It's possible that some combination of efficient markets, semi-inaccurate/incomplete tracking data and chaos theory combines to make it mostly irrelevant.
So Steve just got a promotion and likes the BMW 3 series, but advertising to him is useless because he has already decided to buy a BMW 3 series. Whereas Larry has had the same job for ten years, and the same Ford for ten years, but if you put a luxury car ad in front of him it may get him to take a test drive and actually create a new customer.
The data says Mary is single and goes to the gym every day, but it only thinks she's "single" because she's in a committed long-distance relationship and isn't interested in dating anyone else. And she's a fitness expert who is willing to spend her time researching fitness products, so she already knows everything there is to know about those products, already buys the ones she wants, and advertising them to her isn't going to create any new exposure. Whereas Jane never goes to the gym, so you might actually sell her a gym membership or a piece of fitness equipment because she doesn't already have one or know anything about it yet.
John has a 10th wedding anniversary coming up, but he has also known exactly what he's going to do for years. Whereas he has a third cousin whose wedding is coming up and has no idea what to get, so you should be showing him ads for toasters and flatware rather than jewelry and chocolate.
In general, you may do better to advertise your stuff to the people who aren't already interested in and knowledgeable about it. Which actually looks kind of a lot like random scattershot rather than targeting.
I don’t want to buy beef jerky when I’m reading about a military strike in the Middle East, no matter how much my profile indicates I like beef jerky — but I might be open to a book on politics.
Because reading about content is self-selected disclosure of interest, the NYT already has all the information they need to target me — they know I read politics, and when I’m in that context.
The only thing Google can provide is slight refinements on which political book to suggest — which isn’t far enough above the noise floor to matter. Anything else is just them giving the NYT statistical fuzz to pretend carrying their ads on beef jerky isn’t an all-around negative so they can fleece advertisers.
Targeted advertising isn’t about efficiency, it’s about raising the number of places they can (uselessly) place beef jerky ads so as to increase their cash flow.
This seems to me what "targeted advertising" should mean - NYT says "for all routes of nytimes.com/politics, show political ads. If it's local news, open it up to classifieds for local business." Etc.
If someone's on the page, is that not enough information?
Instead of only political books being able to advertise on that page, they’re bidding against beef jerky and cars and so on. This raises the price for the ad slot by creating (false) demand.
Without those out-of-place, targeted ads there would be less demand for every ad slot, and people could bid less for them.
Heck, even Google AdSense scans your site to match ads with the content (source: I've tried using AdSense). They just don't rely exclusively on the content for ad targetting.
for actual comparisons: https://thomashunter.name/posts/2019-01-09-generic-banner-ad...
The whole surveillance capitalism nonsense we live under is a way for ad networks to justify their existence. If you're a company that has data on everyone, you need to convince people they need that data to accurately sell ads, and targeted advertising exists solely for that purpose. The amount of cross-site tracking that these companies are able to do outscales what any company could manage to accomplish themselves, or even for a smaller competitor to step in, so as long as targeting users across the entire Internet is believed to be a must-have, these ad behemoths stay on top.
> Dear Amazon, I bought a toilet seat because I needed one. Necessity, not desire. I do not collect them. I am not a toilet seat addict. No matter how temptingly you email me, I'm not going to think, oh go on then, just one more toilet seat, I'll treat myself.
It is easiest to understand it with coke. It is so prolific that people say "coke" instead of "soda". That we have "is Pepsi okay?" as a joke. Instead what these ads to is make you feel good for your choice in coke. Not to convince you to buy it, per say, but so that when you do buy it you get an extra kick from those sweet endorphins.
So is Amazon trying something similar? Perhaps the opposite? As in "Hummm... maybe I could have gotten a better one", causing you to return and replace (or just flat out replace). But that might be a weird strategy.
I was researching cameras. I saw very little camera ads in my research. After I bought a camera? Ads for the camera I just bought everywhere, for months afterwards. I have not once clicked on a ad and bought something. I maybe clicked on 10 ads in my lifetime and they were 75% stuff I THOUGHT I had no intrest in. I think targeted ads is the biggest con no of our age.
Even more egregiously, maybe sometimes the advertiser's metrics have some reverse-causality: you buy the camera, then they show you the ads for it; but something in their metrics isn't properly modeling the sequence of events (e.g. they correlate retargeted camera ads shown per week with camera sales per week). Then they mistakenly take credit for a sale that happened before the ad was shown.
That's not to say such mistakes always happen, but I wouldn't be surprised they didn't happen fairly frequently. Given that measurement is hard and both adtech and advertisers are motivated to present success stories, and may not be too motivated to second-guess positive-sounding numbers.
Incidentally, those weren't targeted ads. Those were ads hand-picked by the person producing the content about those books. From that very small sample I conclude that ads relevant to the context in which they're placed are more effective than targeted ads.
I will say that I'm thankful that Squarespace, Audible, and Skillshare support independent video and podcast creators. I click their referral links sometimes to check out new features etc, but would only ever sign up if I needed that particular service. Still, I think that form of repetition helps their mindshare in a positive way.
I did buy the Glif directly from an ad on Daring Fireball, albeit months later, and in combination with brand awareness from their free time-lapse / speed ramping app.
This is annoying and, when one thinks about the implication that everyone and their dog knows who you are, scary.
I have never bought off of ads otherwise and find that most of the time they are not relevant to my interests. I also started using an adblocker because of other reasons (mal-ads/autoplay) even though I previously did not do so because I felt text/banner ads were quite acceptable in order to help keep the lights on.
Mostly clothing...things I didn't even think did existed
And it may even be profitable to be the first to turn away from it when everybody else is on it, and instead use more of your ad spend for non-zero-sum customer generation. Then you get all the new customers to yourself while everyone else burns their margins fighting over the existing ones.
Winner: ad platform.
Maybe a payday loans company finds that people like Steve are less likely to be interested short term loans - so they avoid advertising to him.
I have been running my online business for 5 years now. I learn (and keep learning) all I need to know from the same, high quality source.
I get targeted all the time by adds on landing pages, email funnels, Facebook ads, etc. Some of these are legit, but thanks to my experience I can see that most of them are of poor quality.
They will never sell me anything, while they might sell something to someone that hates his job and is looking for another way to make money.
Unless you have a promo, you really don't want to advertise to them... But that is exactly what you end up doing, because you can't target "people that visited my website 6+ months ago".
Also Google could place a survey question instead of an ad, asking "Which of these products have you purchased in the past month?"
I think a message's context matters - and this is almost self evident from examples like ads for airline tickets being shown on plane crash articles. I think targeting is great, I really do, but I think the value of trusted brands is likely just as, if not more, strong.
If context matters, and I think that argument was the entrenched idea pre-internet and has not been disproven, then where is the positioning of targeting? My hypothesis would be that targeting is likely best utilised when people stray from self selecting brands, e.g. NYTimes needs no targeting, but a smaller publication likely does, as people aren't there for the brand's known positioning, but because of their targetable interests, e.g. they ended up on a site about coding, or computer games, or knitting or whatever.
If true, that would be easy for an ad network to detect. If the click through rate for ads on a topic not matching the users interests (as determined be browsing history) are higher, then your theory is correct.
It's basic stuff, and I'm sure they already do that.
