AdTech Sucks • Hacker News Board

Re: AdTech Sucks

#51

Post by tomlockwood » Fri, Jun 07, 2019, 2:47 PM UTC

xixixao wrote: post #46

> Why, oh why, would a company built on ad revenue want to reduce ad spend? > These companies are perfectly positioned to make ads more efficient - and they have absolutely no reason to do so. The question is not really asking about reducing ad spend, it's asking about reducing advertiser costs per outcome. It's pretty obvious that if you decrease costs per outcome, return on ad spend will rise, and advertisers will…

Author here. I think your response only holds true if both the market acts rationally (which isn't the case if people are optimizing-for-resume), and the benefit from claiming more conversions isn't as low hanging as other "efficiency" gains.

The "attribution mechanisms" you mention are precisely one of the drivers for the pervasive data collection that is in AdTech.

Re: AdTech Sucks

#52

Post by criddell » Fri, Jun 07, 2019, 2:48 PM UTC

tomlockwood wrote: post #37

asenna wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll give you a better example - I'm an English speaking guy consuming regular US content. I travel quite often and when I'm in non-english speaking places like Thailand, I see ads on Youtube(mobile) purely in Thai language. I use Google products extensively and Google most definitely knows I don't speak Thai. I mean it's almost ridiculous the number of Thai ads I've seen on Youtube. For a company that sophisticated…

Author here. I wish I'd thought of your example before I wrote the article :D And I think my opinion on that is probably obvious, but I think the simplest answer is that Google simply doesn't care about mistargeting ads to a consumer who wouldn't conceivably click on them. They gain no benefit from reducing an advertisers spend that way.

The cars example is also not great because cars are one of those things that are advertised to everybody. Beer, laundry detergent, insurance, and movies are other examples like that. Basically, the kind of ads you see during a Sunday afternoon football game.

Re: AdTech Sucks

#53

Post by gmurad » Fri, Jun 07, 2019, 2:51 PM UTC

I joined AdTech just a few years after graduation (my formative years as a software engineer) and that gave me the opportunity to work on very high throughput systems.

Eventually I got to lead several different project like building ad servers and real time bidder from scratch and scale them to the 100K+ requests per second while maintaining single digit ms avg response times. I also had a head start in the "big" data space because of AdTech.

I will always be thankful for the knowledge I got because of the nature of AdTech, it positioned me really well in the market and just made me a much better engineer.

After 5+ years working in AdTech is was time for a change, I was feeling dragged down by similar reasons, I had a high leadership position and a lot of domain knowledge so a lot to lose, but I made a change to mobile F2P gaming and have been doing that for over 3 years, it's been a great change.

Re: AdTech Sucks

#54

Post by MarkMc » Fri, Jun 07, 2019, 2:52 PM UTC

asenna wrote: post #31

nopriorarrests wrote: post #12

From the article - "If you’ve been on the internet for any amount of time, you’ve probably seen very poorly targeted advertising. In my experience, I see a lot of car ads. I don’t own a car". One can argue that advertising cars to person without one make some sense. At least it's better then advertising vacuum cleaners to person who bought one on amazon 1 week ago.

I'll give you a better example - I'm an English speaking guy consuming regular US content. I travel quite often and when I'm in non-english speaking places like Thailand, I see ads on Youtube(mobile) purely in Thai language. I use Google products extensively and Google most definitely knows I don't speak Thai. I mean it's almost ridiculous the number of Thai ads I've seen on Youtube. For a company that sophisticated…

This is exactly my experience. Go to Thailand, see ads in Thai. Go to France, see ads in French. Go to Indonesia, see ads in Indonesian.

Google has paid thousands of engineers billions of dollars over 20 years and somehow they have failed on this very simple optimisation!

Re: AdTech Sucks

#55

Post by spectramax » Fri, Jun 07, 2019, 2:54 PM UTC

xixixao wrote: post #49

spectramax wrote: post #27

Is there a "pull" rather push aspect to advertisement? Sort of a trade-show equivalent of digital advertisement? Issues with pushing ads down my throat are as follows: 1. I don't want to buy another Sony XM3 headphones. I just fucking bought them and I am seeing more ads of the same thing. 2. Even if I saw ads for relevant accessories, say, I bought an iPhone and I am seeing ads for phone cases; I don't want to see t…

One thing you might want to think about: What role do the businesses that benefit from advertising revenue play. You're looking at advertising from the perspective of advertisers pushing themselves into your life, but have you asked yourself how they got that billboard onto the football stadium, that video in front of your favorite show, that page in your newspaper (whether digital or print). > Fuck advertisement. It…

"What role do the businesses that benefit from advertising revenue play" - They want to lure you into buying their products, at times by any means possible. Back in the day when advertisement was word of mouth and perhaps newspaper ads, the playing field included opinions of the people - it fostered increased quality of products because you wouldn't recommend a shit quality product to your friend.

In modern society, we have INSANE...I mean insane amount of deceit, psychological tricks, store smells, layout optimization, there is a huge industry built around deceiving people and not playing by level rules. Instead of focusing on quality, businesses are spending money on marketing.

> Advertisement is literally as old as civilization.

or rather evolved into a monstrous industry worth billions of dollars if not trillion+ dollars. You didn't have Aztec farmers shot by an arrow every 5 mins that had a note attached to it "BUY THIS NEW FUCKING PLOUGH" in ancient times.

