> Recently, Professor Nico Neumann partnered with the brilliant marketing team at HP to replicate this research for B2B. The results were unsurprising – but horrifying. Many enterprise technology companies spend millions of dollars ‘hyper-targeting’ IT decision makers (ITDMs) using third-party data. But if we get gender wrong more often than 50% of the time, what percentage of ITDMs do you think are actually ITDMs, according to the research?
> Do you want to guess? It’s 14.3%. And for ‘senior ITDMs’, that number drops to 7.5%.
> Super impressive! That’s about as precise as… a drunk monkey throwing darts?
That... seems... like a great result? How many ITDMs are there in a random sample of 10,000 people? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics [0], there are 715,000 people working as IT managers in the USA. So the incidence in a random population of 10,000 is 715,000/300,000,000 = 24 people. Seems like the ads are working really well.
I think it's interesting to see when you get a targeted ad you benefit from. I attended HackMIT for the first time after seeing a Facebook ad for it--I had an amazing experience at the event and that ad is possibly the reason I am a software engineer today. I doubt I would have received that ad if targeting weren't possible.
If I had to put my imagination to work where ads and humans can coexist peacefully, I could imagine a world where ads are required to be hyper targeted, and you would be shown no ads unless the ad was specifically targeted to you. If the ad wasn't relevant to you, you could click an x on it to make it disappear, and the advertiser would have to pay a penalty to the host of the ad (google, facebook, whatever) for inconveniencing their users. I suppose marketers at Disney and P&G would suffer, but I am really sick of seeing liberty mutual ads when I don't even have a car.