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Comment by squeaky-clean | Hacker News Reader

I used to work in airfare marketing systems, one of our biggest sellers was Instagram ads with prices inserted into the ad graphic hourly. I have no clue what kind of person sees an ad for "cheap flights to {destination}" and then clicks the ad and impulse-buys their tickets, but they exist. A surprisingly high number of them.

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Mentally ill people do it. Manic episodes in particular lead to lots of impulsive buying of things like plane tickets. Algorithms can target their ads at people with mental illnesses and exploit them while giving companies plausible deniability. Algorithms can even predict when a manic episode is coming on.

If they have enough data on a person, data brokers can easily classify people by mental illness and deliver their information to those looking to target people with specific conditions like dementia. Not nearly enough oversight or regulation on this stuff.

I've never heard this theory before. I wonder how much prepper grear -- survival food, weapons, etc. -- was sold to people who were algorithmically detected to be clinically paranoid.

I knew a guy who would serially impulse buy things off Instagram. I don't know about plane tickets, but his apartment was full of random shit he bought off his feed. Just alone he was probably covering the bandwidth cost of his entire town.

> I knew a guy who would serially impulse buy things off Instagram.

No lie, Insta knows what I want to buy before I know, and it’s very scary. I’m not an impulse buyer by any stretch of the imagination, but their advertising is some of the best I’ve ever seen anywhere on the internet.

Instagram knows nothing about me, i saw the ads for the Canadian metal top the other day.

They are the modern version of home shopping network. They make a fortune out of lonely people buying random shit.

That should not be surprising considering who owns them and how much data they have on us.

If you could find a few of these people, being a middle man for advertising campaigns targeting them would be one sleazy side business.

This is already a thing.

To be honest, any of the advertising schemes being dreamed up here in the comments section of HN are already a thing.

It's people like me who had it on their to-do list and it was a reminder to do it later.

Yeah but you didn't do it via the ad if I understand correctly. I would never ever do that, regardless of the price or any other fact. As mentioned above, I never click on them by principle, same as I never watch TV programs full of ads. Firefox with ublock origin blocks 95% of ads, for the rest I see if there is quick X to remove them or ignore them hard. If its too annoying I leave the page and go for competition.

The best ad could theoretically achieve with person like me is that I would go to ie skyscanner and check current situation.

You’re not the general public. Most people don’t even use ad blockers. Those of us on HN are a different breed in that regard.

Also, even clicking it and then returning later works for the advertisers.

Half of men aged 16-24 use ad blockers, so it’s not uncommon either.

I couldn't believe this, but then I did some Googling. I found this PR post: https://backlinko.com/ad-blockers-users

I'm not sure how accurate are these figures (it is an obvious "SEO" booster PR post acting like a blog post), but they are way higher than I expected. Even if it was even 25%, I would be shocked. It seems pretty sophisticated for the average user to install an ad blocker. I wonder how they distinguish men and women.

When I watch average people "swipe" on the metro, I am always shocked by the amount of adverts on their screen. How can they see or do anything? And some of the apps like Instagram (with doom-scrolling auto-enabled) continuously interrupt users to show them video ads that cannot be skipped. (I see the same for "free" games.) Ugh. Who are these people/zombies!?

If you end up buying a ticket you found in skyscanner on the same device then they'll (often) attribute, or partially attribute, that sale to the ad view even if you didn't click (obviously only if you aren't adblocking or if they're getting around your blocking).

But I think people at HN are the exception to how ads are used.

Offer me a great price to anywhere warm in winter and I'd be one of those impulse buys.

If this was part of a retargeting campaign it would probably be a good audience too.

I think I have clicked that kind of ad. The situation would have been, I was thinking of booking tickets to X, I don't want to pay more than Y, sure I'll click and see if your tickets are as cheap as you say.

In europe casually flying somewhere is fun, cheap and very accessible if one works remote (or one can just go for a weekend). Not everyone plans things in advance.

More likely is misattribution.

Nope, we only did attribution if you clicked the ad and purchased on a device with the same facebook cookie within 24 hours. Our other ad services probably had misattribution errors and the instagram stuff still outperformed them by like 10x.

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