Scams upon scams: The data-driven advertising grift
anotherangrywoman.com
anotherangrywoman.com
You can construct experiments to demonstrate damn near anything is true, and without (or even with) a rigorous background in statistics and scientific methodology, it's very hard to examine the supposed evidence.
I know I say this a lot, but constructing solid experiments is time consuming and difficult. It's hard even if you you're trying to be fair. Professors routinely get this wrong despite a literal decade of formal training in the scientific method and half a lifetime of practical experience with this exact craft; despite how fucking up puts their career, reputation and livelihood in jeopardy. Not only does this happen a lot, bad science routinely slips through peer review as well.
That's the state of affairs in the spaces that in general aren't extremely adversarial, where the people involved in constructing the experiments in general don't have a a vested interest in trying to mislead you. (Scientific fraud still happens of course, but Jan Hendrik Schön is the exception and not the rule)
One time I was at this silly daylong corporate team building event where they assigned us to groups and had us do "experiments." As it happened one of my group members has a PhD in Particle Physics and the look on his face was something else. Needless to say he didn't bother telling the take charge type that her experiment design was entirely nonsensical, because why bother, but I was amused.
However, it also seems as if a tuned LLM could look at the corpus of my on-line profile (mail, FB, HN) and produce a model of my attention and commentary (positive/negative). Then that model (or several models) could be tested against various ads to determine which are more likely to produce positive responses. Right now I think that would be too expensive except for very high value ads/targets, but perhaps pricing will come down and non-keyword based advertising might appear.
LLMs are useless in this domain.
I always figured there are some verticals where the value per acquisition was high enough, and the product narrowly-scoped enough, where it might make sense to microtarget individual customers-- profiling them individually and building custom messages for each of them.
The obvious target would be the narrow-scope prescription drugs-- all those ads that say "If you have XYZ-positive, PDQ-negative Exploding Sphincter Syndrome Type XVI with Sprinkles and Cheese Sauce". Presumably there are only a few hundred people with that condition in the country, but you're spending a lot of money to reach everyone else to try to catch them in your net.
Super-premium luxury goods might also fit there, but I wonder if the brand risk would be too high. Rolls Royce probably knows the 200 customers most likely to buy their new model, but it might not fit their brand to actually put together a campaign that seemed like they were actually TRYING to sell cars.
I think there are high value customers for whom this probably makes sense, but only if those doing the targeting make money from it. Right now you're the product, but the supplier is the one doing the targeting (or not) and the customer doesn't know enough about their potential customers to target. The suppliers don't really make money by effective targeting.
I witnessed this.
I briefly worked on the recommendations team for a fashion retailer, doing yeoman plumbing and maintenance. Basically an in-house equiv of RichRelevance.com.
So, so much data and logging.
Alas, after cutting out all the obfuscation layers and steps, the "lift" attributed to the team's exquisite algos proved illusory. Some >80% of the conversions came from the "recently viewed" rule. Whereas the conversation attributed to the algos consuming most of our dev and compute resources was basically noise.
I wouldn't say our (very smart) data scientists were fooling themselves, necessarily. More like the feedback loops were never fully validated. (Familiar story of non-programmer domain experts hoisting a POC, which then was promoted to production. Maintenance hell.)
Coincidentally, FWIW, my bro has worked in ad tech (Avenue A/Microsoft, RichRelevance, others?). He's got a math skillset. Was a true believer. It took a long time, but he eventually lost his "faith" that digital advertising (as they were doing it) was effective, on the balance.
Also FWIW, during my brief stint, I advocated "personalization". What I imagine StitchFix is doing. I'd love to know, for real, how they're doing. Like the split between algos and human "style consultants".
Practically all web marketing experiments and analysis is invalid, and not replicable. But it pays the bills for everyone to pretend its legitimate.
The worst part is that some of the tests were still used to justify decisions to and by management. SMH
It’s a global optimization problem, not a scientific way to understand how a specific change impacts users. Testers that have this mindset tend to be locally constrained and less likely to have bigger wins.
No. It's the fault of middle management.
