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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

#271

Post by FakeComments »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #206
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…

> 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…

There’s a bigger effect: context.

I don’t want to buy beef jerky when I’m reading about a military strike in the Middle East, no matter how much my profile indicates I like beef jerky — but I might be open to a book on politics.

Because reading about content is self-selected disclosure of interest, the NYT already has all the information they need to target me — they know I read politics, and when I’m in that context.

The only thing Google can provide is slight refinements on which political book to suggest — which isn’t far enough above the noise floor to matter. Anything else is just them giving the NYT statistical fuzz to pretend carrying their ads on beef jerky isn’t an all-around negative so they can fleece advertisers.

Targeted advertising isn’t about efficiency, it’s about raising the number of places they can (uselessly) place beef jerky ads so as to increase their cash flow.

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

#272

Post by hobofan »

wukerplank wrote: post #29
josefresco wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this include "remarketing"? From what I read it's much more effective. For those that don't know, remarketing involves showing ads to only people who have visited your website, or interacted with your brand before. Is this considered targeted?

I always wonder if this really works? Amazon uses it a lot and all I get ads for are products that I already bought. Which is pointless.

Actual retargeting (= targeting a previous visitor/buyer of your product) works, and in some cases works very well. Reactivating a customer vs acquiring a new customer can be up to 10x cheaper, depending on how well you do it. And if you know how to do that, then you can have a much higher initial CAC, which is often the hardest thing to optimize.

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

#273

Post by tivert »

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 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 coupons and stuff only men would care about. That achieved the whole targetted effect and avoided looking creepy for just a few pennies more.

It was Target in the US:

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits....

> As Pole’s computers crawled through the data, he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score. More important, he could also estimate her due date to within a small window, so Target could send coupons timed to very specific stages of her pregnancy.

> ...

> “With the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly,” the executive said. “Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.

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

#274

Post by pdpi »

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.

> Sure, NYT is not enough data to be significant

Even just a few hours of NYT ad traffic ought to be statistically significant enough to say that the difference is within a few percent.

The problem is that the data might not be _representative_. NYT traffic might behave differently enough from yours that their results don't apply to you.

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

#275

Post by phiresky »

cm2012 wrote: post #146

It's amazing how so many people who no knowledge of online advertising post so confidently in these threads. Since I have a lot of experience with targeted ads, it makes me trust the comments on topics I'm not an expert on less.

Feel free to share some of your expert knowledge with the rest of us (instead of just complaining about comments from non-experts).

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

#276

Post by Cpoll »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #206
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…

> 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…

But if you determine that targeted ads are worst than scattershot, the correct conclusion isn't to do scattershot, it's to invert your target group.

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

#277

Post by character0 »

throw0u1t wrote: post #117
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…

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. I…

Perhaps he could be reminded.

Car just won an award, which would direct him to look up more info about the car and why it's considered good.

Maybe they just made an update to the car model he likes, but is not aware of this change.

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

#278

Post by rjf72 »

undefined1 wrote: post #158
cm2012 wrote: post #146

It's amazing how so many people who no knowledge of online advertising post so confidently in these threads. Since I have a lot of experience with targeted ads, it makes me trust the comments on topics I'm not an expert on less.

> people who no knowledge ... post so confidently The Dunning–Kruger effect at work. > Since I have a lot of experience with targeted ads, it makes me trust the comments on topics I'm not an expert on less. That's like when you see a news report about something you're a domain expert on. You notice the mistakes and are left to wonder how often that happens with all the areas you're not an expert on...

I think there's a secondary effect going on in social media comments (including this site). The mostly anonymous nature of things means that people have no ability to understand who they're talking to or their qualifications to speak on a subject. So they take cues from language itself. When things are posted without exuding confidence, people assume ineptitude or uncertainty and rarely regard it as meaningful. By contrast things posted confidently instill trust and confidence and thus are treated as more meaningful.

You can trial this pretty easily by just creating multiple accounts and consciously changing the tone of the comments you make. It's pretty amusing! Online comment voting systems are extremely easy to game because of basic recurring phenomena like this, that you'll find many people come to exploit whether consciously or not. And thanks to those little arrows by our names, those comments that game the system end up near the top.

And finally you also have to keep in mind the You and I that actually chat instead of lurk are outliers, a surprisingly small percent of all people on the site. So you get twisted and likely counter-productive conversational cues driving conversations between a likely biased sample of (not necessarily positive) outliers. And finally now add in the countless biased interests (corporate and political in particular) with presences working to steer perception to their benefit. Nonetheless, I still find it entertaining watching how all the parts play together.

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

#279

Post by koonsolo »

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.

YouTube keeps presenting me French advertisements as a Flemisch person. So I guess "targeted ads" will remain not as targeted as you think.

Also, when I just bought some appliance online, maybe it's time to stop showing me ads for it on every page that I visit.

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

#280

Post by pdpi »

duxup wrote: post #130
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…

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…

> But the ads I see are way off target.

The two sides see "off target" quite differently. If the baseline is 0.1% accuracy, and an ad platform offers 1% accuracy, then you see relevant ads showing up at 1 in a 100 rates rather than 1 in a 1,000 rates. You still feel like you're being spammed by useless nonsense. As an advertiser, my cost to reach my audience just dropped by 90%.

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