251–260 of 464 posts
This is the thing the ad industry really didn't want people to discover: what if the behavioural and personalised targeting wasn't actually worth the cost?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You be surprised how much less sophisticated Googles and Facebooks ad targeting is! We are far away from a machine classifying you as being single and going to the gym every day or liking BMW and having gotten a promotion. Not that I don’t think we couldn’t get there...but today these system are far away from it! Just go to your Facebook ad settings to understand how primitive the information is they have about you.…
One thing I have wondered for a little while is how all these learning algorithms will handle change over time. A lot of my advertising is for things I may have liked perhaps 5 years ago, but no longer have anything to do with. It's also a bunch of super wrong things, like parenting, even though it also thinks I'm a single male who likes holidays, and skiing, even though it doesn't snow where I live and I've never ev…
The models react strongly to that...i went from years of poor ads to fantastic ads within 2-3 purchases
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…
The real creepy behavior is that companies can openly pay to manipulate you for most of your waking life, and people are fine with it.
The "manipulate" argument is silly.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You be surprised how much less sophisticated Googles and Facebooks ad targeting is! We are far away from a machine classifying you as being single and going to the gym every day or liking BMW and having gotten a promotion. Not that I don’t think we couldn’t get there...but today these system are far away from it! Just go to your Facebook ad settings to understand how primitive the information is they have about you.…
One thing I have wondered for a little while is how all these learning algorithms will handle change over time. A lot of my advertising is for things I may have liked perhaps 5 years ago, but no longer have anything to do with. It's also a bunch of super wrong things, like parenting, even though it also thinks I'm a single male who likes holidays, and skiing, even though it doesn't snow where I live and I've never ev…
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…
> 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 diet. Are such details of no significance determining what ads to show these people? It's possible that some combination of…
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…
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…
> 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 diet. Are such details of no significance determining what ads to show these people? It's possible that some combination of…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It does make sense the way you describe it. But the ads I see are way off target. Hell Google's news ... AI or whatever they're doing has been absolutely convinced I'm a Nebraska Cornhuskers fan, probabbly because my team plays them and I google something about them once in a while.... but in the past even when I told Google directly "I don't want to see stories about Nebraska Cornhuskers" ... after a while it again…
Or "let’s sprinkle some noise in here so people think we’re less efficient than we truly are, so that we appear a bit dumber and less creepy." But probably the truth is that these systems aren’t that good :)
Meanwhile, NYT experiments with predicting readers’ emotional state and using that information to target ad placement... https://digiday.com/media/project-feels-usa-today-espn-new-y... NYT is deeply hypocritical when it comes to digital advertising.