If you are unable to provide your manager reasons for new development, he's going to find someone else to do your job, someone who will give him a report with charts and numbers that he can use to justify and expand his teams operational and headcount budget.
Giving a manager a report that says "there are little to no modifications that we can make at this time to improve UX" is a CLM for him.
Is it only their marketing power, or perhaps something about the platform better?
Not trying to be confrontational, just interested in finding out why.
To be honest Ebay, just like Craigslist, didn't change much in the last 20 years.
Sometimes you want one of those Chinese paper cutters, or reasonably priced leather tools. Ebay is mostly good, despite itself. They've also barely changed the UI in my memory, and I've got a 20 year old account.
Anyway they're a little different. I don't think you'd purchase an item to be shipped off CL? It's more a local community board.
[1] https://thehustle.co/01072021-uber-ad-spend/
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/01/02/when-bi...
The cost of pushing ads to people who already have mattresses is insignificant to capturing those that are about to buy them, statistically speaking.
The disappointing thing about this trend is that even if the rule sets are obviously wrong, yet still provide positive results means that their operators have little reason to change them. Statistics don’t work for individuals.
Case in point is credit rating and insurance underwriting
All the companies, from startups to giants, across different countries and cultures, must be wrong.
Only few (and they all write blogs) can see through the vile of disguise and tell the readers how online advertising doesn't work.
If people are rude or posting something completely unhelpful that’s a downvote even if the statement is overall true.
I also find it a bit.. idk what the word is, egotistical? Self-centered? Judgemental? To vote based on subjective qualities like perceived rudeness or helpfulness (toward one’s own goals or one’s own understanding of a stated goal)
Considering that things like attacking the messenger and bad-faith discourse (via insults, etc) are counter to the stated HN ethos, I don't feel it's unhelpful to downvote assholish comments for the sake of being assholish, even if the comment has accurate factual information that is relevant.
No wait. Nope, that’s not how it works. Downvoting for rudeness, incivility or low effort comments makes for a much better environment.
So many of the adtech dollars have come from venture capitalists pouring money into startups that will be profitable any year now, they swear.
So much of the advertising business has always been about convincing the entire rest of the economy that they desperately need more advertising in order to compete, regardless of any actual stats on ROI.
Is online advertising—and in particular, the hyper-targeted advertising that fuels the industry's insatiable hunger for every last drop of personal data—worthwhile?
We don't know.
You don't know. I don't know. The adtech companies don't know (but they assiduously avoid acknowledging that fact, often even to themselves). Their customers don't know.
Me, I'm comfortable with my educated guess that it's nowhere near as worthwhile as they want to make us believe it is.
I've never worked with anyone that doesn't measure ROI or ROAS. I'm not arguing that some companies don't need to spend so much on advertising or that it's not needed for some but there's a pretty clear measure.
> Is online advertising—and in particular, the hyper-targeted advertising that fuels the industry's insatiable hunger for every last drop of personal data—worthwhile?
In my experience in eCommerce marketing is that both Meta and Google are steering advertisers towards massive audience campaigns that aren't hyper-targeted. They might be doing hyper-targeted advertising but it's no longer as recommended as it once was.
All that said, I use ad blockers and I think data should not be hoovered up without consent or awareness and sold without consent. On my personal site and even my online shop I don't use GA or any other third party tool (hosted on Shopify so they inject some things).
Fundamentally, there are two "sides" of advertising ROI you can try to measure: the individual, and the aggregate. They each have serious challenges.
At the individual level: sure, some people see an ad, say "hey, I want that!" and go buy it. But that's definitely nowhere close to the majority of purchases—even online—and it's very unlikely to be a very high percentage of ad-influenced purchases. Much more often, the ad gets the product into your brain, and then later, when you're shopping, you see it and say, "hm, maybe I should get it," never consciously realizing that the ad caused or contributed to that. Thus, any kind of consumer survey will be unable to capture more than a tiny fraction of ad-influenced purchasing.
