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.
> I honestly would not be surprised if the difference in effectiveness of targeted vs untargeted advertisement turns out to be none
> What if I told you the NYT has been doing "untargeted" advertising for 150 years? Besides if you advertise in the NYT you ARE technically targeting people
> advertising is the art of fooling oneselves first about the source of success and then fooling others
> Why would any premium website even agree to ads that track users?
Since you seem to work in adtech or advertising, that famous Upton Sinclair quote probably legitimately applies to you ("It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!").
That's the big problem here. The people with the most knowledge of adtech are likely biased and untrustworthy due to their economic interests, but the people who lack that bias also have less knowledge.
What needs to happen is that you and other adtech people should volunteer to be interviewed by some deep investigative journalism piece by a place like the NY Times or ProPublica. They could take your knowledge, filter out some of the self interest, and educate the rest of us.
Below is an example of someone trying to write about ad tech, but just making incorrect claims throughout the entire blog post.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18732538
It also doesn't really make sense that every single person who works in adtech is biased, and unable to get around that. If a single person could "fix advertising" then they'd make billions of dollars by changing the entire industry.
So you're saying we should just take whatever Wall Street says as the truth, since only insiders can really understand?
I think sometimes insiders confuse "not taking an insider perspective" with being wrong or being unable to understand.
If you think they're missing something, find an good reporter (who can understand you, find alternative viewpoints and call you on any BS), then volunteer your testimony and experience to them.
It seems worth commenting that you could make the same argument about not listening to doctors for medical advice. In this context, it just seems like you're making an appeal against authority.
You could, but mainly against things like billing practices and perhaps the necessity of certain procedures where there might be a conflict of interest.
Willfully choosing not to believe is on you. If you discount everyone talking about their profession because they get paid for it then you'll quickly end up with no experts on anything. People are still professionals regardless of industry. Treat them that way and you'll get clear answers.
I'm beginning to think that user-curated content is fundamentally flawed.
Tons of comments here confidently say that the very idea of targeting clearly doesn't work based on their own experience or that it's a house of mirrors that doesn't work because of some obscure math.
I've managed over $10 million of ROI focused ad spend on Facebook and Adwords. You can test if targeting works trivially:
1) Use the platforms to target one audience that's a generic "All US Population" audience.
2) Test this against (for example) an algorithmically generated Lookalike that FB creates based on your seed audience.
The Lookalike will generally perform 3-20x better than the general population, depending on how specific the audience is your trying to target.
As far as public data goes, 90% of new ad spend goes to FB and Google for a reason - they're the best ways of targeting specific audiences online. And this is easily provable if you've ever worked on even mid-size ad campaign.
Buying ads on the NYT Health section is a form of targeting. It's also a much lower noise targeting compared to programmatic.
I'll also note there's very little scale in direct ad buying - very few niches have scale that matters for any audience smaller than "interested in business". That said, programmatic outside of FB and Google is indeed trash and the NYtimes did well to drop it. But pretty much everyone in the thread conflates Facebook and Google (Again, 90% of spend) with the 1000s of random ad tech firms out there of dubious quality.
EDIT: and the downvotes begin, at this point it's just comical.
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...
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.