Re: AdTech Sucks

#56

Post by 55555 » Fri, Jun 07, 2019, 2:54 PM UTC

DailyHN wrote: post #33

DisruptiveDave wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, this, this. So many people who are not well versed in advertising (the art, not the tech) simply launch a bare minimum campaign, for some reason expect great returns, then blame the tool. It's completely illogical. There are many components to an ad campaign, from targeting to what's being advertised to creative to copy (and the thousands of variations within each) to ad type...and so on.

Great returns? My only expectations is being able to believe real people are actually clicking the ads. Which I don't.

You realize the prices you pay per click or impression are set by a market, right? The crux of the problem is that other people are just better at advertising than you are. There's a lot of fraud but I'm tired of people on HN who are terrible at advertising saying that "ads don't work." It's like saying "code doesn't work". It's just nonsense.

What is your website/landing page URL and what did your ad say?

Re: AdTech Sucks

#57

Post by bduerst » Fri, Jun 07, 2019, 2:54 PM UTC

DailyHN wrote: post #15

omarchowdhury wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean it sucks for you. How can you speak for all advertisers, especially based on a sample size of 200 clicks? You have to diagnose what could be off on your end before making extreme blanket statements. These ad systems are tools, and tools only work as well as how you use them.

I find it hard to believe that 97.5% of people can click a link to a website and not even accidentally click something on that website. I'm not referring to real conversions , where yes, skills in marketing and using the tools does make all the difference. All I'm saying is that I paid for 200 clicks that appear to not even have real people clicking anywhere at all.

Only you know how you set up your ads. Did you use the right keyword targeting? Location settings? Is your ad copy relevant to what you're actually selling or even to your website? Does your website have clear CTAs and copy? What is considered your conversion goal? Are you advertising in a popular market? Have you tried optimized with A/B testing for any of the above?

Re: AdTech Sucks

#58

Post by maxxxxx » Fri, Jun 07, 2019, 2:57 PM UTC

spectramax wrote: post #27

Is there a "pull" rather push aspect to advertisement? Sort of a trade-show equivalent of digital advertisement? Issues with pushing ads down my throat are as follows: 1. I don't want to buy another Sony XM3 headphones. I just fucking bought them and I am seeing more ads of the same thing. 2. Even if I saw ads for relevant accessories, say, I bought an iPhone and I am seeing ads for phone cases; I don't want to see t…

It used to be that when you looked at kiteboarding forums or blogs you would see kiteboarding or travel ads. No tracking of individuals needed. I think that’s what you are talking about.

Now you see ads for blenders because you bought one or looked at one last week. Ads are not context sensitive anymore.

I would have no problem if HN made some money with advertising for dev tools. It makes sense. Personalized ads are creepy and annoying.

Re: AdTech Sucks

#59

Post by dano » Fri, Jun 07, 2019, 2:57 PM UTC

tomlockwood wrote: post #37

asenna wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll give you a better example - I'm an English speaking guy consuming regular US content. I travel quite often and when I'm in non-english speaking places like Thailand, I see ads on Youtube(mobile) purely in Thai language. I use Google products extensively and Google most definitely knows I don't speak Thai. I mean it's almost ridiculous the number of Thai ads I've seen on Youtube. For a company that sophisticated…

Author here. I wish I'd thought of your example before I wrote the article :D And I think my opinion on that is probably obvious, but I think the simplest answer is that Google simply doesn't care about mistargeting ads to a consumer who wouldn't conceivably click on them. They gain no benefit from reducing an advertisers spend that way.

Another aspect of the Thai example is that the target is over constrained. The user is from the US, knows English, doesn't know Thai, is temporary located in Thailand, age 30 to 35, likes country music, and of ethnic decent (just example data). Advertisers can't really customize their offer to that overly constrained individual and the algorithm falls through to the remnant ad inventory. On the sell side, such a constrained target is a small market and not worth the effort to buy placement. If one runs unlock orig or pi-hole regularly, ads you do get out of home on your phone will start to be less targeted to you.

To the larger point of pull vs. push, I would embrace such a market place. Google shopping sort of does this. Good article. Thank you.

Re: AdTech Sucks

#60

Post by taormina » Fri, Jun 07, 2019, 2:58 PM UTC

dpflan wrote: post #5

"""The systemic issue occurs because marketers and AdTech companies unreflectively increase surveillance and data collection in the hopes of increasing media attribution. Even the most trivial data point, the most granular site visit or location data, stored on a person-by-person basis, could conceivably be used to demonstrate that a customer may have come into contact with one of your campaigns.""" I'm genuinely int…

I left an AdTech company about a year ago. I went to learn more about data engineering and applied machine learning. I learned a phenomenal amount, but I really grew to dislike the advertising industry. The incentives are hilarious misaligned, as the article discusses at length.

To be honest, a large part of my ethical discomfort was not only about implicitly contributing to the surveillance state, but about the waste of the use of computing power and time and work. Even if we succeed, and deliver the perfect recommendation to every single shopper, then might make X% more ROI from their website. Maybe a yay for 's stockholders? Unless you know, Twitter talks about them this week... How is the world a better place because I'm working at my job today?

I don't make my senior software engineer salary working for myself, but I've "digitized" 4 separate businesses since I left. It feels good to build tangible products and write software that make someone's life easier.