At the aggregate level: what you're trying to measure here is simply your sales numbers over time. And except for the very largest of companies, sales numbers will be pretty noisy. That means it's very hard to tell for sure whether this ad or that one worked, or if any of them had any direct effect on sales at all. (That's particularly true for the subtly-influenced purchases I described above; those might happen months after an ad campaign starts.)
Is it totally impossible to measure ROI? No, it's not. But it takes a lot of work, and has a fairly high degree of inherent uncertainty. The old saw "half of all advertising dollars are wasted—we just don't know which half" is very relevant here.
The buyer of ads does (usually) keep track of conversion (as correctly pointed in the article, also the seller) and when optimizing their strategy they're usually ok with the results they get from it (because they sell and they have sales attributable to the online ads)
But here's the catch, making a more efficient ad probably doesn't make the sellers more money.
of course it does. it allows the better seller to take budget from other ad sellers.
"Hey boss, I spent $40 milion on a targeted ad campaign with this fancy new agency. They sent us a report showing 2.5% uplift, but I ran it by our in-house stat nerds and they say it's bogus."
vs.
"Hey boss, I spent $40 million on a targeted ad campaign. The agency proves we got a 2.5% uplift. That's $300 million! Ain't I terrific!? Where's my bonus?"
Edit: and...
CEO to board: "We tried a new targetted ad campaign but it didn't make any difference."
vs.
CEO to board: "Last quarter the industry suffered increased competition, and our uptake through traditional advertising channels suffered. Fortunately I had the forsight to direct Marketting to open up to new, inovative methods. I'm pleased to report that it paid off, to the tune of $300 MM, completely offseting the drop from traditional campaigns."
The most common these days is “conspiracy theory,” which is really an optimistic view that starts with the assumption that someone understands what is happening and can coherently control it. If these conspiracies were true it would mean that all we’d have to do to fix major problems is get “them” out of power or convince “them” to become the good guys. Very, very optimistic.
Combined with supremacist beliefs (They are superior which gives them insight others can't possess) and we get pretty much all the conspiracy theories.
Sadly, there are plenty of very real conspiracies in this world, doing immense harms, yet those are seemingly actively ignored by the theorists... Which I often presume to be a result of the inability for the theorist to hold the "special knowledge" card as any who looks at the evidence would come to the same position and thus the promulgation of such legitimate theories are "too mainstream" for those seeking to further thier self delusion of supremacy.
Worst case, if someone refuses to stay silent, you can just label them “disgruntled”, question their character, their mental well-being, claim that they’re in cahoots by some known evil agent, etc etc.
Point is.. many conspiracies don’t require perfectly competent agents with perfect knowledge.
> If these conspiracies were true
Well, quite obviously all theories are not true. The bulk of random conspiracy theories are most certainly bogus, just like most low-effort theorizing by laymen in general. But aggregates don’t make conspiracies impossible.
This is called conversion rate and for some businesses it can be surprisingly tiny while still making that business completely viable.
I would hazard that rates in the mattress industry are almost preposterously low (<5%) but margins are so high that it doesn't matter in the slightest
This whole ad driven philosophy encourages the absolute bare minimal product that the customer will still pay for.
As a consumer that is bad for me.
Ultimately “voting with your wallet” becomes an inefficient communication method with all the layers of bullshit in between.
For Google search ads pretty good CTR would be about 8%, and a pretty good conversion rate would be about 5%. So it’s more like 1/250 buying if you’re doing pretty well. At average costs, that’ll be one conversion for something like $40 in ad spend. More average would be like 2% and 3% so more like 1/1700 and like $70 per conversion.
(Display ads are more like 0.3% and 0.6%. So more like 1/50,000. Costs are cheaper.)
Those prices are _average_. There’s no flat rate for these—they’re an auction. So generally your higher margin items, especially in industries with higher average click/conversion rates, are going to end up with higher bids and higher costs.
A bank will pay a lot more to convert someone to a mortgage customer than a restaurant will pay to convert them. You may end up paying $30 per click for someone searching for mortgage refinancing. Assuming the same “good” search conversion rates, you’re paying $600 for the conversion at a $30 CPC. (I suspect the conversion rate on something like mortgage refinancing is probably lower.)
