Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Facebook managers trash their own ad targeting in unsealed remarks

theintercept.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 134 posts

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

#81

Post by jonas21 »

nopriorarrests wrote: post #60
gonehome wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I played with dragon in 97 and it was awful - it didn’t work at all, completely unusable. Today voice transcription is a solved problem and while their engine might be the same in name - I’d be surprised if the approach isn’t totally different than what they were doing in 97, either that or the LG tv voice transcription probably doesn’t work as well as everyone else’s. The deep learning revolution and the applic…

Of course it was awful. It was 1997. But you can't claim that something "wasn't possible 5 years" ago, if 7 years ago said feature was included in inexpensive consumer product (LG TV). I'm not acting cynical, but it's tiresome for me to see people who claim that 20-30 years ago we all were living in a caves and catching bugs with wooden sticks, and now boom, ML! Regarding "something truly different", well, my persona…

First, nobody is claiming that people were living in caves before ML. I understand you're exaggerating for effect -- but that's the same thing the parent comment is doing when they say something "wasn't possible" 5 years ago. They don't mean that it was literally impossible, they mean that it was sufficiently bad that a typical consumer would be unlikely to use it back then -- whereas now the quality has improved to the point where these things are ubiquitous.

Similarly, both Amazon [1] and online pizza ordering [2] existed before 1995. They were just not commonly used.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)

[2] https://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/index.html

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

#82

Post by fairity »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #73
fairity wrote: post #18

Facebook's ad inventory is sold by auction. Inaccurate targeting isn't a big deal as long as all advertisers are treated the same. Furthermore, granular targeting is no longer the way to scale on Facebook. Therefore, inaccurate targeting will have little to no effect on most campaigns' efficacies (at least the ones designed by those who are knowledgable of the ecosystem). Any FB marketer worth their salt knows this.…

Couldn't this be sample bias since you were spending 8 figures? At that level of spending, you might be getting a proportionally higher 'correct' target demographic. For small-time advertisers, FB knows these folks would have less capital to fight back against poor ad practices.

I think it's possible but unlikely first and foremost bc FB has financial incentive to create a fair advertising ecosystem. Since FB sells inventory by auction, they make more money when there's more competition. There's a very long tail of small advertisers on Facebook, and handicapping them would ultimately lead to lower revenue for FB. On top of that, if such favoritism were real and ever were revealed, FB would suffer huge reputational damage which just isn't worth the risk when they're sitting on a cash cow.

I started out with low budgets too, and I can see how it would be easy to blame the platform when the real problem is poor campaign design and creative. Don't get me wrong, big advertisers have a huge advantage bc they can iterate on creative and campaign design faster. And, this advantage often explains why most small advertisers fail. But, at the actual auction level, I've never seen any evidence of favoritism nor do I think it would make sense from Facebook's perspective.

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

#83

Post by nopriorarrests »

jonas21 wrote: post #81
nopriorarrests wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it was awful. It was 1997. But you can't claim that something "wasn't possible 5 years" ago, if 7 years ago said feature was included in inexpensive consumer product (LG TV). I'm not acting cynical, but it's tiresome for me to see people who claim that 20-30 years ago we all were living in a caves and catching bugs with wooden sticks, and now boom, ML! Regarding "something truly different", well, my persona…

First, nobody is claiming that people were living in caves before ML. I understand you're exaggerating for effect -- but that's the same thing the parent comment is doing when they say something "wasn't possible" 5 years ago. They don't mean that it was literally impossible, they mean that it was sufficiently bad that a typical consumer would be unlikely to use it back then -- whereas now the quality has improved to…

>they mean that it was uncommon for a typical consumer to experience it back then.

Siri from Apple was launched in 2011, as some other commenter noted below. Also, "On June 14, 2011, Google announced at its Inside Google Search event that it would start to roll out Voice Search on Google.com during the coming days".

If it does not count as 'typical consumer to experience it', well, I do not know what counts then.

9 years ago, I mind you, not 5. And I think that 5 years ago voice recognition was more-or-less good already. In 4 years both Apple and Google acquired large enough datasets to learn from, afer initial launch of their products in 2011.

What we are still struggling with is proccesing of fuzzy queries, something among the lines of 'Siri tell me which restaurant in my area serves the most delicious sushi according to yelp reviews and also allows takeout', but this is not a voice recognition problem (though typical consumer can think it is).

