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Comment by ijidak | Hacker News Reader

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ijidak

I am an advertiser that uses targeted advertising and contextual advertising.

There are some products and services that absolutely require targeting by preferences to maximize profit.

I'm running such a campaign now and getting wildly high ROI's in the 14X range.

If I couldn't target by audience interest, I'd be happy to get an ROI that is a tenth of that.

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> There are some products and services that absolutely require targeting by preferences to maximize profit.

As a normal person who just wants to use his phone without creepy crap going on, I don't care—and see zero benefit if your profits are maximized.

Your profit seeking wishes are not my concern.

They were replying on the subject of whether targeted ads are effective or not. Whether they should be allowed is a different matter, but while companies are collecting your data it's not reasonable to ask advertisers to disadvantage themselves against competition by not using the marketing options with the highest ROI.

Send your complaints to politicians, not ad buyers.

(Disclaimer: I've spent millions - not my own money - on ads in my career. I'd support better privacy regulations to prevent some of the targeting I've been able to use.)

Politicians either don't care or can't get changes passed. Until that changes blaming and shaming does and will continue to work, at least better that my elected officials who'd ratherdo anything but challenge their largest donors profits.

> I'm running such a campaign now and getting wildly high ROI's in the 14X range.

Are you able to prove they wouldn't have bought anyway?

"50% of my marketing dollars are wasted, the problem is, I don't know which 50%"

But targeted advertising is expensive because it is controlled by 2 companies alone. OTOH untargeted advertising is much cheaper, with tons of unmonetized inventory, however there doesn't seem to be much willingness to take up on that.

Why would I care if you can't use marketing psychology dark patterns to take advantage of me to give you money? It seems like watching this industry fail would be better for my well being.

Interesting. But can you distinguish between the effects of contextual advertising (ad depends on the content around it) and targeted advertising (ad depends on the person viewing it)?

So if businesses like you cannot hyper target, you’ll spend more money right? Won’t this actually increase Facebook’s revenues then?

like I care your bullshit profit

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