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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Personally I can't stand retargeting, if there is one turn-off I have when visiting websites it is being hounded from site to site by an ad. That signals to me to never ever buy that product. That it is 'exciting' to those in the advertising industry is a signal all by itself.

Once a while ago I googled for a bit around the time I was buying a car. For weeks afterwards I got hounded by car ads for some brand. Needless to say that brand is not on my short list for any future purchases.

Any advantage in advertising has turned out to be short lived. It's like building up a resistance to certain chemicals, at some point you need a harder variety to reach your goal. And then the resistance increases and so on. Retargeting will work for a while and then we'll be back to square one, more obnoxious ads and less content. Until all you see is ads.

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My biggest annoyance with retargeting is also buying a car. I don't remember seeing any car ads leading up to my purchase, but ever since buying the car (over a year ago now) my browser is littered with Ford Focus ads. It's not going to do any good to show me ads for a Focus, i already bought one. It's just a waste of your ad buy to show me more ads. Retargeting seems to be, at this point, one of those technologies that has a high potential value but needs a lot of work to realize that value.

Or it could just be that the people who sell fords aren't very smart. Three days (!!!) after i bought my car, they sent me an email promoting a trade-in event they were having, telling me what a good deal i could get on a used toyota at my local dealership if i traded in my car.

For my case, I always see newrelic retarget ad. I need to check newrelic everyday for work. And after that every time I watch a youtube video it shows me a newrelic ad. I am already a Pro Annual user, I can't upgrade my plan anymore. They should not retarget current user.

My company runs some of the retargeting campaigns for New Relic. I just checked our setup and they're definitely excluding people who have converted or become customers already. New Relic works with a few providers though so it's very probably one of them is machine-gunning all visitors with ads.

There is a general rule of thumb that a person has to look at/interact with/be cognitively aware of an ad at least 7 times before any action can be taken.

Showing ads across sites is just one more way to do that. In fact I would rather have relevant ads show up than irrelevant ads.

I will admit that many companies out there do overdo their retargeting campaign though. That's what the company does that is mistaken, not the technology.

The psychological requirements to achieve that task and your personal preferences are irrelevant, it is underhanded and obscene.

I will not deny that this is a technological solution to a social problem, and yes it is mismatched, but web browsers need to be managed by responsible stewards that protect their users from abuse (it is abuse).

It's just the nature of the global namespace. Makes the world look small.

Although I can see how this would have some short term appeal to use Firefox. I may give it another spin hope it's fast and stable.

The nature of the global namespace is irrelevant, with that logic we might as well make every bit of personal information freely available to anybody that wants it. Ambitious and potentially useful? Absolutely, but it's also extremely dangerous.

Personally I will be suggesting Firefox to all of my non-savvy family and friends because I support the idea that their privacy should be respected by default.

> That's what the company does that is mistaken, not the technology

The technology of low level internet surveillance in order to facilitate advertising? And you wonder why people don't like it?

I worked in advertising for quite a while and no longer do, I understand why you love retargeting and why you are sad to see it go. I'm sure that you were sad to see popup blocking become mainstream as well, popups and popunders had fantastic results. They were more hated but orders of magnitude less evil than 3rd party cookies.

You are expecting people to change their behaviour or preferences and make sacrifices solely in order to be easier to advertise to ... isn't learning never to fall into that trap day one of advertising 101?

Browsers are thinking about what their customers actually want, you are thinking about what makes it most efficient to control those customers ... of course you disagree. And of course you are wrong.

> and why you are sad to see it go.

not the GP, but I highly doubt it's going to go anywhere. Mozilla's decision is just going to accelerate the arms race into more and more esoteric ways of tracking you... I'd heard about evercookie, but tcp-level analysis was news to me.

true, that type of tracking is too useful, especially now that big players are used to having it. The browser's have the advantage here in both available options and agility so accelerating the arms race is probably a good thing.

What are you referring to when you say 3rd party cookies are evil?

