> Ad value is not intrinsically tied to the extraction of personal data
Ad value may not be tied to the extraction of personal data, but it's unambiguously tied to the use of it. Obviously more targeted ads perform better.
Ad value may not be tied to the extraction of personal data, but it's unambiguously tied to the use of it. Obviously more targeted ads perform better.
Do we honestly know if that's true in any meaningful way? It also depends on what you mean by targeted. If it's advertising power tools to someone who's clearly searching things related to DIY, sure, make sense. If we mean: "Push this product to men between 30 and 40, who works in construction and have 2 kids" then I'd love to see an A/B test that suggested that a broader campaign isn't cheaper and equally effective. You're cutting of a lot of potential customers when you're targeting is to narrow and I don't think that's accounted for in general.
See, for example: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/1963405.1963431
There was a point in an episode of the podcast You're Wrong About where one of the hosts made a comment about how much you can learn about people just by observing what kinds of things we don't require evidence to believe.
I think that the effectiveness of tracking-based advertising might be one of those things. It seems to be tied to an assumption that, where data is concerned, bigger is always better. Ironically, statisticians and philosophers of science have already known that this isn't actually true for about a century now.
That they know the whole thing is a big lie, and contextual ads definitely work better, but they are either stupid or corrupt and forcing this concept down everyone's throats?
But is it? Maybe? It could also be the case that our thirty year old is perfectly content with Spotify and has no interest in records, or it could be that he has been going to the same local shop for the last decade and can't be tempted away. And it could also be that our 18 year old actually loves the 1975 and thinks records are a vibe but isn't connected to her local music scene and is would love a way to browse and buy records that doesn't involve the social anxiety of going to in IRL store where she feels like an outsider. But you can't really capture this kind of data which is why we still get ads like "bought a vacuum -> you must be a vacuum enthusiast."
The people running the ads are measuring the results in different ways. Whether or not they see measurable increases attributed to their ad spend is what keeps them coming back, or not.
Auction houses are inextricably linked to the results they are driving. It's most of the reason they get most of their business.
This is why companies like Google and Facebook control so much of the ad market. Not just because they are popular publishers, but because they have some of the most sophisticated ad delivery and measurement platforms.
I can transfer an ad click ID through to a sale and into my CRM, showing a 100% direct attribution. This attribution determines my likelihood to choose an "auction house" in the future.
It's kind of crazy the level of disrespect and outright dismissal the HN community gives to the ad world.
These ad networks own the market because they're the only suppliers of digital ad space with enough billboards to meet the massive demand; that's no small feat. And yes, they do have very far reaching tendrils to determine attribution which is also technically impressive but that's also not without a sea of muddy data especially when it comes to VTA.
Google and Meta aren't magic and you're giving them far far too much credit for what are really your own (or the agency you paid) successful ad campaigns because you did all the work.
You're completely clueless, just stop talking.
First, the "ad network" in this case and the "publisher" are the same thing. Second, nearly all of effective modern performance ad buys on the major publishers (Meta/Google) outsource most of the targeting to the publishers via tools like lookalike audiences (Meta) or dynamic search ads (Google), all of which are powered by user data. In fact, the publisher's loss of performance data via IDFA was the entire reason why losing IDFA was so bad for Meta. It wasn't that the buyers couldn't close the loop on who was converting (they could), it was that the publisher couldn't close the loop on who was converting (super important for targeting). The idea that buyers drive conversion and the publishers have not much to do with is wrong. It's blatantly obvious you have no direct experience in this area, and no idea what you're talking about.
Sources:
- Spent over $100m on performance ads
- Started and ran an ad attribution company
- Ran the team that built the Reddit ads platform and know how hard it is to make a performance ads platform work as well as Meta or Google (basically impossible)
(p.s. Citing 12 year old research on advertising makes you look clueless, most of ad targeting barely existed then and the performance was absolute shit compared to modern ad platforms)
Let's assume most of high-quality ad-spaces are available for "broader campaigns". Once each small business broadcasts ads here, they will compete for space. Price of space-unit goes up.
Then some ad-space-seller opens Pandora's box: "hey I can allow you to narrow the audience by location targeting. Each unit is more expensive but conversion rate is higher so you will end up with a better margin overall"
Do you think no one has done this?
My thinking is that any positive results they've seen from targeted ads are just a result of them running any time of advertising campaign and not specifically a targeted one.
The targeted ads might also have been proved to be more effective, in at least some cases, for some companies, but are they significantly better, like 20, 50 or 100%? They might be 5% better, but is that enough to justify the amount of data collection?
Now this is a nuanced take I am here for. I think if we put a value on personal data, much like a carbon tax, personalized ads would instantly become less profitable than contextual. In a heartbeat.
No, the increase in efficiency is not worth the data collected.
However with improvements in machine learning, behavioral ads will get even better (this is happening as I write this). And that value comparison may flip yet again.
Another factor to consider is location. Very few services/products that are advertised globally will be available where you actually are.
If that's true at all, it depends on the targeting. Consider the classic "I bought a toilet seat, so now Amazon gives me loads of suggestions to buy more of them". I remain convinced that lots of ads are poorly or incorrectly targeted with the results that the additional information didn't actually help them and may have even hurt them.
There are certainly poorly targeted ads. Not sure what that has to do with the technology, though.
Some ad tech may be responsible for the bad targeting, depending on your vendor. But there is also ad tech that has scary capabilities that rarely misses.
If the goal is to remove advertising, then it may be better to set up mechanisms for consumers to share information with sellers, rather than play whack-a-mole with adtech.
This is already happening with Whole Foods / Amazon, REI, and other loyalty programs.
I'd be thrilled with this, as long as I can choose zero brands, and companies will refrain from collecting data about me.
Telemetry in software is never worth it in my opinion. The only part that is useful is crash detection and logging. But if the goal is to decide what is important or no, the data just become self reinforcing. You have all those feature request boards and items with multiple votes on it and the company never act on them (Looking at you, Spotify), so what is the usefulness on the telemetry then?
> Without major changes to its operating model, each day the targeted advertising infrastructure is inching closer to collapse. Those who build and maintain the adtech metropolis now face a decision: shore up defenses around their strategic interests with slight tweaks and creative legal theories, buying themselves as much time as possible, or rebuild before the crash.