It’s been a few years since I was forced to live in the advertising world but (1) no it’s not a money printing machine (except for the ad networks) and in fact (2) I’ve literally never seen a directly attributable positive ROI. Mostly the gap is explained away as "well, it's building _brand awareness_". Most of the positive results I’ve seen were… questionable. Usually “you didn’t acquire new customers, you took existing ones or existing leads and funneled them into your advertising pipeline and attributed them there”. Think advertising on your own company’s name—people searching for your company by name were almost definitely going to end up there anyway.
I know loads of people in the same situation
People can say what they want but when I sit down to eat, it’s Mark Zuckerberg who I thank in my prayer
(If you already have one, post the link).
Also, the incentives of the advertising platforms and the advertisers mitigate against efficiency.
In fact, getting to a world where ads are perfectly targeted would be one hell of a privacy nightmare.
As an occasional admittedly naive experimenter with ads – it’s far more likely that the platform has done the math and showing you the ad is profitable to them, not the advertiser.
Google et al love nothing more than to burn your entire ad budget on cheap clicks from countries that will never buy anything. But the number of “ad conversions” looks high and graph go up!
Getting these platforms to do what you want is a literal full-time job. Hell, in bigger companies you have entire teams doing nothing more than bending over backwards to get these platforms to do the useful thing instead of setting money on fire. The algorithms love setting money on fire. It’s a lot like giving your 3 wishes to a genie, you have to be very specific.
I can assure you it is very true that it takes a lot of skill to get ad platforms to do what you want. They do not care about you. The algorithm will make The Metric go up and that’s a threat. It’s your job to make it a good metric.
While I'm sure some companies have some "reliable" 3rd party + 1st party metrics that affect their bottom line, they don't need more until the trends start to invert, and then they just don't have the data for marginal short-term experiments. This causes these companies to make sweeping changes that a 3rd party will not help tool around...leaving the company to decide the changes either 1) help climb returns (overall), 2) hurt returns, 3) most commonly, show nothing at all. It's flailing in the dark, hoping for an external force to turn things around. The company that is still relying on someone else's platform are dinosaurs and small players. Sometimes they are able to climb out of it due to externalities or developing their own platform.
There are a lot of small companies in the world. Would Facebook miss you as an advertiser?
Let’s say sales increase but your advertiser just burns 20% of your spend because it can and you won’t know. That’s the scam part.
It’s not that your spend doesn’t increase sales. It’s that part of your spend is wasted and you could increase sales more if it wasn’t scammed away as wastage.
I just bought a dozen bagels for $20. I’m happy, pretty good deal. But if the store was throwing away a dozen bagels for every one I bought, that’s wastage. Just because I’m happy doesn’t mean it’s not a scam.
* participating in the subs in good faith, with full disclosure;
* astroturfing the posts&comments;
* rigging upvotes/downvotes;
* building relationships with (maybe bribing) the mods; and/or
* entirely running the sub already.
Whether by social group principals (grassroots), or self interest promotion (corporate), this is the thing that has been infecting the Reddit platform for years making it less fun to use.
You can tell by turning them all off. Ask Kraft Heinz.
Beyond that it gets fuzzy. Is it inefficient? Yes. Does anyone agree on the actual mechanics? No. Is the data wildly inaccurate? Sure. Is there grift? Totally.
And it’s like a room on a cruise ship — the boat is gonna sail one way or another. So it has to be sold.
Advertisers might choose to let Facebook arbitrage those impressions into a cost per click model — at pennies per click instead of hundredths per view. Tradeoffs galore in that model.
When you aggregate these numbers into a $600b industry, you start to see how sweating some of the finer details just doesn’t matter.
super shaky reasoning. the less rooms that get sold, the less likely future ships are to sail or even be built. individual decisions matter in aggregate
I think it’s an opportunity. The original premise of google is that targeted ads would let you benefit from “sweating some of the finer details.”
If 1/3 of a $600B market is wastage or fraud, then that’s an opportunity to give advertisers better response for their spend. Really massive.
