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AdTech Sucks

lockwood.dev

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Re: AdTech Sucks

#71

Post by omarchowdhury »

navigatesol wrote: post #69
omarchowdhury wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No doubt, there is fraud in the system. If you want to be successful in using these ad platforms for your business, you will have to accept that as a fact of life. What you need to do is to exclude bad placements/websites from your campaign. But even before that, you have to see if your ads + landing page are compelling, or you'll just waste a ton of money.

> But even before that, you have to see if your ads + landing page are compelling, or you'll just waste a ton of money. And how do you determine that, ex ante?

This part is more art than science, and requires being objective about the subjective, and what I mean by that is: being honest about what you're offering and if it's actually valuable to your prospects, and then seeing if how you're presenting your offer is simultaneously clear and breaks through the noise.

At the end of the day we're still talking about sales, just in a new form, in a multi-dimensional bazaar called the Internet.

Re: AdTech Sucks

#72

Post by javery »

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…

This is what VRM is supposed to be.

https://blogs.harvard.edu/vrm/

Re: AdTech Sucks

#73

Post by matz1 »

Its not always sucks, as a consumer, if I can get cheaper pizza, with the trade of they may sell my data, I'm fine with it.

What is the downside ? My email spammed ? not that much of issue, gmail spam filter work reasonably well.

My phone being spammed by robocall ? smart app can filter those out too.

Ads on the web ? adblocker solve that.

Re: AdTech Sucks

#74

Post by kenhwang »

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…

Even as English speaking person in an English speaking country, I get non-English ads on Google properties. It's astonishing how bad Google's ad targeting is sometimes.

Re: AdTech Sucks

#75

Post by cattlefarmer »

dano wrote: post #59
tomlockwood wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cons…

There's also the little problem where when your eyeballs are up for auction, the ones putting in bids don't have any relevant inventory targeting you so all the network can do nothing is default to whatever fallback ads they have, which are usually low cost brand building ones. That's where all the almost-porn and dating ones pop up because they're desperate for eyeballs of any kind.

Re: AdTech Sucks

#76

Post by _ptgt »

criddell wrote: post #42
tomlockwood wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure since I've been out for a couple years, but at the time I'd often have conversations with marketers where I'd come away wondering how they could be so oblivious to the ethical concerns in what they were asking for. I do think as time goes on, more and more people are becoming aware of the issues, but I see that uniformly across society rather than in tech.

> I'd come away wondering how they could be so oblivious to the ethical concerns in what they were asking for Like Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

I'm not sure that's what's at play here. Marketers could easily be aware of the ethical concerns and simply disregard them. Their salary doesn't depend at all on their ignorance of the ethical issues involved.

More likely, at the risk of overgeneralizing, I suspect a lot of the people going into adtech aren't really the philosophical-type (I think those probably tend to avoid marketing in general), a lot of them are young, and probably excited just to get a job offer in such a well-paying, high-profile industry.

Re: AdTech Sucks

#77

Post by tomlockwood »

matz1 wrote: post #73

Its not always sucks, as a consumer, if I can get cheaper pizza, with the trade of they may sell my data, I'm fine with it. What is the downside ? My email spammed ? not that much of issue, gmail spam filter work reasonably well. My phone being spammed by robocall ? smart app can filter those out too. Ads on the web ? adblocker solve that.

Author here. Would you be ok with your health insurer buying your pizza purchase frequency from a data broker?

Re: AdTech Sucks

#78

Post by kps »

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.

> 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.

Depends on the type of site. If I follow a link to read something, I'll probably read it and leave. If the site tries to make me click something, I'll probably just leave.

Re: AdTech Sucks

#79

Post by veridies »

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…

Oddly enough, PETA’s website does a great job with this. They have a whole section of their site that’s just paid listings of vegan products. It’s actually fun to browse; it feels like you’re in a shop and seeing new things you hadn’t considered (like vegan travel packages or a cork briefcase). I felt very strange that I was enjoying looking at ads.

Re: AdTech Sucks

#80

Post by iamnothere »

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…

YouTube provides the platform, while ad buyers select the targets. Sounds like someone picked "people in Thailand" without filtering by native/preferred language. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2454017?hl=en

Edit: to clarify, even though Google makes targeting pretty easy, you still have to know what you're doing to set up a good ad campaign. Lots of businesses don't realize that ad buying actually requires some knowledge to avoid wasting money, so they just get the in-house "power user" to take care of it.

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