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AdTech Sucks

lockwood.dev

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Re: AdTech Sucks

#81

Post by j-c-hewitt »

maxxxxx wrote: post #58
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…

They are still context sensitive, just the retargeting guy is bidding higher so that is what is showing.

Re: AdTech Sucks

#82

Post by tehjoker »

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.

They also show car ads to people to make you think someone that owns a particular car is cool and good. You need to show ads to people that don't buy for that. However, the internet ad system is famously metric focused on, e.g. cost per conversion, so it's hard to say which mixture of evil and incompetent they are.

Re: AdTech Sucks

#83

Post by programmertote »

tomlockwood wrote: post #47
programmertote wrote: post #38

> Imagine you’re a marketing-degree graduate in middle management. If you’re lucky, you may have done some statistics courses. In your day-to-day, you likely don’t apply these to a great amount. You hear about this great thing called “Machine Learning” which is sweeping marketing departments. You might have read a white paper or two about it, heard about it at a conference, or been schmoozed by someone from IBM tryin…

Thanks for your kind words! :) I worked at a Telecom for most of my time in AdTech so I think I might have had a close encounter with some particularly high overcollection of data there.

Ah...I definitely see the Telecoms recording and hoarding a lot of data without any regard to consequence/implication. I know a couple of coworkers who decided to leave my current employer and work for big Telecoms, and they said it's more chaotic there. :)

Re: AdTech Sucks

#84

Post by matz1 »

tomlockwood wrote: post #77
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?

Whats the actual issue ? They might increase my premium if i I buy too much pizza ? then it may be possible they might decrease my premium if I don't buy pizza that much.

Re: AdTech Sucks

#85

Post by cattlefarmer »

dpflan wrote: post #7
tomlockwood wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. I was attracted by the money, but also the exciting technical challenges. AdTech had all the largest datasets! At the time I entered the industry I wasn't really thinking about the ethical concerns. I just didn't think those issues would bother me as much as they ended up bothering me.

Thank you for sharing your perspective and authoring the article. Is there growing sentiment like yours amongst colleagues and peers in ad tech?

One more datapoint here if you care.

The industry is filled with hugely interesting technical challenges even if you're not at FAANG scale. Trivial things like building a cost efficient delivery infrastructure to reducing the number of steps between receiving that first page load to ad delivery and then on to analytics. A lot of it is just math and it's fun when you structure your challenges that way. It's like inverse Pinky and the Brain everyday. We're not scheming to erode everyone's privacy, we're just lab rats looking for the shortest route from one end of the maze to the other.

I also left after a few years because all that maze running got boring eventually and I decided I'd like something with a little bit more meaning. Or, from another point of view, those years eroding everyone's privacy has enabled me to climb high enough up on Maslow's pyramid such that I now have the comfort to worry about self actualisation.

edit:

There were a few people that totally drank the kool aid, and believed that what we were doing was enabling people to gain a livelihood by running a popular website. Usually the really young ones or those at management level.

Those from a developed country were mostly interested in the technical problems and improving their engineering skills.

Those from developing countries were most definitely in it for the money.

Re: AdTech Sucks

#86

Post by bongobongo »

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…

In my experience, AdTech companies will pay top dollar for engineering leadership (CTO, VP, etc.) but then hire a legion of junior developers at entry-level salaries to execute. I do wonder if AdTech hiring managers focus on young and inexperienced people fresh out of school who are attracted to beer and ping-pong and a decent salary for a first job.

Re: AdTech Sucks

#87

Post by diogofranco »

bunderbunder wrote: post #21

> I’d love for data to be seen as a liability - something audited and discarded often to minimise risk. Perhaps it's just the industries I've worked in, which tend to be highly regulated, but I have such a hard time seeing why this idea isn't more intuitive to people. Every single scrap of sensitive information you have laying around is something that has the potential to fuel a very expensive, possibly even existent…

Surely there are many reasons to not hoard everything, but I find this argument strange. If you're in a business that is making bad decisions due to wrong analysis of data, it seems like there should be more nuanced and pertinent ways to tackle this then just throwing it out, which also prevents good analysis.

Re: AdTech Sucks

#88

Post by chipperyman573 »

StreamBright wrote: post #70
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…

Could not agree more. The pull approach of ad would be great. - much less CO2 production - much less chance of malware / virus spreading - much higher accuracy - the web would be usable again without ad filters

How would this reduce CO2 production?

Re: AdTech Sucks

#89

Post by isoprophlex »

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…

Who the actual fuck buys these ads? Ad people: are you reading hn right now? Google is screwing you out of your money, big time

We're on vacation in northern italy. Why did my 2 year old daughter just get served two consecutive ads, one for a razor blade, in german, and one for the Italian Amazon website; all while watching Dutch songs for toddlers on YouTube?

She sure as hell doesnt speak german or italian, and I don't think she needs a razor....

Re: AdTech Sucks

#90

Post by geuis »

tomlockwood wrote: post #24
geuis wrote: post #13

Ironically that url is being blocked by Ublock Origin on my phone.

Author here - I actually had to change some of the image URLs I made because they had AdTech in the name, and uBlock was blocking them. Hahaha! I solemnly swear that my website has no tracking installed on it (that I know of, welp). Cheers.

Probably because of the combination of “advertising” and dates in the path.
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