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Facebook managers trash their own ad targeting in unsealed remarks

theintercept.com

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Re: Facebook managers trash their own ad targeting in unsealed remarks

#41

Post by jariel »

stickfigure wrote: post #32
mjburgess wrote: post #5

This 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 guess there's two ways of looking at this: * 40% of targeted viewers didn't match "high-earner, college educated", the system is crap! or * 60% of targeted viewers did match "high-earner, college educated", that's amazing! I dunno... do you have a better way of reaching those targeted viewers? Do you have a better way of measuring results than abstract page views? Depending on the context, 60% could be very worth i…

If the campaign is well measured, this is taken into context.

FB advertisers are paying for results and they will pay, or not, for those results, not really the targetting.

If ABC corp knows for sure their target is top 50% Households, and FB can only roughly provide that, then the value will work itself out in the numbers.

If FB can provide that target more precisely, those ads will convert better becoming even more valuable.

Re: Facebook managers trash their own ad targeting in unsealed remarks

#42

Post by nopriorarrests »

ma2rten wrote: post #29
mjburgess wrote: post #5

This 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 t…

>recognize voices. All these things were not possible 5 years ago.

FTR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_NaturallySpeaking

Dragon Systems released NaturallySpeaking 1.0 as their first continuous dictation product in 1997. As of 2012 LG Smart TVs include voice recognition feature powered by the same speech engine as Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

Re: Facebook managers trash their own ad targeting in unsealed remarks

#43

Post by tomaszs »

It is a know fact among marketing agencies detailed targeting on Facebook is almost fake. You can safely target for age / country / region / sex and that's it.

There is also similar audience setting, however it is a black box solution that takes away control over the campaign.

Moreover even when setting the campaign right, almost 80% of I got in some, were bots.

Re: Facebook managers trash their own ad targeting in unsealed remarks

#44

Post by hertzrat »

ashtonkem wrote: post #33
mjburgess wrote: post #5

This 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…

According to FB metrics, FB AI magic works great. Then again, according to FB metrics video engaged better than text ... and it turns out they were lying. I wouldn’t put it past them to goose the numbers a bit for their core product.

The “videos engage better than text” idea has been dominant for a few years now. It’s based on a Facebook statement?

Re: Facebook managers trash their own ad targeting in unsealed remarks

#45

Post by drzoltar »

mjburgess wrote: post #5

This 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’m a bit confused why we are assuming the low performance is the fault ML. I would think instead that this low performance is deliberate because it locally optimizes Facebooks KPIs.

My understanding is that Facebook has a lot of data on the elasticity of ad buyers. If Facebook were to have even more precise algorithms, then they would likely charge even more money for impressions and clicks. Presumably buyers may be reticent to pay even higher prices.

Alternatively more precise targeting would highly bias the money people spend toward larger companies that can afford better keywords.

Re: Facebook managers trash their own ad targeting in unsealed remarks

#46

Post by nopriorarrests »

indigochill wrote: post #38
stickfigure wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess there's two ways of looking at this: * 40% of targeted viewers didn't match "high-earner, college educated", the system is crap! or * 60% of targeted viewers did match "high-earner, college educated", that's amazing! I dunno... do you have a better way of reaching those targeted viewers? Do you have a better way of measuring results than abstract page views? Depending on the context, 60% could be very worth i…

>... do you have a better way of reaching those targeted viewers? I'd be curious to see how blogs do at targeting certain demographics. Presumably if you had a blog aimed at high-earning college educated people you could get a pretty high ratio of (target demographic/all viewers). But I assume advertisers generally trust metrics more than intuition so you need something like Facebook or Google's ad network to identif…

>Presumably if you had a blog aimed at high-earning college educated people you could get a pretty high ratio of (target demographic/all viewers).

Correct. The problem of course is scale. How much money such blog can accept from advertisers before it will get absurdly expensive to buy ads from such blog?

FB gives you targeting and scale, and you need both to run meaningful advertising campaign.

Re: Facebook managers trash their own ad targeting in unsealed remarks

#47

Post by hertzrat »

giarc wrote: post #2

This doesn't surprise me at all. I've run a few, albeit very small, campaigns on FB. I set up targetting (occupation and geography) and I would get people outside of my target 'liking' my ad. I'd reach out anyways to ask if they are interested in my product and they would never respond. I oftened wondered if they were just fake/bot accounts to make it look like my ads were getting attention. I'm glad some company has…

If Facebook ads are as ineffective as people say, what have people done that did work? The only thing I know for sure is that word of mouth can make an outstanding product spread quickly, but you still need to get your first 100 users somewhere

Re: Facebook managers trash their own ad targeting in unsealed remarks

#48

Post by ashtonkem »

hertzrat wrote: post #44
ashtonkem wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to FB metrics, FB AI magic works great. Then again, according to FB metrics video engaged better than text ... and it turns out they were lying. I wouldn’t put it past them to goose the numbers a bit for their core product.

The “videos engage better than text” idea has been dominant for a few years now. It’s based on a Facebook statement?

Facebook pushed that argument hard, and there is an ongoing lawsuit over whether they misled their customers.

Re: Facebook managers trash their own ad targeting in unsealed remarks

#49

Post by dodobirdlord »

scott00 wrote: post #30
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #8

I 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 th…

We should give some amount of acceptance to the argument that modern contractual agreements are too complex for individuals to read and understand fully. But this is entirely unacceptable as an argument from one business buying services from another business. It’s not the “fine print”, it’s the contract. If the plaintiff’s argument amounts to “I didn’t read the contract.” they will rightly be laughed out of court.

Re: Facebook managers trash their own ad targeting in unsealed remarks

#50

Post by tracer4201 »

ma2rten wrote: post #29
mjburgess wrote: post #5

This 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 t…

I was at a non tech company 7 years ago where we were generating article summaries and performing image recognition. We had some at least one org applying speech to text for a business use case.

I’m not saying there hasn’t been innovation in the past 5 years — absolutely there has.

In that industry, 2013-2016 were peak “ML” and “Cloud” where the CIOs at my company and competitors were fully bought into the ML and cloud hype, how it was going to solve all kinds of problems, without understanding what those problems were, and without realizing the complexity of getting meaningful, applicable data for those problems.

In the past few years, it feels like more people realized that ML is less mathematical magic and more of different “kinds” of curve fitting.

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