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Comment by aerosmile | Hacker News Reader

> All related studies are showing that the latter isn't working anyway.

This is very common on HN these days - stating something with a lot of confidence that turns out to be some self-constructed mental model that has nothing to do with reality. Then, add the obligatory "all related studies are showing it" and you have met the publishing standards.

Legally or illegally, morally or immorally, for better or worse, Facebook has created the most sophisticated ad targeting engine the world has ever seen. You want proof? Look at their financial statements. You want more proof? Look at all the companies that went public on the back of Facebook's ad targeting engine. Again, perhaps it shouldn't exist in the first place, but trust me, it works.

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Disclaimer: I studied media theory and publishing, but well before the Web became the all-decisive factor. Meaning, I have some idea about those things and have still an interest in them. (Also, I actually programmed ad embedding mechanisms for ad networks, but quit this field, when things became too invasive and ads too aggressive and I couldn't justify this any longer. – At this time, tracking was commonly done for multistage campaigns only.)

That said, I've never come upon a study that showed significant gains due to targeting, rather to the contrary. – So, after a decade, I'm still waiting for any proof in favor of targeting. (The suspicion must be still that targeting is rather a lazy alternative to media analysis and its perceived advantage is rather rooted in minimising efforts than in effectiveness.)

Regarding "Facebook has created the most sophisticated ad targeting engine", this is a rather biased proposition. It has enforced Facebook as a broker, made advertising cheap, while less effective, and has driven ad revenues for content providers downhill. (Google is to blame, as well.)

* There is a pervasive belief on HN that marketing teams are making easy errors, i.e. there is low hanging fruit

* Consultancies that improve marketing campaign efficacy make lots of money

* HN users are making small fractions of that money and constantly complaining about it

* Any HN user capable of picking this low hanging fruit could do this for two years and retire for life

* They are not

* Conclusion: Either there is no low hanging fruit, or the HN users observing this are making millions of dollars, or these HN users do not care for money at all and get greater utility from complaining about money.

Maybe, there's a biased view in ad business and some of the perceived benefits and effects are rather tautological? (This is why we have studies.)

You could also conclude from your remarks that there is a pervasive idea around ad teams that former generations (in the times of media analysis) were just delivering complete failures. However, this model had delivered for more than a century. How could this model perform with todays instruments and data?

The best thing about startups is that they test questions like that in a way that these studies can't. Because the participants have a very real and strong incentive to succeed they will perform that continuous search and hypothesis adjustment till they hit gold or die. If you truly have a Thiel hypothesis, you're going to get very rich.

In software, we call this "talk is cheap; show me the code", but of course here you don't need to show me the code. It's just that you're letting this golden opportunity go to waste. Up to you, I guess.

The problem being only that these startups are still acting in the bubble of common beliefs of the field. So these are actually testing the beliefs, not their real-world effectiveness. (Also, at this stage, you have to comply and conform to the delivery networks right from the very beginning with little chance of competing with the big, established ones.)

Edit: Moreover, you had to compete with the paradigm of low effort, high interchangeability and big data. (Meaning: interchangeable code, interchangeable users, interchangeable professionals, interchangeable clients, and lean know-how stack as it's "all in the data". While this adheres to criteria of optimization, it doesn't necessarily mean that it represents an optimum of effectiveness, as well.)

Alternative conclusion: as with all things in a capitalist society, there is a small minority of people that is killing it, and they are not making it easy for everyone else to discover their playbooks.

That doesn’t work because we’re assuming that most marketers are making easy mistakes. The playbook is so simple that people on HN could write it, supposedly.

> That doesn’t work because we’re assuming that most marketers are making easy mistakes. The playbook is so simple that people on HN could write it, supposedly.

Those are someone else's words, not mine. I never argued that winning on Facebook is "easy" (and for the record, neither is it on Google). It's not easy, it's just doable. And for those who have the skills and resources to do it, it's massively profitable. I would even argue that if you're letting an agency run your Google or Facebook account, you're lacking the resources to do it right. What you need is top-level talent competing against your nearest competitors, and winning battles inch by inch. An agency will never give you the talent you need to go up against a company that just raised $100m and is running their performance marketing in-house (and if you don't have such a competitor, then you're either smarter than anyone else in the world, or simply not pursuing a VC-investable market).

So no, it's not easy at all. But it's doable and totally worth it.

>"You want proof? Look at their financial statements."

Homeopathy peddlers make a killing, so does the agile consultants and th catholic Church, if this is proof they must both be right?

Just because someone made loads of money doesnt mean their claims are sciebtifivally valid.

I went out of my way not to give Facebook any moral high ground, and yet you still managed to get offended.

Snark isn't a sign of offense.

Call it what you want, the outcome is the same. You want to say [A], but before you say it, you have to start with [B] just not to get the conversation derailed by call-it-what-you-wants. And it turns out, the call-it-what-you-wants are still going to do their thing, pretending this is Reddit.

I call it a sound challenge to your fallacious argument from profitability. Your non sequitur derailed the conversation.

Would you mind to elaborate? I am genuinely wondering if you're a troll or if I am mistaken in my argument. To summarize, I responded to the claim below that Facebook's ad platform is ineffective:

> All related studies are showing that the latter isn't working anyway.

I pointed out that Facebook wouldn't be profitable if the ad platform is ineffective, and you called that argument fallacious. I am really curious to hear what's fallacious about it.

The fallacy is that Facebook making a profit doesn't mean that invasive ad targeting is effective.

It just means that Facebook is good at selling ads, whether they are effective or not.

I guess we have to define effective. Is it effective from the consumer point of view? That might be a long discussion, and we might assume that a world without advertising might be the most effective way to live your life, etc. But is it effective from the advertisers' point of view? Unless you want to call 5+ million marketing teams around the world total idiots, you have to assume that they are meeting or exceeding their ROAS targets and therefore pouring a lot of money into Facebook.

> It just means that Facebook is good at selling ads, whether they are effective or not.

Facebook doesn't sell ads. Marketers choose to sign up and spend money, because their jobs depend on being able to achieve ROAS targets. Contrary to popular belief, the world of marketing is very quantified and apart from experimental budgets, most of the money is spent on channels that are proven to work.

But without getting any deeper into all of this, I think I found my answer - it appears that at least a subsegment of people on HN believe that over 100BN of ad dollars (25% of overall digital ad market) is spent on Facebook in an unprofitable way, and that 5 million marketing teams get away with it, year after year. Hence, it's possible for Facebook to achieve great financial results without their ad platform being effective.

If that's your takeaway, then I think you need to read this thread again.

1) Nobody is saying that ads aren't profitable or that marketers are throwing money out the window because they are stupid. The discussion is about whether invasive user tracking is effective. Ads can be profitable even though user tracking is ineffective.

2) This thread also is mostly about your very weak argument. You wrote:

> Facebook has created the most sophisticated ad targeting engine the world has ever seen. You want proof? Look at their financial statements.

That's just not a good argument. Who knows, maybe Facebooks tracking really is the best thing in the world, but the fact that Facebook is raking in loads of cash on its own tells us very little about how effective their user tracking is.

You're just confused about how marketing works. The fact that you're dissociating tracking sophistication from performance tells me all I need to know. To learn more, dig a bit into the iOS14 impact on the Facebook performance results.

I just tried to explain why people think your argument is fallacious.

You said:

> I am really curious to hear what's fallacious about it.

But apparently that was just a figure of speech, not an actual question.

Your 'proof' doesn't make sence, what does 'offense' or 'moral high ground' have to do with it?

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