Anecdotally, FB shows me the same ads on repeat: Few are relevant, and the same ones repeat past a threshold I'd assume would indicate I'm not interested.
Facebook managers trash their own ad targeting in unsealed remarks
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Re: Facebook managers trash their own ad targeting in unsealed remarks
#22This shows the limitations of ML: facebook has incredible amounts of preference & behaviour data on its users; and can't even meet incredibly generic categories such as "high-earner, college educated, etc.". The reason we think we're in an "AI" boom is 90% these ad. companies hyping their own abilities (an identical strategy to that of the initial boom in the 50s). What we call "AI" today is just an associative house…
Well, a combination of objective limitations and FB's ability to execute.
But mostly objective limitations. The most advanced minds executing the most robust, cutting edge ML aren't likely to do very much better. And most of the metrics by which they might suggest otherwise end up being flawed themselves due to the bias introduced by the feedback loops involved.
When your predicate influences the next version's antecedent, it's easy to show a big ROI, lift, or whatever other jargon you might care to use.
Re: Facebook managers trash their own ad targeting in unsealed remarks
#23This shows the limitations of ML: facebook has incredible amounts of preference & behaviour data on its users; and can't even meet incredibly generic categories such as "high-earner, college educated, etc.". The reason we think we're in an "AI" boom is 90% these ad. companies hyping their own abilities (an identical strategy to that of the initial boom in the 50s). What we call "AI" today is just an associative house…
I think the problem is deeper than that. Every company wants to advertise to high earning college educated people, and nobody wants to advertise to unemployed anti-vaxers. But presumably Facebook has a lot more of the latter. So they have to get a bit "creative" with their targeting if they want to sell their inventory...
Re: Facebook managers trash their own ad targeting in unsealed remarks
#24I know everyone loves to hate Facebook and articles that confirm that bias are very popular right now, but this lawsuit doesn't seem to have smoking gun evidence like the headline suggests. Have you ever written an e-mail or Slack message to a peer complaining that something at your company might not be working well? Or that something is totally broken and you think it should be prioritized in the ticket queue? Imagi…
I think there's a huge difference between "statements are being cherry picked" and Bosworth, a major confidant to Zuckerberg, stating that "[I]nterest precision in the US is only 41%—that means that more than half the time we’re showing ads to someone other than the advertisers’ intended audience". I appreciate that you're pointing out the movement du jour against Facebook, but here it looks cut and dry to me.
Re: Facebook managers trash their own ad targeting in unsealed remarks
#25Anecdotally, FB shows me the same ads on repeat: Few are relevant, and the same ones repeat past a threshold I'd assume would indicate I'm not interested. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbKdKcGJ4tM
As someone who runs facebook ads for ecomm, repeated targeting are a core part of making facebook ads profitable.
You'll almost never make money by running a simple, one-step ad with a link to your website.
What we do is to target a group of people with a simple ad, then people who engage with or leave impressions on that ad will be run into a second ad, and so on and so forth until you finally funnel them into a conversion ad (for example, a discount) to try to convert those "warmed up" leads. All the campaigns leading up to the conversion ad aren't profitable, then you make all your money on the conversion ad.
So advertisers actually intentionally target you repeatedly, most people it just annoys but for the subset of people that are actually interested in your product, it can work. Familiarity and repeated visibility seems to lead to a sort of trust for certain people.
Re: Facebook managers trash their own ad targeting in unsealed remarks
#26Most clicks are simply fraud. Unspoken truth in adtech.
Re: Facebook managers trash their own ad targeting in unsealed remarks
#27This shows the limitations of ML: facebook has incredible amounts of preference & behaviour data on its users; and can't even meet incredibly generic categories such as "high-earner, college educated, etc.". The reason we think we're in an "AI" boom is 90% these ad. companies hyping their own abilities (an identical strategy to that of the initial boom in the 50s). What we call "AI" today is just an associative house…
This article is quoting employees conversations from 2016. It wasn't until late 2016 that Google published research on wide and deep recommender systems. I'd be interested to see if people still think behavioral data is poor and ML has not provided advances.
That said some demographics are broadly correct from behavioral tracking (e.g. a child who watches baby shark on repeat), but good luck telling the difference between a rich child and a less rich child.
Re: Facebook managers trash their own ad targeting in unsealed remarks
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can support what you're saying with the same experience. I did some SEO for a local landscape company. They were already doing well, but asked me about doing ads on FB. I told them I thought it was a scam, but they persisted so I ran a few campaigns for irrigation in the Spring and then fall cleanup starting in August. Same thing happened. They got a ton of impressions and clicks (no surprise) and a about a dozen l…
What could explain the mechanics of how this happens? Surely FB employees aren't managing those bot accounts themselves. Do they generally determine accounts that engage with ads to be "human/real", thereby incentivizing bad actors who spin up fake FB accounts to click/"like" ads?
> Surely FB employees aren't managing those bot accounts themselves
Why not? It's not like Facebook employees have a track record as paragons of virtue.
If there are managers incentivized to meet click targets, it could even happen informally. Like the Wells Fargo account-opening scandal.
Re: Facebook managers trash their own ad targeting in unsealed remarks
#29This shows the limitations of ML: facebook has incredible amounts of preference & behaviour data on its users; and can't even meet incredibly generic categories such as "high-earner, college educated, etc.". The reason we think we're in an "AI" boom is 90% these ad. companies hyping their own abilities (an identical strategy to that of the initial boom in the 50s). What we call "AI" today is just an associative house…
I can't speak for other people, but the reason that I think we are in an AI boom has nothing to do with online advertising. It is that computers can now recognize images, translate language, have conversations, generate articles, make realistic looking pictures, play the game of go, solve protein folding, generate realistic text to speech, recognize voices. All these things were not possible 5 years ago. Every year there is significant progress. I believe that in a couple of years we will see many more applications. This will be as much of a paradigm shift as the invention of the personal computer, the internet and smart phones.
Re: Facebook managers trash their own ad targeting in unsealed remarks
#30I know everyone loves to hate Facebook and articles that confirm that bias are very popular right now, but this lawsuit doesn't seem to have smoking gun evidence like the headline suggests. Have you ever written an e-mail or Slack message to a peer complaining that something at your company might not be working well? Or that something is totally broken and you think it should be prioritized in the ticket queue? Imagi…
> It's not clear if Facebook explicitly knew at the time that the ad targets didn't meet the criteria, or if Facebook's targeting data was simply incorrect for those who were targeted.
The plaintiffs don't care, nor should they. When I go to a restaurant and order a hamburger, if the server brings me a tuna melt I send it back. It doesn't matter why the server brought me a tuna melt. Facebook is essentially saying that even though they wrote hamburger on the menu, and accepted my order for a hamburger, I should have known they meant a 41% chance of a hamburger and a 59% chance of something else because taped underneath my seat is a 15,000 word Restaurant Use Agreement printed on microfiche.