I’m sure advertisers would like more sales by being able to remove the waste ads. Currently they can’t do that. But if some new company or tech allows for that, it’s worth trying to figure out.
Its probably impossibly to conclude with any confidence that the results were simply due to cuts to the ad budget, cuts to the budget and cuts to operations, or simply cuts to operations. Ads are also not commodities. An ads effectiveness is also not the result of pure spend, cheap ads can be very effective and expensive ones can also not be effective and vice versa.
Places that would also make sense to advertise mattresses: around universities and dense rental housing, or new developments of single family houses. I required no spy networks to make this list.
I think the issue is that the platforms don’t want to actually target, they just want to pretend and allow for the narrative for why.
I would expect that the search pattern of multiple mattress buyers is very different than single (ie, single searches and buys one and stops searching; multiple searches, buys one, keeps searching). And for returners have identifiable patterns (ie, searches, buys, searches for “how to return”).
Remember that google knows pretty much every single search you run and every page you visit and every checkout you complete successfully (if you’re using chrome).
Let's think carefully before we argue that Google and Facebook should expose (indirectly or not) even more of the information they collect to third parties.
Of course its tested "rigorously". Performance marketing is always about testing and optimizing CAC/CPA. It can make or break your company. If you can acquire customers at 10% lower rate(at the same volumes) than you competitors and you have similar COGS, you will dominate them and will ultimately will be the market leader. Monetary incentives are there to ensure efficiency just like there are incentives around COGS for efficiency.
Statistically, these advertising segments will be very fuzzy and there will be outliers (probably many of them?).
We have a yearly Gads budget around ~$5-$6M, of which is 95% SEA. We are selling an unchanged service in a very stable, slowly declining market with heavy ads competition for the top keywords. Roughly 60-65% of our customers are paid and come from Google.
Since then, our ROI on that spending has not changed whatsoever. Paid traffic remains stable. Our CAC and conversion rates are virtually the same (even slightly better). Our new customer's LTV has increased compared to the previous cohorts as well, so it seems we're actually getting better quality leads (though I wouldn't attribute it necessarily to Google).
So if reporting more data to Google was supposed to help us target our users more cost-efficiently, it did a piss poor job at it. In hindsight, we have wasted so much time trying to help Google make "smarter" decisions by providing it with more and more data (hello server-side tracking), while the most efficient thing to do would likely have been to do nothing at all. We have been working with GAds selling the the same service for more than 8 years now, so we have a large basis of comparison to be able to make that case.
Maybe we're lucky, maybe this will turn out badly, but since then I have stopped blindly believing whatever the ads platforms are pretending to do behind the scenes with all this data. If they do anything with it, it doesn't seem to be for the advertiser.
Our next step will be to gradually cut our SEA spending and follow the impact.
And don't get me starting on Facebook's borderline fraudulent ad performance reporting that doesn't match our reality...
Someone who goggled matresses and then bought one is hardly an "outlier" - it's probably more common than someone who googled mattresses and hasn't yet bought one. I guess the ad-tech companies don't let their advertisers de-select prospects that have already shot their load?
I've pulled all my google ads, facebook ads, instagram ads and podcast ads.
After about 10 years of doing ads (for my coffee club) and really attempting to track what was happening (from a technical point of view) I couldn't actually attribute any of it (the holy grail of digital marketing). "Word of mouth" is still our biggest channel. And all the time whenever I speak to "marketing" people it's the same low value analysis with zero mathematical or scientific vigor. They look at what happened (High CTR on this ad) and draw some conclusion from it, and then next week when CTR flatlines on the ad they have no comment and are busy looking at the non-significant noise coming from another ad.
And that's before even talking about the pure lies coming from the podcast people who swear up and down they know exactly how far into a podcast someone plays, when the spec they quote explicitly states it doesn't really work on apple products and 90% of the listernship is Apple. So many lies. It is a grift built on grift. Somebody in the organization knows it's a pile of lies, but the sales people actually believe it I think or don't care.
I wonder if there are any good books out there for these sorts of businesses in modern times, doing a kind of shovel selling during a gold rush sort of business plan, not really caring if the ore vein is even real, just serving the lemmings their desires.
