subscription? Should nightclubs not be allowed to overcharge the bottle? > GDPR literally o…

> Is it unlawful for gyms to charge by subscription instead of per-use based on the model that most people don't use them? Should the NYTimes be forced to go pay-per article instead of subscription? It isn't, and it shouldn't. Either can choose whatever works for them best. GDPR only outlaws a few particular antisocial behaviours, which makes a particular class of business models illegal or much less profitable. The…

I think it's more like if you made an iPhone game and sold it for 99 cents and the government came along and told you you had to give it away for free to people who didn't want to pay.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#328

Post by FridgeSeal »

manigandham wrote: post #324
solomatov wrote: post #30

One surprising side effect of this might be that the hordes of machine learners and data scientists who used to work for adtech might go to healthcare/bioinformatics where we might get new breakthroughs.

There are not that many actual hard data science experts in adtech. Much of it is smoke and mirrors with every vendor claiming "AI" even if it's just some excel tweaking. The industry can't even agree on standard metrics or run a campaign without 20% discrepancies. Also you can definitely apply ML techniques to data without PII, it's just harder, which actually makes the job more in-demand for high-quality talent.

As someone who has just left the advertising industry, and was doing data stuff, the real issue is that a lot of companies have a lot of data but almost none of it has any actual useful information content in it. It’s a bit of a hard concept to explain to explain to people because they go “but there’s a hundred something columns, and hundreds of millions of rows!”, you can have all the data you want, but if it’s all non-indicative trash you’re not going to be able to usefully predict anything, but hey, you’ve hired a data scientist now and added the cost of a big spark cluster to your AWS bill now, so you may as well continue telling the market you’ve got some real hot stuff.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#329

Post by thisisit »

madeofpalk wrote: post #112
rossdavidh wrote: post #59

Oddly, I think the article underestimates the size of the change coming. I think one side affect of the surge of IT into advertising, is that it has become easier to measure exactly how well advertising works. By and large, it doesn't, very well. I am reminded of this, from Paul Graham, about his time at Yahoo: http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html "...The reason Yahoo didn't care about a technique that extracted the…

> By and large, it doesn't, very well. I know Twitter isn't known for being the best at advertising, but it was made exceptionally clear to me that online advertising is a massive bunch of lies when I did my GDPR Twitter data export and it included me in a bunch of incorrect, non-sensical and contradictory ad targeting groups. Twitter claims I: * Own a cat, dog and other animal (I don't) * Have between $100k- $999k l…

> Facebook data exports don't contain this data

Facebook does have demographics and targeting data. Go to Setting -> Ads -> Your Information -> Your Categories. I haven't found a way to export it.

On the categorization side, Facebook does a half decent job considering I don't upload anything on FB or any other sister sites.

Twitter on the other hand might be running algorithm which tries to extrapolate too much from the available data.

Re: GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

#330

Post by nl »

scarface74 wrote: post #271
madeofpalk wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at the hundreds of mostly incorrect or irrelevant demographics that Twitter has be in, I would still say there’s a huge amount of waste going on. At least with offline advertising (like TV or print) the “fuzziness” is very explicit. Here, Twitter sells you that you can target “dog owners”, but nowhere through the Twitter ad buy process does it tell you how BS that targeting is.

And that's why Twitter is not doing as well as Facebook. Facebook doesn't need algorithms to know what you are interested in, where you like to eat, etc. You explicitly tell them in your info and by what types of articles you like and share, and what you post.

Twitter is the same, except even more-so. People tweet 10+ times a day, update FB status infrequently.

All the things FB has done to extract things like resturant data etc are product development they undertook. Twitter spent 10 years moving form 140 characters to 280 instead.

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