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Meta's ads tools started switching out top-performing ads with AI-generated ones

businessinsider.com

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Re: Meta's ads tools started switching out top-performing ads with AI-generated ones

#61

Post by rchaud »

chistev wrote: post #34
naet wrote: post #28

I'm a big fan of podcasts; this year I've heard multiple podcasts that I listen to say that the bottom fell out of podcast ad sponsorship money and they lost a lot of funding. Many were looking for alternative ways to fund their podcasts like selling monthly subscriptions. I wonder if the ad market will start to drop out for other stuff like websites too. AI might cannibalize search engine traffic... if google can ba…

Why are podcasts being affected?

As a podcast listener, I can think of a few reasons:

- 10-20 companies focused on Direct to Customer (DTC) products seem to make up the majority of advertisers for a lot of podcasts: VPNs, mattresses, personal grooming products, discount code providers, online courses, etc. If their ad budgets are reduced in the current economic climate, podcast earnings will fall. It's also possible that they've collected enough data to know that ROI in this medium isn't great, and growth of podcast creation is slowing.

- A lot of top podcasts have been being acquired by Spotify and Apple as exclusives over the past few years, where a lot of this ad spending was concentrated . This reduces the total pool of advertising money available.

- Programmatic advertising (where ads are spliced into the downloaded file, varying by geographical location) has lowered the cost of advertising, so the money paid out to podcast owners is less.

Re: Meta's ads tools started switching out top-performing ads with AI-generated ones

#62

Post by rchaud »

Terr_ wrote: post #53
chuckadams wrote: post #19

> Three advertisers also said they'd encountered a problem where Meta automatically switched those toggles to "on," even when they'd explicitly turned them off — meaning they inadvertently spent their budgets on AI-generated ads they didn't intend to run. Goodness, such uncharacteristic behavior for Facebook apps :-|

One of the enshittification patterns: Abuse the middleman formerly applied just one side eventually gets applied to the other as well.

Used to be that only the consumer was exploited this way. Manually turn off notifications and permissions in an app, only to have them turned back on after an app update. This is why I block app updates across the board. My bank app will tell me when i need to update to continue using it, and that's good enough for me. Most app updates tend to make the experience worse these days.

Re: Meta's ads tools started switching out top-performing ads with AI-generated ones

#63

Post by eastbound »

agentifysh wrote: post #35

are Meta's ad conversions that good as people say it is? anytime this comes up its always advertising on X is the worst and Meta is the best but is this backed up by real data? it makes sense why X is the worst performing but mystery as to what makes Meta so special.

Maybe Meta has older people with more spending power. That’s the lesson of Spinal Tap: Sometimes you don’t know what your success is caused by, and every rationalization makes you optimize the wrong knob (hence the “amp it up to 11” meme).

Re: Meta's ads tools started switching out top-performing ads with AI-generated ones

#64

Post by gs17 »

naet wrote: post #28

I'm a big fan of podcasts; this year I've heard multiple podcasts that I listen to say that the bottom fell out of podcast ad sponsorship money and they lost a lot of funding. Many were looking for alternative ways to fund their podcasts like selling monthly subscriptions. I wonder if the ad market will start to drop out for other stuff like websites too. AI might cannibalize search engine traffic... if google can ba…

> On a different note, I sometimes use Instagram and recently I have seen a ton of ads for a local tech event... but the event already passed a good while ago, so every time I see the ad it's completely pointless.

I get a lot of these for elections which already took place... in places I don't even live. It seems like these are mistakes on the part of the people placing the ads, it's hard to imagine they're seeing the view metrics from after the event and deciding to keep spending.

Re: Meta's ads tools started switching out top-performing ads with AI-generated ones

#65

Post by gedy »

__loam wrote: post #33
naet wrote: post #28

I'm a big fan of podcasts; this year I've heard multiple podcasts that I listen to say that the bottom fell out of podcast ad sponsorship money and they lost a lot of funding. Many were looking for alternative ways to fund their podcasts like selling monthly subscriptions. I wonder if the ad market will start to drop out for other stuff like websites too. AI might cannibalize search engine traffic... if google can ba…

Something that annoys me about all the AI hype is that it's breaking a bunch of systems that seemed like they were chugging along just fine. Fundamentally all those podcasts probably have the same listeners as before, why is it necessary to totally rethink how we advertise to those people? Seems like we're causing a lot of pain by breaking things to make a bet on something that's totally unproven.