I thought it was common knowledge. The more complicated and graph-filled the dashboard is, the more work that the advertiser can claim to have done to their bosses
Before this, the classic life style segment in media analysis was magazine audiences aged 15-25. Notably, this was not the part of the population that could afford the goods advertised immediately, or even anywhere in the near future. The idea was that this would be formative, that this would effect in an invaluable baseline of expectations and anticipations that could not be competed with, when it came to real acquisitions. Well, nowadays it's all just-in-time, often even just-after-buy, which seems to be the most efficient.
Just great writing, this.
Disc: Google employee, not ads though
Easy money for advertisers just by showing some fancy irrelevant graphs.
Have you ever seen a real estate agent?
Can we build a society without the need for real estate agents? Perhaps. Would that society be better? Probably. But saying they are simply a grift is obviously untrue
I'm not going to argue about whether ads are "worth it", but working on the other side (serving and optimizing ads), I can tell that yes, we run the numbers, and the math (mostly) works out.
As per your examples, we have run experiments by applying targeting ads based on narrow segments, and others without. As it turns out the data shows that "casting a wider net" works better, statistically.
Make of it what you will.
Knowing that you bought a mattress is useful for the ML to find the mattress-purchase-likely cohort. Filtering those people out just saves the advertisers money. Hence the grift.
Google Ads specifically has a feature to exclude targeting of customer's you've said have made purchases, ie. only target net new customers.
The platforms aren't as dumb as the post author thinks they are.
People who have recently bought a mattress will see a lot of ads for mattresses.
Maybe the platforms are not that dumb, it is the mattress seller that doesn't properly make use of that feature, or there could be other reasons why they insist on suggesting over and over again a mattress.
The experience described has happened to everyone for any (not very often replaced) item bought online, be it a printer, a wash machine or whatever, so if the platform is not dumb, it lacks data and the sellers are dumb, in any case the final effect of this "targeted" ads is 0 added sales.
I'm not saying it's likely, but there are scenarios.
I did this. It’s because I’m incompetent. But I bought stuff for each room one at a time. Use an ad blocker, so no clue if it caught.
Think of it — some people have a second home. Or a short term rental. Or a guest bedroom.
“No one really knows what mattresses are meant to gain from their lives either. They are large, friendly, pocket-sprung creatures that live quiet private lives in the marshes of Sqornshellous Zeta. Many of them get caught, slaughtered, dried out, shipped out and slept on. None of them seems to mind this and all of them are called Zem.”
Maybe we should boycott mattress ads for the sake of preserving the species.
So, you’re left with this great signal that someone is shopping for a mattress. Seems like a very good reason to recommend other mattresses to them.
Advertisers aim to optimize expected revenue over cost within a 'payback period', which is typically 1-3 years for large advertisers. This is calculated through customer acquisition cost, retention, and incrementality (the probability of an ad causing conversion).
Only advertisers themselves can effectively calculate incrementality due to access to their specific conversion/retention metrics. This incrementality, along with the optimal mix of channels and ad spend, is the ongoing challenge for sophisticated advertisers. It involves multi-objective optimization across millions of ad assets, campaigns, and targeting criteria.
Privacy regulations since 2015 and subsequent laws like GDPR and CCPA have led to more reliance on probabilistic modeling for targeting. The entire pipeline of targeting, engagement, conversion, and retention forecasts are now based on probabilistic models.
While ad networks offer simplified scaling solutions like 'target roas' and 'campaign budget optimization', they're more useful for average advertisers with limited internal resources - eg, they can't justify hiring ML SWEs, quant traders, technical PMs, etc.
Advertising has become even more data-driven and arbitrage gains for sophistication have increased. Profound gains can be made with investments in marketing and forecasting science, similar to the operations of a quant trading firm.
Source: I've managed $10B+ through automated ad spend systems since 2012.
You already see this with some goods so its certainly at least somewhat effective, e.g. luxury watch ads in beverly hills contrasted with military recruitment billboards in south LA.
