Ask HN: Does targeted advertising work at all?

While plausible, that sort of situation doesn't sound common enough that it should underpin the entire online advertising industry.

Even right after I have bought a graphics tablet I'm infinitely more likely to buy a graphics tablet tomorrow, compared to my parents who have never bought one in their lives, and never will.

But you're more likely still to buy another stylus, or art software, or an accessory, or physical art materials, etc. Why don't advertisers understand that?

Bob Hoffman's take on advertising e.g. Advertising for Skeptics, is well worth reading - he's an ex-adman who thinks the ad industry and particularly the personalised ad industry is full of shit

When you look at the online ad industry it's reasonably clear that the people who are making the money are the ad tech companies and not the advertisers

How to Create Advertising That Sells Ad by David Ogilvy [1972] https://boraoztunc.medium.com/how-to-create-advertising-that...

What I meant was, there is nothing wrong with advertising, or targeting right people to deliver value, products, services to them with creative approaches. Online advertising though, especially programmatic, is totally a different scheme.

I suggest reading more about; "Surveillance Capitalism"

Professor Shoshana Zuboff, author of “[The Age of Surveillance Capitalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Surveillance_Capita..., who coined the term surveillance capitalism in 2014, defines it as;

" …the unilateral claiming of private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. These data are then computed and packaged as prediction products and sold into behavioral futures markets — business customers with a commercial interest in knowing what we will do now, soon, and later."

In an interview with The Gurdian, Zuboff explains how surveillance capitalism is a human creation;

>It lives in history, not in technological inevitability. It was pioneered and elaborated through trial and error at Google in much the same way that the Ford Motor Company discovered the new economics of mass production or General Motors discovered the logic of managerial capitalism.

>Surveillance capitalism was invented around 2001 as the solution to financial emergency in the teeth of the dotcom bust when the fledgling company faced the loss of investor confidence. As investor pressure mounted, Google’s leaders abandoned their declared antipathy toward advertising. Instead they decided to boost ad revenue by using their exclusive access to user data logs (once known as “data exhaust”) in combination with their already substantial analytical capabilities and computational power, to generate predictions of user click-through rates, taken as a signal of an ad’s relevance.

>Operationally this meant that Google would both repurpose its growing cache of behavioural data, now put to work as a behavioural data surplus, and develop methods to aggressively seek new sources of this surplus.

>The company developed new methods of secret surplus capture that could uncover data that users intentionally opted to keep private, as well as to infer extensive personal information that users did not or would not provide. And this surplus would then be analysed for hidden meanings that could predict click-through behaviour. The surplus data became the basis for new predictions markets called targeted advertising.

Here was the origin of surveillance capitalism in an unprecedented and lucrative brew: behavioural surplus, data science, material infrastructure, computational power, algorithmic systems, and automated platforms. As click-through rates skyrocketed, advertising quickly became as important as search. Eventually it became the cornerstone of a new kind of commerce that depended upon online surveillance at scale.

The success of these new mechanisms only became visible when Google went public in 2004. That’s when it finally revealed that between 2001 and its 2004 IPO, revenues increased by 3,590%.

Surveillance capitalism is no more limited to advertising than mass production was limited to the fabrication of the Ford Model T. It quickly became the default model for capital accumulation in Silicon Valley, embraced by nearly every startup and app.

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Further sources if you are interested:

VPRO Documentary Shoshana Zuboff on surveillance capitalism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIXhnWUmMvw

The Intercept The Rise of Surveillance Capitalism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2s4Y-uZG5zk

High tech is watching you https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/03/harvard-profe...

Yes, targeted advertising consistently produces higher conversion rates. Your personal experience might have been "poor", but in aggregate it works.