Sorry, retargeting ?

I assume this is why I get ads for stuff I just bought on wildly different sites - the advertising network server asks for my cookie before serving the ad and so can identify me?

Yeah that's annoying. I will install adblock one day, but in defence of chewxy I just tend to avoid sites with that crap on them anyway.

It seems to me that every site is adopting this technology, so what, exactly, are you waiting for? The writing is on the wall.

Personally, I would suggest using a cookie management tool like cookie monster [1], and other tools like Request Policy [2] or Ghostery [3], depending on your browser of choice (i.e. RP doesn't have a Chromium/chrome extension, AFAIK). Adblock is great, but your reluctance up to this point suggests you would like to support some sites via their advertising efforts.

[1]https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/cookie-monste...

[2]https://www.requestpolicy.com/

[3]https://www.ghostery.com/

KISS Privacy is kinda sorta like RequestPolicy for chrome.

http://silentorbit.com/kiss/

If you are logged into gmail (and the site uses adwords), wont this still happen, even with 3rd party cookies disabled?

> I would rather have relevant ads

Me too, soo much. I was really counting on that until it never actually materialized.

Looking over my last few months of purchases, advertising could have struck a real coup by helping me find the lowest priced dry cleaner in my area, or by letting me know I could buy a USB device that lets me use an xBox controller in Windows.

Instead, all I hear is that when I drink a certain Vodka I'm on top, and that Budweiser loves horses. Also, everyone wants me to start using credit cards.

Yeah, I don't drink, and rotating credit with abusive APRs sounds like a criminal enterprise.

Maybe everyone else is getting the perfect ads right now, things that really help them decide what to buy. I've been let down. I don't think I'm the only one though.

Because giant companies from a select few high-margin industries are the ones buying the power ads. Hulu can only choose between ad spots for things I will never buy, there's no amount of profiling that fixes that.

There's just no relation between the amount of information a company has that would help me make a purchase and its advertising budget.

I'm sure what I am about to say is no great insight here on HN, but I like saying it so here it is:

There are two kinds of advertising: 1) Advertising that helps you find what you need 2) Advertising that convinces you to spend money you would not otherwise have spent

The lofty ideal has always been (1) but the reality seems to always turn out to be (2). We should stop giving lip-service to the lofty ideal.

Mostly true, but #1 is still necessary. You just made a cool thing. You want people to know about it. How do you tell the world?

Ideally, it'd be nice to have a thriving community of independent journalists and reviewers covering just about every topic and using their experience to evaluate new things. Consumers would know where to go to get the information they need.

But reality is so much messier. It's February 2013 and I want to buy an X that does Y and Z. How do I truly make an informed decision to buy the absolute best product that meets my needs? Who the hell knows. The resources just aren't there, at least not in a convenient, comprehensive, and objective form. Consumer Reports does some of that, but they're limited in scope. Therefore, advertising and branding.

Another way to look at it might be that #1 did happen, it's just called the internet.

Twitter, for example, has an entire team of people working on "search and relevance." This is essentially #1, but it's not advertising, it's just how Twitter works. The core concept of sites like Twitter, Facebook, and even HN is that you should be seeing the content that you find interesting.

What we call advertising in that context necessarily has to subvert #1. If it was the content that is already the most "relevant" to a user, there would be no reason for an advertiser to pay in order to make it visible to that user, since it would be what is naturally presented.

New Relic, I'm looking at you. I don't think I've seen a banner for anything other than New Relic for a month and I have New Relic and use it every day.

Would you rather see ads for the tanning salon or the hot waxing ads?? Really if you are a newrelic customer and only see their ads they are not running a very good campaign.. From a conversion perspective your are a waste of their money... But from the standpoint if getting you to come back and continue to use and talk about them - its working great

Frankly the data shows otherwise ... from my previous work in the industry the majority of people respond well to retargeting simply because it's relevant and useful. Hell it's been working for Google for years...

I wasn't disputing that it is working.

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