First is the old chestnut: Why does company keep advertising product to me after I've already bought it!? This is one of those child-like criticisms that keeps rearing it's ignorant head. Literally, you are ignorant as to why they are doing it. Your ignorance as to why doesn't imply their stupidity. Amazon does it. Google does it. I'm sure Facebook does it. So either three of the biggest companies in the world are full of stupid idiots or perhaps you are just ignorant to the reason they are doing it.
> Their ethos is that if a human can do a task, a machine can do that task better, and not cost them anything such as salary, pensions or or a basic level of respect
No, their ethos is - we can't possibly have any reasonable number of humans do the task. In what universe could we imagine hiring a sufficient number of humans to sift through the data Google has collected? They have immense data on literal billions of humans. How much time would it take any person to understand you as a person sufficiently by painstakingly reviewing your data so that Google could send you perfect ads? The very premise of this is ridiculous beyond reason.
So the conclusion is based on the premise that having humans do the task is impossible. We have no other option than to use machines and algorithms to attempt the task because it is the only viable alternative.
> Advertisers, then, are getting served a steaming turd on a plate rather than the medium-rare filet mignon they were promised.
Advertisers are making a value judgement based on the options they have available to them. They can advertise on TV, radio, or magazines. They can advertise on podcasts, YouTube channels or Instagram feeds by directly contacting the creators and doing sponsored content. They can put up billboards and wrap public buses. They can put people in public squares and hand out flyers, do personal demos and offer prizes. I couldn't even scratch the surface of what is available to modern companies for promotional purposes. The fact that Facebook, Amazon and Google are as large as they are suggest there is some value being derived by companies given that they have plenty of alternate options available to them.
> There isn’t any evidence to suggest that an ad targeted to 35 year old men with children with an interest in football is any more likely to result in sales of Football Dad socks than a poster for Football Dad socks at a bus stop. But an entire industry is based on pretending that this is the case.
I really don't think they are. But let's compare the idea to the other advertising avenues I listed. TV ads are broadly targeted based on the time of day the show runs at as well as the content of the show. Magazine ads are broadly targeted based on the content of the magazine. Junk mail and flyers are broadly targeted to people living in a particular geographic area.
But I guess this MSc in marketing knows more than the entire industry they claim to be from.
This fallacy is called appeal to authority, and its the worst kind at that - its based on wealth rather than competence.
I think of it as an appeal to consensus but if you want to dismiss an argument based on some debate bro tactics then at least be more substantive than naming some so-called fallacy and leaving it at that.
The organizations that have the data and that are using that data to sell advertising to the largest number of buyers are doing a particular thing. Traditional media, as I point out, is doing a softer form of targeting as well. So who is right, the person who flashes their MSc in Psychology as if that grants them authority? Or do we instead look at the overwhelming evidence based on the behavior of the entire industry?
We have absolute proof that homeopathy is grift. But by your logic, You ask people engaging in grift whether they have consensus
I would love, just once, for yet another commentator on the advertising practices of Google, Amazon, Facebook, et al to provide a shred of evidence for their baseless conjectures. But of course, there is no evidence. There is, in fact, no correlation based in fact or reality between homeopathy and the advertising practice of said companies. Just an attempt to use rhetoric to smear them based on personal agendas.
You can hate the companies and their practices. You can hate advertising in general. But I see no reason to doubt the effectiveness of the techniques on rational principles alone. I have no doubt that there is a clear signal in their data that shows their practices achieve outcomes aligned with the needs and desires of their customers: the advertisers. You don't understand why because you lack of access to the data and are therefore unable to independently see that signal with your own eyes. To conclude that the companies are stupid or deceitful based on your own lack of independent confirmation is a kind of hubris that is outstanding.
At first I was amazed at the number of interesting local groups and their member counts. I felt I missed out on so much, but activity seems to have not recovered since 2019.
Then after browsing around, I realized that there a huge number of single women living in the region, in their 20s-40s, whose main interests are hiking, real estate, and *Kubernetes*.
This seems incredibly odd since I do not live in California…
The dating scene must be brutal for “on-prem” kinds of people…