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

#84

Post by a_t48 »

amelius wrote: post #78
ummonk wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computer vision is used for many driver assistance technologies, which are a big deal for ease of life.

People obsess too much over minor conveniences. I don't care about driving. It still takes the same amount of time. What I care more about is cooking. I'd rather have that one solved, as it would actually save me time. (No, I'm not looking for restaurants, meal delivery services or microwave meals).

Driving assistance is about safety, not about convenience.

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

#85

Post by matkoniecz »

amelius wrote: post #78
ummonk wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computer vision is used for many driver assistance technologies, which are a big deal for ease of life.

People obsess too much over minor conveniences. I don't care about driving. It still takes the same amount of time. What I care more about is cooking. I'd rather have that one solved, as it would actually save me time. (No, I'm not looking for restaurants, meal delivery services or microwave meals).

> I don't care about driving. It still takes the same amount of time.

If it would be automated, the you would be able to use this time for something else rather than driving.

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

#86

Post by joe_the_user »

tylermenezes wrote: post #53
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…

As someone who has purchased Facebook ads, it's /so very evident/ that this is happening, that it's not particularly hard to compile evidence. Here's a specific example: we ran around $1k in ads last year, targeting senior-level engineers at technology companies, but the ads were getting liked by mostly people who worked minimum-wage jobs. Twitter and LinkedIn targeting were fine with pretty much the same parameters.…

we ran around $1k in ads last year, targeting senior-level engineers at technology companies

While sure it sounds like you were ripped-off, I would expect that just about any mass-market medium offering ad-targeting to "senior-level engineers at technology companies", "senior managers", "wealthy yachting enthusiasts" or similar super-high-value clients be a ripped-off if it was offered. I'd imagine anyone in the position would avoid anything that could target them with ads (blocking ads, going incognito, avoiding social media, etc)because otherwise they'd be continuously barraged by companies.

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

#87

Post by cbsmith »

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…

There's a confusion here about what is really going on here.

In truth, advertisers care more about volume that quality, and so the industry has a bias in that direction. It's entirely possible to have much higher precision, but that precision turns out to be not what advertisers are looking for.

For example, take "college educated high-earner". Well, there are a bunch of such types who don't spend or making purchasing decisions like the rest of that group, and a bunch of people outside that group who behave exactly like them. How did the advertiser figure out that they want that group? Did they really figure out that if you aren't meeting those criteria their ad is a waste of time? Of course not. They're just guessing, and they don't intend for their guess to constrain their audience.

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

#88

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

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…

Is the hype working? (Sales.)

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

#89

Post by solidasparagus »

tsimionescu wrote: post #62
ma2rten wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Out of your list, translating language and solving protein folding are the only 2 that are likely to have any kind of major impact on the world in the somewhat near future, in my opinion. Image recognition may be a distant third, as it could prove very useful as a tool in many domains that have lots of visual data to sift through. Voice recognition is neat, and it is extremely useful in certain niches, but it is gene…

You’re statement about us not learning anything about Go from AI agents is just false. Also we have seen a rapid improvement in the accuracy/speed curve, most notably with NAS. It hasn’t just been increased computational power.

AFAIK the use of learned embedding in the biomedical space has improved our understanding of the science/our ability to find high value experiments to run.

I think the coherency of GPT-3 and the RL learned tool use work both raise extremely interesting questions about the nature of language and high-level intelligence. Questions that we couldn’t meaningfully ask before that evidence.

I also think you’re being shortsighted about the possibilities that are opened up as we enable computers to understand and interact with the real world in more way. Increased visual and audio understanding will lead to more passive computing and that has all sorts of fascinating implications.

I don’t know what insights you’re looking for. We’re seeing AI reveal fascinating phenomena in language, vision and general purpose learning. Scientific advancement is often about asking the right questions and unexplainable phenomena is the driver of those questions. Much like some phenomena (I want to say something to do spectral) were unanswered questions that developed into the field of quantum mechanics, what we’re seeing in AI is currently unexplainable phenomena.

Are you in the field? You’ve focused on the things that made global headlines, but I feel like there’s so much more.

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

#90

Post by cm2012 »

In the article and this thread: a bunch of people who have never spent serious sums on Facebook trashing FBs targeting.

I have spent large amounts of money targeting niche audiences on Facebook. The targeting is unparalelled by anything else on the web.

Post reply on HN