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After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

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Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#111

Post by fyfy18 »

adzicg wrote: post #90
codq wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps there's some kind of Baader-Meinhof phenomena going on here. When a targeted ad is creepily accurate and on point, people flip and think that the machines have figured us out. But the ads that are irrelevant just fly by us without a hit. The one-out-of-a-hundred ads that get it right, likely due to an ad targeter's lucky strike, are the ones that get under our skin, and the only ones we really notice.

I read somewhere (can’t remember the book name unfortunately) that Tesco in the UK faced this problem when they started sending out personalised coupon booklets based on loyalty card purchases. People were freaking out. Then they started adding coupons to the booklet designed to be irrelevant - say if they figured out that someone was newly pregnant, they’d send a few pages of baby stuff, but also inject lawn mower c…

I remember during college I was working at Tesco, and a customer way buying a lot of baby food, and she had received some Clubcard coupons for them. I asked her if she had grandchildren, she said no, but her husband really likes baby food.

Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#112

Post by ehnto »

tomjen3 wrote: post #102
MarkMc wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be absolutely astounded if targeted ads did not provide significant long-term advantage to a big player like Google. How can it be that having intimate knowledge of someone would not allow you to sell them more stuff? John has a 10th wedding anniversary coming up. Mary is single and goes to the gym every day. Steve just got a promotion and likes the BMW 3 series. Michael is overweight but has just gone on a d…

You and I might, a prior, believe that they would be much more valuable, but after 10 years and with some of the sharpest minds in the world working on the problem, facebook has never once shown me an ad for something I wanted. I have as far as a recall only twice clicked on ad on google with intent to acquire the item (as opposed to just clicking on the ad rather than go to the homepage of a company). If you could a…

Sometimes it would pick up on keywords in my messages, but I rarely talk about things I wanted to buy. I'm a very satirical individual so if I mention a product it's most likely because I'm making fun of it. Making the advertisements extra ineffective.

Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#113

Post by wlesieutre »

SmellyGeekBoy wrote: post #95
skilled wrote: post #35

I can't be the only one who thinks behavioral targeting is a bit creepy? This has happened to me at least 3-4 times in the last 2 years: I go to a supermarket or a store that I have never been to, I do shopping and come back home. After a few hours, I pick up my phone to check Email/Facebook, only to find myself staring at an advert for a product that's sitting in my fridge. I mean, come on... The first time this hap…

I bought a Casper mattress around a year ago and the websites I visit are still full of ads for mattresses. How many mattresses do they think I need, anyway!?

Funny you mention them, because I've only ever heard of Casper in podcasts, one of the few remaining non-targeted digital ad slots.

Unless "listens to X podcast" counts as targeting, but that's no different from "reads X magazine" in offline media. No creepy tracking required.

Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#114

Post by Mirioron »

MarkMc wrote: post #52
bitofhope wrote: post #6

I honestly would not be surprised if the difference in effectiveness of targeted vs untargeted advertisement turns out to be none, negligible or even unfavorable to targeted. Sure, NYT is not enough data to be significant, especially when compensating for my confirmation bias, but I would really like to see more sites stop tracking, at least from an ethical standpoint.

I would be absolutely astounded if targeted ads did not provide significant long-term advantage to a big player like Google. How can it be that having intimate knowledge of someone would not allow you to sell them more stuff? John has a 10th wedding anniversary coming up. Mary is single and goes to the gym every day. Steve just got a promotion and likes the BMW 3 series. Michael is overweight but has just gone on a d…

It's not Google that's bad at this, but the people buying the ads and selecting the targets. And if targeted ads wasn't a thing then a large portion of your ads would be in a different language.

Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#115

Post by iagovar »

Sharlin wrote: post #99
codq wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps there's some kind of Baader-Meinhof phenomena going on here. When a targeted ad is creepily accurate and on point, people flip and think that the machines have figured us out. But the ads that are irrelevant just fly by us without a hit. The one-out-of-a-hundred ads that get it right, likely due to an ad targeter's lucky strike, are the ones that get under our skin, and the only ones we really notice.

But do people generally think that targeted ads are especially accurate? If anything, I’d think people are bothered by all that privacy invasion and still getting completely irrelevant ads!

IMO many people managing ads do not seem to use it properly. I worked for a marketing agency once and we got pretty good results, but we tried to understand our target, use negative keywords, use different ads for different keywords and so on. It was actually a lot of work. I guess some people wants to cut corners and just gets the client money and puts it down into adwords and fb ads, write some reports and pass it to client. In my experience clients most of the time get confused with so much jargon, and they are unable to link sales with marketing expending correctly, the only certain thing they know is that (for most of them) if they don't do marketing sales will go down over time.

I'm always surprised when I see a company wasting money on adwords when they are also ranking many #1 keywords organically, specially on brand keywords. I may be outdated but I doesn't make any sense to me.

Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#116

Post by tuacker »

Reading this makes me happy as I'm currently working on a service [0] (not available yet) to allow sites to do this. The goal is to facilitate and make ad selling/scheduling easy while having websites/etc. serve the ads themselves, ensuring no tracking (by my service) is possible.

A lot of people are already doing direct sales via mail and then work out a way to get paid somehow, which can be cumbersome. Hoping to make that easier, while also improving the bad, intrusive behaviour around ads.

[0] https://www.adsfromsource.com

Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#117

Post by throw0u1t »

MarkMc wrote: post #52
bitofhope wrote: post #6

I honestly would not be surprised if the difference in effectiveness of targeted vs untargeted advertisement turns out to be none, negligible or even unfavorable to targeted. Sure, NYT is not enough data to be significant, especially when compensating for my confirmation bias, but I would really like to see more sites stop tracking, at least from an ethical standpoint.

I would be absolutely astounded if targeted ads did not provide significant long-term advantage to a big player like Google. How can it be that having intimate knowledge of someone would not allow you to sell them more stuff? John has a 10th wedding anniversary coming up. Mary is single and goes to the gym every day. Steve just got a promotion and likes the BMW 3 series. Michael is overweight but has just gone on a d…

Does Steve need an ad to remind him that he likes the BMW 3 series? No doubt one of the first steps he took after his promotion was look up the prices, or finance offers on BMW 3 series, perhaps create a spec and then talk to his partner about it if he has o e.

The thing is if there is something I want to buy, or own at some point in my life, I don't tend to forget about it or need some reminder from a targeted ad. If it's something I really want I'll usually think about it daily.

On the other hand, there could be something that I need, and have never searched for, that I have forgotten about such as going out and buying more toilet roll.

Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#118

Post by sbuttgereit »

thatguyagain wrote: post #78
manigandham wrote: post #64

I work in adtech. This has nothing to do with how effective targeting is, and a single site does not reflect the entire industry when they're all competing for the same pool of ad dollars. There is a massive drop in EU programmatic advertising because of GDPR. Most EU advertisers now buy a few large campaigns with coarse targeting instead, and sites with the biggest reach like NYT will get more money but there's less…

I don't understand. What stands in the way of a small niche website for, say, dog owners to sell ad space for dog related products without having some kind of data hoarding ad tech behind it?

If I were buying ads (I've made some micro purchases in the past), I'd also understand that the users of the small, niche website are also likely using the larger websites, too.

So the time in researching what small websites exist for my market (say dog owners), the ad cost per buy of making many small buys, the administrative overhead related to maintaining many small accounts (accounting, dealing with many sales people, many platforms to administer, etc) vs. buying ads in greater bulk with a few content providers like the NYT or others alongside pet related stories (or other compatible content) where I'm likely to get most of the niche site users and others that are also in my market that don't use those sites.... seems kinda no-brainer.

I also expect data aggregation to continue, even without a focus on "personalized" or "one-to-one" behavioral data. For example the NYT times would likely want to be able to show advertisers that those that read dog articles also disproportionately read articles about outdoors activities... they can produce those metrics within the course of normal operations, I would think, possible even without employing things like cookies for the purpose... naturally the metrics being captured today do have a market value beyond just allowing the collector what ads to show and my suggestion doesn't replace that path, but I expect for just the purpose of targeting ads that's probably more useful anyway.

Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#119

Post by Nasrudith »

I have long been bothered by the superficiality of advertising. At this point I have gotten the impression that much of advertising is the art of fooling oneselves first about the source of success and then fooling others. As long as there is a success and they are advertising it is stop self reflection and claim victory.

Annoy persistent customers with ads? It means it is driving retention and not that they had to get milk and knew you were an immediate better option than the alternatives.

Not receive as many sales during a recession when people cut back and you are forced to cut back on ads? Cutting ads brought this and not!

Clearly it has some impact given the derth of businesses without any but it is so entangled that it stinks of being driven by self-serving superstition more than concrete impacts. I would guess abstractly modeling awareness and desirability as separate concepts for one. No matter how much you advertise people will not want an air freshener that dispenses Ebola in their living room.

I know my own biases towards an annoying outgroup, that I am not equipped to derive a more logically rigorous and complete proof (let alone actionable and doing adequate in the field never mind better) but it feels as if the whole field should use way more mathematical rigor and self reflection.

Re: After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue

#120

Post by manigandham »

cyborgx7 wrote: post #101
manigandham wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea I get it. Advertising is a subset of marketing, and efficiently connecting people with a message inherently involves targeting. There's a reason 2 of the biggest companies on the planet are ad networks.

>efficiently connecting people with a message inherently involves targeting The point of this thread is that maybe it doesn't.

What's the evidence? This article? That's not the reason why, the whole EU market is down and there are just fewer but larger ad campaigns which go to the sites with the biggest reach. It's regulation causing consolidation.
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