I don't have a reference handy but I think another factor was Apple (at least) started to exclude the automatic podcast downloads as a "listen", which caused a large drop in podcast listener counts for ad purposes.

Re: Meta's ads tools started switching out top-performing ads with AI-generated ones

#66

Post by sfink »

lukev wrote: post #55

Putting AI in the primary loop for optimizing ads (or anything) is risky... because you can only optimize what you have metrics for. Any implicit or unstated values will go ignored. There was an article going around a few years ago how if you just "optimized" without any constraints, you'd invariably iterate towards just selling porn. This feels kind of like that.

iron crab porn

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_peak

https://biologyinsights.com/why-do-things-keep-evolving-into...

http://127.0.0.1/Downloads/

Re: Meta's ads tools started switching out top-performing ads with AI-generated ones

#67

Post by yencabulator »

sfink wrote: post #66
lukev wrote: post #55

Putting AI in the primary loop for optimizing ads (or anything) is risky... because you can only optimize what you have metrics for. Any implicit or unstated values will go ignored. There was an article going around a few years ago how if you just "optimized" without any constraints, you'd invariably iterate towards just selling porn. This feels kind of like that.

iron crab porn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_peak https://biologyinsights.com/why-do-things-keep-evolving-into... http://127.0.0.1/Downloads/

> http://127.0.0.1/Downloads/

Ah, the site formerly known as ftp.warez.org.

Re: Meta's ads tools started switching out top-performing ads with AI-generated ones

#68

Post by toss1 »

immibis wrote: post #51
redsymbol wrote: post #30

I'm a software engineer who is also a media buyer, which is the term for someone who purchases and configures advertising campaigns. I have spent over $100k of my own funds on Meta ads the past several years, which makes me moderately experienced. I spend a lot of time in the "ad manager", i.e. the webapp that Meta has for configuring these ads, allocating budget, and so on. I think the current UX of the ad manager w…

Why class action? Sounds like you think you could sue individually. I'm not convinced, but you are.

A major benefit of a class action, especially for complex cases, is that the costs of prosecuting the lawsuit are spread over many plaintiffs. Pursuing an individual lawsuit in federal court can cost well into six figures, which is not a good bet if your potential recovery as a single plaintiff is in the same range. And that is assuming the large corp you are suing doesn't do the usual tactic of burying you in papers, spurious motions, and every trick in the book to run up your costs in money and time.

Class actions bundle those costs for 'all plaintiffs who are similarly situated' and the judgements are also for all plaintiffs at once, so class actions are where large companies can be properly stung.

This is also why so many companies put clauses in their contracts that you agree to forego any possibility of participating in a class action.

So, if you are subject to a systematic malfeasance by a company, the best route is a class action; they've already got it setup that you'll almost certainly fail trying an individual action, unless you have very deep pockets and close to a decade of free time.

Re: Meta's ads tools started switching out top-performing ads with AI-generated ones

#69

Post by Terr_ »

rchaud wrote: post #62
Terr_ wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the enshittification patterns: Abuse the middleman formerly applied just one side eventually gets applied to the other as well.

Used to be that only the consumer was exploited this way. Manually turn off notifications and permissions in an app, only to have them turned back on after an app update. This is why I block app updates across the board. My bank app will tell me when i need to update to continue using it, and that's good enough for me. Most app updates tend to make the experience worse these days.

Yeah, as much as some software updates need to be automatic for security reasons, others need to be opt-in because the publisher can't be trusted.

Not just in the sense of downgrading the software, but also when the publisher—sometimes under new management—decides to add things that invade your privacy or are straight-up malware.

Re: Meta's ads tools started switching out top-performing ads with AI-generated ones

#70

Post by DannyBee »

toss1 wrote: post #68
immibis wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why class action? Sounds like you think you could sue individually. I'm not convinced, but you are.

A major benefit of a class action, especially for complex cases, is that the costs of prosecuting the lawsuit are spread over many plaintiffs. Pursuing an individual lawsuit in federal court can cost well into six figures, which is not a good bet if your potential recovery as a single plaintiff is in the same range. And that is assuming the large corp you are suing doesn't do the usual tactic of burying you in papers…

This savings is mostly for lawyers, since almost any of these cases would be taken on contingency. You are not paying up front.

It therefore mostly affects case valuation

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