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Comment by nopriorarrests | Hacker News Reader

From the article - "If you’ve been on the internet for any amount of time, you’ve probably seen very poorly targeted advertising. In my experience, I see a lot of car ads. I don’t own a car".

One can argue that advertising cars to person without one make some sense.

At least it's better then advertising vacuum cleaners to person who bought one on amazon 1 week ago.

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I'll give you a better example - I'm an English speaking guy consuming regular US content. I travel quite often and when I'm in non-english speaking places like Thailand, I see ads on Youtube(mobile) purely in Thai language.

I use Google products extensively and Google most definitely knows I don't speak Thai. I mean it's almost ridiculous the number of Thai ads I've seen on Youtube. For a company that sophisticated with AdTech, I'm shocked how bad they are with this.

Are they doing this on purpose just to sell more ads? The companies spending the money to show me those videos are practically throwing money down the drain if I don't even understand them.

Author here. I wish I'd thought of your example before I wrote the article :D

And I think my opinion on that is probably obvious, but I think the simplest answer is that Google simply doesn't care about mistargeting ads to a consumer who wouldn't conceivably click on them. They gain no benefit from reducing an advertisers spend that way.

The cars example is also not great because cars are one of those things that are advertised to everybody. Beer, laundry detergent, insurance, and movies are other examples like that. Basically, the kind of ads you see during a Sunday afternoon football game.

Another aspect of the Thai example is that the target is over constrained. The user is from the US, knows English, doesn't know Thai, is temporary located in Thailand, age 30 to 35, likes country music, and of ethnic decent (just example data). Advertisers can't really customize their offer to that overly constrained individual and the algorithm falls through to the remnant ad inventory. On the sell side, such a constrained target is a small market and not worth the effort to buy placement. If one runs unlock orig or pi-hole regularly, ads you do get out of home on your phone will start to be less targeted to you.

To the larger point of pull vs. push, I would embrace such a market place. Google shopping sort of does this. Good article. Thank you.

There's also the little problem where when your eyeballs are up for auction, the ones putting in bids don't have any relevant inventory targeting you so all the network can do nothing is default to whatever fallback ads they have, which are usually low cost brand building ones. That's where all the almost-porn and dating ones pop up because they're desperate for eyeballs of any kind.

This is exactly my experience. Go to Thailand, see ads in Thai. Go to France, see ads in French. Go to Indonesia, see ads in Indonesian.

Google has paid thousands of engineers billions of dollars over 20 years and somehow they have failed on this very simple optimisation!

They're just optimizing for selling ad space instead of your satisfaction with the ads. You're just a pair of eyeballs to them, if even that.

The advertisers you see have specified location but not language.

I'd be willing to advertise a culture string like "en-US" if I thought adtech would respect it, and not try to override it or profile me further.

Even as English speaking person in an English speaking country, I get non-English ads on Google properties. It's astonishing how bad Google's ad targeting is sometimes.

YouTube provides the platform, while ad buyers select the targets. Sounds like someone picked "people in Thailand" without filtering by native/preferred language. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2454017?hl=en

Edit: to clarify, even though Google makes targeting pretty easy, you still have to know what you're doing to set up a good ad campaign. Lots of businesses don't realize that ad buying actually requires some knowledge to avoid wasting money, so they just get the in-house "power user" to take care of it.

Who the actual fuck buys these ads? Ad people: are you reading hn right now? Google is screwing you out of your money, big time

We're on vacation in northern italy. Why did my 2 year old daughter just get served two consecutive ads, one for a razor blade, in german, and one for the Italian Amazon website; all while watching Dutch songs for toddlers on YouTube?

She sure as hell doesnt speak german or italian, and I don't think she needs a razor....

Consumer behavior is not always intuitive.

Even with vacuum cleaners, you're a magnitude more likely to purchase one again if you've purchased one in the past. From there it's just a math equation for a vacuum seller involving their cost per acquisition and re-targeting spend.

People credit adtech for knowing everything about them, but it's really not as smart or all-knowing as some give it credit for.

They also show car ads to people to make you think someone that owns a particular car is cool and good. You need to show ads to people that don't buy for that. However, the internet ad system is famously metric focused on, e.g. cost per conversion, so it's hard to say which mixture of evil and incompetent they are.

just to play the devil's advocate: perhaps they knew that if you owned a thing, you're more likely to buy the thing when time comes to replace it. The more advertising you see, the more your mind remembers the brand and product.

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