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Comment by endofcapital | Hacker News Reader

The only social networking I do anymore is twitter. The list of the thousand people I follow is so intimate, I feel like just flipping through that would reveal everything about me and be a huge violation of privacy.

But even on this platform I've spent almost 10 years curating the perfect feed on, the one that should know absolutely everything about me, I still get served endless garbage ads for junk food and pickup trucks. I can't think of two products I care about less.

Amazon is a similar story, they seem convinced that I'm a woman despite having some pretty detailed purchase history going back to 1998 suggesting otherwise.

The targeting algorithm is often wrong, they just don't seem to know it be willing to admit it.

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I think it's a common misconception that "the algorithm" is responsible for this, when what is actually happening is that an advertiser is bidding on the wrong users and effectively buying bad ads.

I think it's a common misconception that "targeted" advertising in any way involves the ad viewer's interests. Showing you only ads for things you are interested in was never a goal. The advertiser targets who should see the ad, which may or may not match what the viewer's interests.

Advertising junk food and pickup trucks to someone that "can't think of two products I care about less" isn't an error. It's an attempt to make you care (if possible), and reinforce the brand so their name is familiar= if opinions change about junk food or pickup trucks in the future.

> Advertising junk food and pickup trucks to someone that "can't think of two products I care about less" isn't an error. It's an attempt to make you care (if possible), and reinforce the brand so their name is familiar= if opinions change about junk food or pickup trucks in the future.

This sounds just like what people in the ad industry would tell worried clients. The actual reason is likely to be more mundane: the guy is, according to the tracking database, in an age and income group with high statistical correlation with interest in junk food and pickup trucks. Not all targeting is as detailed and personal as everyone thinks after reading scary articles.

I don’t know, I suspect it’s in ad agencies’ interest to keep people under the impression that they aren’t susceptible to ads and the ads must be for those other people who are.

More like the advertisers who could cater to a person’s interest are not able to locate the individual.

Because the platform knows ads can be creepy, and will result in user disengagement.

Facebook often accurately targets people, and the result is terrified users.

So, the answer is other platforms have taken note, and are providing cover for users, to retain them.

This augments the return on ad spend, but only slightly, since ads actually aren’t very effective in practice. Ads are simply signage, nothing more. They don’t actually change behavior, but only reorganize behavior that usually would have happened anyway, so that the existing outcomes possibly land in the finite set of buckets differently.

Thus ad platforms only need to target so vigorously, and with that, it becomes obvious that targeting can be made less acurate, and buyers of ad space would never know.

So you can quickly see that Facebook’s game is absolute overkill, and other players likely underkill by a margin, with much improvement to their platform reputation.

Facebook does such a good job of ad targeting these days, I've actually disabled adblock on the facebook.com domain. It's weird to be getting ads for products and services I actually want and wouldn't have known about if not for the ad.. there's some junk too, certainly, but overall the ads actually improve Facebook for me. Which feels really weird to say.

I've heard this about Instagram, too, which makes sense I guess since they have the same ad infrastructure. One woman I was talking to the other week said her favorite thing about Instagram was the ads. I was like.. "huh."

Well yes, the bad ad buying is often done on purpose. In theory I would not have a problem with advertisers wasting money on this, because I figured that by now they should be getting outbid by actually competitive ads that promote new value propositions and lower prices rather than pushing brand reinforcement. This has mostly not happened yet though, and I currently doubt it will anytime soon because there is still too much of an advantage to big advertisers that can afford to run campaigns like this... many opportunities there though for folks who know how to trim some of the fat.

But does that really work, or is it some cool story they sell the people buying ads? Especially for junk food, how would that work? You cannot make McDonald's more familiar with me. It's freaking McDonald's! And I'm not quite sure my opinion on them will change through ads.

But even if, doesn't this just bring you back to the original point of the blog post? Just advertise to everyone, no data mining and ML required. Best case, you do indeed change my mind about your brand, and the stereotypical junk food consumer sees the ad, suddenly feels hungry so hops into their pickup truck heading to the nearest McDonald's.

Fascinating, thank you! Where can I read more about this?

Google “purchase funnel”. It’s 101 in ads business.

I'm not sure you can pin this all on the advertisers.

My interests, according to Facebook, include:

  - "product (business"), 
  - "Price", 
  - "Providences and Territories of Canada", 
  - "Livestock", "experiment", 
  - "Lizard" and "Shark" (as a hobbies!),
  - "USB".

As far as I know, I neither own nor operate a battery-powered reptile farm. Honestly, reptiles kinda creep me out.

They do get a few things correct, but none of these seem "inferred"--it's mostly organizations that I've explicitly liked and...substrings of their names.

I don't know, certainly on Netflix and partly on Amazon no one is bidding. Yet the recommendations are atrocious.

I was reading a dark fantasy book series and all the similar items were romance novels…

> The targeting algorithm is often wrong, they just don't seem to know it be willing to admit it.

It doesn't matter if their targeting algorithm is wrong. It just has to be 1) better than random and 2) not significantly worse than anyone else's.

In fact, even that isn't necessary. It just has to be perceived as those two things by those who are willing to give Google or Amazon money to try to improve their chances of selling you stuff.

Wouldn't Google and Amazon rather have more money for effectively targeted ads?

It's a continuum. Better targeted ads are worth more than less-well-targeted ads. They do the best they can, and they keep trying to get better. Their targeting may be lousy, but it's still good enough for them to get paid.

95% of ads are not using targeting based on your personal interests. Advertisers don't just upload ads and let them go. They add the targeting themselves and start wide open so that they can optimize after seeing the actual performance amongst different groups and cohorts. Far cheaper and more effective. Ad networks might add their own algorithms but they definitely aren't going to stop advertisers from spending money otherwise.

Every time I get a Spanish-language ad on Spotify or YouTube, I take solace in the fact that the algorithms have not yet won.

I get spanish language from the credit card machine at the supermarket, it’s written in the card that it is French.

Are you sure that it's the algorithm that's wrong or could it instead be that the people who buy ads target the wrong categories?

If I want to target 18-25 year old males with make-up products then no algorithm is going to save me from myself.

Your example might be seen as an advertiser trying to capture a nascent market (which it actually seems to be).

Simple test: Google "wedding ring", click the top 10 links and browse around each a bit. You'll see the ads on a lot of the web change.

I'm sure if your Twitter feed was full of automotive posts you'd see car ads. It's probably full of stuff no advertiser cares about, like your love of old British railway cars, so instead you get generic ads about spicy nacho cheese.

>It's probably full of stuff no advertiser cares about, like your love of old British railway cars

As a railway enthusiast myself, I would say that's actually an opportunity for very effective targeted marketing:

* There are loads of specialized reference and historic books and video on the subject.

* The crossover interest to model railways, a hobby involving many high-margin purchases, is very high.

* Many enthusiasts literally plan their vacations around preservation railways and museums. Everyone from the tourist-railpass sellers to full-fledged package tour operators should be targeting them.

If that interest is not well advertised to, it's either because they're doing a poor job identifying the interest and routing it to advertisers, or they've done a terrible job of fostering ad buyers in those verticals.

While, yes, it's theoretically possible, there must exist some company paying Twitter to sell one of those products, and who wants it specifically targeted to the group.

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