Not to mention the ads keep following you after you buy the thing.
And this is not only because of lack of information. Checks out a cellphone from Amazon, buys the cellphone, still get ads saying "you might like this cellphone"
And this is not only because of lack of information. Checks out a cellphone from Amazon, buys the cellphone, still get ads saying "you might like this cellphone"
>> Not to mention the ads keep following you after you buy the thing
If you don't want irrelevant ads for items you already purchased following you around, then you want better targeting.
I think many people just don't like ads at all. If I had to live with ads, I'd prefer to have relevant ads, but that's just me.
I do very much mind ads that stick a massive zombie in my face when i happen to be browsing a url listing that may hold something about games.
While some advertisements can alert you to a product that will be helpful, many have the psychological intent of producing dissatisfaction and are an attempt to compel you to purchase something you do not need and your life probably would be better off without. Advertising is deliberately about producing discontent and it makes people more unhappy and more dissatisfied with their lives.
I would rather see ads that I can immediately dismiss than have ones that make me start desiring that which I don't really need.
That's fine but I don't think there is an alternative business model that doesn't rely on advertising to feed the current demand of entertainment. I hope I'm wrong and people like you who find advertising distasteful can have access to the wealths of society with some alternative form of funding
There's no need for 'targeted' ads that follow me around if the ads are in the places I expect when looking for something.
Content providers should be ensuring they display quality and relevant ads, not relying on 'other' services to come find the consumer.
The same way they do in television, radio, film and every other medium?
Not really. Targeted marketing is about particularly narrow conceptions of quality and relevance. IMHO, the logic of targeting and tracking has severely twisted the meaning of those terms in marketer's minds.
There may be sense to this madness.
I believe rate of returns is increasing as online sales takes over. The only way to actually see and touch many electrical devices is to buy and return them e.g. there is no store in my major UK city that has premium non-mac laptops on display. It means you might buy and return 3 devices to find the one you want to keep. If the return rate is 30%+ then a completed purchase really is a strong indicator that might purchase the same thing.
I think it's much simpler. The chance that any person is say, buying a fridge at any point is very low. If you're 99% sure that person has already made their purchase, that means there's a 1% chance you're wrong, and they're still looking! That's a much better signal than any other signal you're going to get.
According to this article in the Toronto Star, online return rates are around 20%, rising to 30% in the holiday period.
https://www.thestar.com/business/2017/01/15/online-shopping-...
However they also sell returned items to others. There are multiple huge warehouses where I live filled with (mostly) returned products being auctioned off to the public by a middleman. The volume is astounding.
Actually, PC World had demo machines out to play with last time I was in there, but very few in comparison to the tech department of the department stores.
Maybe it's hard to connect Google's idea of who a user is with the store's user accounts. Maybe the ad-buying algorithm is suuper simple, and getting a dev to "do it better" isn't worth the cost.
If it's just "this person searched for car rentals two days ago, let's show them car rentals today," that seems simple enough to make money over "no targeting," with obvious and acceptable failure cases like "already booked a car" and "phone got stolen, should show ads for pawn shops instead."