Do customers benefit from highly targeted online ads?
gsb.stanford.edu
gsb.stanford.edu
I would actually like to receive more relevant ads. "Hey, we saw that you recently purchased a trash can, check out these garbage bags." There are so many supportive or related products that would be relevant to things I've bought. It's a no-brainer. Yes, I know there are "related" and "customers who bought this..." on each product page. I'm talking about after the fact in the days and weeks that follow the purchase.
And how about the option to say "No thanks, I'm not interested in these types of products right now." or "I already have this."? Is this really a difficult thing to implement?
Maybe I'm missing something.
The type of Facebook ads that are heavily leveraged by Amazon are called "re-targeting ads". True to their name, they target you again for something you've already looked at. Usually, they serve to remind person being served the ad about a product they looked at previously and didn't purchase. They're actually very effective (which is why Amazon and others continue to use them, despite how "creepy" they feel). The fact that you're shown re-targeted ads after already purchasing an item points to a bug in Amazon's system and how it interacts with Facebook.
This is the one and only time a targeted ad really was useful to me, but it sure was useful.
Assuming you mean "customers" as in businesses... because you and me? We aren't the customers... we are the products.
It's closer 10,000 useless ads for every ad I'm interested in, plus the occasional malware thrown in.
It is manipulation that sidesteps rationality and hijacks a supposedly 'free actor'. This is why it must be eliminated.
After this experience I began to trust this form of targeting but still think 'retargetting' is annoying (I publicly stumped one of the execs at Adroll when I asked 'why do we need retargetting?')
If that was the case, advertising wouldn't work, and companies that engaged in more advertising would be burning money without improving their competitive position. Advertising would be a net harm to the business doing it, and businesses would soon learn that not advertising was an easy way to slim down costs without hurting revenue, leading to the rapid and inevitable demise of the advertising industry in all media.
That this has not occurred suggests to me that human nature is not to block out advertising, whether or not it is consciously noticed and easily subject to intentional recall.
> Quick: What's the last ad you saw before going to this website?
An online ad for Civ 6; I remember clearly because it made me recall the speculation I've been making recently that there is a mechanism recently that is overtargeting ads (both personally and temporally), because rather than getting ads for things that I might be interested in, I'm seeing a lot of ads for things I've just thoroughly explored.
2. This appears to assume that consumers are rational