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AdTech Sucks

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Re: AdTech Sucks

#151

Post by bogomipz »

joefkelley wrote: post #146
bogomipz wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might you or someone else mind explaining how this "bidding component" works? I'm not familiar with it or with the specific bidding models at work - "bid per click * ctr" etc?

Advertisers go to an ad network and configure their campaign with: "I want to show X to users who are Y or are on a site about Y, and I'm willing to pay Z for it". X is just the content of the ad and is usually entirely advertiser-defined. Some ad networks will allow you to do some fancy stuff to help determine the best phrasing or arrangement or whatever of your ad. Z can be in dollars per impression, per click, or…

Thanks for the clear and thorough explanation. The parent comment makes good sense now.

One follow up question - is the "bid per impression" sort of the campaign of last resort then? In other words its the cheapest type of campaign for an advertiser to run as well as the least profitable for the ad network?

Cheers

Re: AdTech Sucks

#152

Post by 55555 »

DailyHN wrote: post #64
55555 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Maybe more focus should be on the fraud instead of the people who are wondering if ads are worth pursuing because of having to set aside a part of their budget to that fraud. And considering the pervasiveness of tracking, why isn't the fraud better tracked?

The ad networks don't seem to want to reduce fraud much. Possibly mostly because reducing fraud comes at the expense of denying real users, and the eventually-CPA-adjusted auction model means that the fraud should just be "factored into the price" and in that sense it's not a problem, and so they'd rather not deny 10 fraud clicks if it means accidentally elimininating 1 real click. But whatever the reason, they mostly view it as an issue advertisers should deal with.

On the advertiser side, fraud has a small impact due to idiot brands bidding up prices and also another small impact due to the fact that you need to cull all the worst placements/domains when you first start using a network or launch a campaign.

On the publisher side, each fraud penny earned is a penny directly taken away from legitimate publishers.

Fraud is much more a problem for publishers than for advertisers.

Re: AdTech Sucks

#153

Post by 55555 »

navigatesol wrote: post #66
55555 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> You realize the prices you pay per click or impression are set by a market, right? > There's a lot of fraud Makes no sense. Everytime AdTech comes up on HN, there's inevitably people who defend advertising with "you're not doing it right". Sorry, but the industry is a cesspool.

I'm saying each fake click brings no value and so advertisers lower their bids because at the end of the day they are looking at sales generated and bots dont buy. Professional performance-based advertisers don't really mind the fraud in the market, because it doesn't affect them any more than it affects any other advertiser, and it's a competition to convert best. In fact if you're better at detecting fraud placements, for example, it can actually be your edge over others.

Re: AdTech Sucks

#154

Post by joefkelley »

bogomipz wrote: post #151
joefkelley wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Advertisers go to an ad network and configure their campaign with: "I want to show X to users who are Y or are on a site about Y, and I'm willing to pay Z for it". X is just the content of the ad and is usually entirely advertiser-defined. Some ad networks will allow you to do some fancy stuff to help determine the best phrasing or arrangement or whatever of your ad. Z can be in dollars per impression, per click, or…

Thanks for the clear and thorough explanation. The parent comment makes good sense now. One follow up question - is the "bid per impression" sort of the campaign of last resort then? In other words its the cheapest type of campaign for an advertiser to run as well as the least profitable for the ad network? Cheers

I think bidding tends to just be about what the advertiser cares most about. If they are a "brand" advertiser (Coca-Cola is the canonical example) they might bid per impression since they're not really looking for clicks, and they have some idea of how much an impression is worth to them. Compared to say some app where they want installs and so might bid per conversion.

As for the network, it's also not as clear what's profitable. Bidding per click or conversion probably gives them more opportunity to do well with good targeting. But high per-impression bids are also useful for the users the network knows very little about.

Re: AdTech Sucks

#155

Post by leonardmh »

iamnothere wrote: post #45
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…

> However, when I am searching for a pressure cooker, it would be great to go to a centralized repository of ads and look through who markets this sort of thing the best and may be have some objective reviews along with it. The Wirecutter used to be pretty good for this, until the NYT bought it. It's still OK now, but it feels like that the pool of products being reviewed in each category is smaller than it once was.…

Yep it has been incredibly difficult to buy anything of quality from Amazon for the past 2-3 years at least. I will likely cancel my Prime membership this year, it’s just no longer worth it.

Re: AdTech Sucks

#156

Post by theshadowknows »

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’ve been in the game for about 8 years now and I agree a lot with the author. I also think one issue is in the talent pool and hiring. You get a lot of well meaning but by and large poorly trained people in the space. And the result is poor use of the tools. Look at Salesforce Marketing Cloud for example. It’s immensely powerful. But 9 out of 10 orgs that use it are a shit show. And their results are often terrible. Because you have teams that simply aren’t technical enough to use it properly. This is common across the entire ad tech stack.

Re: AdTech Sucks

#157

Post by theshadowknows »

tomlockwood wrote: post #113
_ptgt wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think criddell is right. I think the amount of money makes people gloss over some of the ethics, as cynical as that probably sounds. I didn't say it in the article specifically because of it sounding so cynical (even though the article is very cynical). I think you're right, that a lot of the people going into AdTech, and just marketing in general, aren't philosophical. But, you saying that made me chuckle, because…

A lot of the people I work with are looking for cheap wins. So they bend the rules and ignore ethics. Many retailers for example are data rich on the aggregate level. And could very likely achieve great results without trying to spearfish customers further. But the analytics insights required to do that take time and work. And marketers don’t like to do that. So they’d rather “enrich” crm data with Experian or some other service. When really they can’t handle they data they have and adding to it will just make it worse.

Re: AdTech Sucks

#158

Post by [deleted] »

logfromblammo wrote: post #119
xixixao wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're still focusing on advertisers (I didn't make this clear enough). Think about the people owning the football stadium, the tv channel, the newspaper (they're likely advertisers themselves, but let's pretend for a moment they aren't).

Advertising allows those who have fleeting excess brain-seconds of attention to convert it into non-ephemeral money. People give away their brain-seconds of attention based on interest, and the interest-providers are profiting on the difference in interestingness between advertisements and their own content. If they maintain interestingness above the boredom threshold, they can dilute their product with ads and pocke…

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