Comment by dotcoma | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dotcoma | Hacker News Reader

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> Proponents believe we are entering a new era in marketing, where every creative message will be tailored to the specific needs of individual buyers.

They are talking about ads, not about which songs are suggested to us.

> Most personalisation efforts are powered by third-party data. Marketers infer who customers are based on their browsing behavior.

In order to deliver personalised ads, they use cookies — third-party cookies, by companies that invade our privacy and track our every move.

Spotify does not rely exclusively on poor quality third-party data: they also have first-party data about us: the songs we listen to, like etc; how often we listen to them; if we put them in our playlists etc. This is one reason why their guesses as to what we may like are better.

Another reason is that they are ‘only’ trying to suggest another song to a person who, apparently, likes music; they are not trying to guess my gender, age, job, wealth, type of person I am, mood, interests etc and find a match between these tracts and the fact that I may be interested in… an ad I never requested from a company I don’t know…

> “We determined there was simply too much waste in the old model of activating this third-party cookie-based data across high-reach, low-impact placements.

My guess is that the type of ads they are talking about here are general rotation banner ads, i.e. garbage worth nothing which gets sold for good money under the (false) promise that companies have ways to show your ads to the ‘right’ people. Problem is, they don’t.

> They are talking about ads, not about which songs are suggested to us.

It has a big list of media and it's trying to pick one that will be effective on you. That part is quite similar.

> Spotify dies not rely exclusively on poor quality third-party data: they also have first-party data about us

Is that why they're saying it doesn't work? Or is it a different reason? Because I see people citing all sorts of possible reasons and intuition can only go so far in knowing which ones are important.

> My guess is that the type of ads they are talking about here are general rotation banner ads

Maybe. But in that case how much is the data the problem and how much is the type of ad the problem?

Hi, let me try to answer your last point, which imho is the most important.

The problem is the type of ad, which is worth nothing. The data is just BS used in order to dress up the selling of a worthless ad placement for good money; and yes, that data is also largely flawed.

And even if it were not flawed, ‘guessing’ that someone who is supposed to be a certain age, gender, in a certain job, in a certain relationship, with or without kids, etc could be interested in a certain product is much harder than simply guessing that if you like these 10 or 100 songs, you may like this other song.

And how is anybody going to ‘prove’ that all this quasi-magical targeting worked, when click rates are ridiculously low even for highly targeted ads?

Imho targeting and ‘personalisation’ serve just one simple purpose: convince the marketer that he/she is doing the right thing, or what is considered right or best practice at the moment, and so that they are safe and are not going to be fired because, you know, nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM.

> Is that why they're saying it doesn't work? Or is it a different reason? Because I see people citing all sorts of possible reasons and intuition can only go so far in knowing which ones are important.

The Spotify data about like/dislike is rather accurate (like 80-100%), as long as someone doesn't click under substance influence.

Third party data (according to article) has accuracy around 4%-44%.

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