A: ...and in conclusion, it's a win-win situation. Users will benefit from ads and our revenue will go up.
B: People don't like ads on their TV.
A: But they do. I refer you to slides 18 through 25 where you can see engagement metrics for our ad rollout on the old model. If people wouldn't like ads they wouldn't be clicking on them so much .
B: I don't like ads. Do you like ads on your TV?
A: No.
B: Does anyone here like ads?
A: That's not the point. No-one here is in our target group or representative of our user behaviors.
C: Ok, if there are no more objections we're going with A's plan then. B, can I see you in my office after we finish here?
The reason they predict their revenue will go up (which it will, at least in the short term until the market adjusts) is because they have a lot of customers already lined up to pay them to show ads on their TVs.
Those customers' marketing departments decided to pay money to include their ads on TVs because a similar process was followed and they (rightfully) predict that they will get "engagement" on those ads (which the marketing department will rely on to justify or increase their salaries).
The problem is that this "engagement" will mostly be just annoyed customers mis-clicking or trying whatever it takes to dismiss the ad and not actually intending to purchase the advertised product, thus not contributing to the company's end goal of selling more product.
I am not convinced that the majority of the advertising & marketing initiatives out there actually translate to more profit. Marketing departments will brag about "conversions" all day long but how many of those are either accidental clicks or people who were already determined to purchase your product anyway (looking at the companies who buy Google AdWords on their own brand - if someone's searching for your brand on Google your website will already be the top result - a click on the ad is not a true "conversion" in this case and is just wasted money).
Ultimately, people have a finite amount of time and disposable money, and throwing more ads at this "problem" won't solve it. Your conversions will go up because of accidental clicks (and your marketing department will capitalize on that to justify their salaries/raises), but that doesn't magically give the consumer more money to actually go and buy your product so your profits will not increase.
"Amazing! The smaller we make the 'X' button, the more people love them!"
TuneIn does this.
I think anyone with some experience in that type of software would intuitively understand the negative user experience described here.
Seems like a pretty straightforward case of the classic "Unless their salary depends on not understanding" rather than some opaque wall of unknowable unpredictable consequences.
Sounds like yet another case of, "Lies, damned lies, and statistics."
Except that Google lets anyone else advertise in that slot above your brand. And as we've seen some companies can confuse the customers and steal them away in such an ad.
If we tacitly accept a search engine allowing such phishing expeditions in those ads, then this kind of spending is the necessary and only step companies can take.
I’m actually considering whether it would be a good thing if the app stores would verify government applications and perhaps not even allow ads on queries which have results that include governmental apps...
Could be a true conversion given that all competitors are paying adwords on your brand name search also. If you don't have them you will probably appear after a long list of competitors with really personalized clickbait titles prompting your customers to compare you with them
Google has devolved into a shitty search engine even ignoring the advertising. Someone please build a search engine comparable to google in the mid-2000s. No duckduckgo isn't it.
Pro tip: if the competitor uses your trademark in their ad copy, you can do a takedown notice and usually the ads will be removed.
The dominance of this kind of surveillance capitalist or ad-saturated model everywhere is a side effect of extreme wealth inequality and a generally demand constrained economy.
There are a few good reasons to do this:
1. Competitors will bid on your brand name. Your ad for your own brand name will have a higher quality score and be very cheap, driving up the price for the competitors.
2. So much of a SERP is below the fold that there is value to being as close to the top of the page as possible.
The kinds of "feature" we are talking about with the Samsung TV here and other so-called smart devices will stop me from buying those products in the first place. But then I also don't use Windows 10 for my main PC because I think I should control my PC and not whoever happened to write the OS I'm running, so apparently I'm an outlier.
- Brand awareness is one thing, but it feels companies are more interested in saturating consumers with advertising. That saturation is something entirely different.
- Advertising can present information to base purchasing decisions upon, but rarely does in most media. While advertising should never be the sole source of that information, it would be far more effective for brand or product awareness.
We all know this, but we ignore it. Branding for brandings sake == lying to customers.
Heck the yoga app I use I saw through a mobile ad. Same deal for the fitness app I use (BodBot, awesome app, check it out!)
I've gotten onboard Kickstarters from ads, and I've bought keto cereal from an ad I saw.
99.999% of most ads I ignore, but sometimes ads are really well targeted and actually show me something I want.
(None of these ads were on a tv in any way...)
This sounds like customers will eventually choose less shady brands in a year or two, when in reality all brands will actual race to the bottom together.
The big companies have people who check if the ads are working. Every have the clerk ask for your zip code? That is because they are checking if the ad sent to some zip codes worked. It is noisy data, but statistics is all about finding signal in noisy data.
https://www.adexchanger.com/ad-exchange-news/the-marketers-g...
That’s odd. You’ve never read a valley S-1, I take it?
It's the same thing in the airline industry - people will complain all day long about legroom and being treated as cattle, but the next time they buy a ticket they vote with their wallets when they sort the flight list by price and choose the cheapest option.
But that information is never available at the point of purchase so most people get the surprise of see ads when they had no idea that was even a thing.
- You can buy the device for $X, and it’s marked as being sold “with special offers” (a euphemism for ads that would be more explicit in an ideal world)
- You can buy the device for $X + $Y, and it’s marked as being sold “without special offers”
- You can buy the device for $X “with special offers” today, but you can spend $Y once you have the device to “disable special offers”
This case is pretty terrible because Samsung isn’t giving buyers the ability to pay them the $10 directly to disable ads while not being up-front about whether or not ads will be served.
Do any of the airfare search sites allow you to sort/filter by legroom? I would love that feature.
American tried. American failed. Nobody was willing to pay more.
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/04/business/american-air-to-...
United Premium, United Premium Plus, Delta Premium Select, American Airlines Premium Economy, Lufthansa Premium Economy, Alaska Airlines Premium Class, Air France Premium Economy, Air China Premium Economy...
tl;dr: when it comes to crappy airline service, the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our regulators, but ourselves.
Airline tickets are the same: I know I’ll be treated like shit, nickel and dimed, and have no legroom so why wouldn’t I be looking for the cheapest ticket?
If someone would roll out such a feature, I'd use the hell out of just as soon as I feel like packing my butt into a petri-dish again.
The three big mainline carriers offer coach seats with extra legroom on most domestic flights (branded as Delta Comfort+, United Economy Plus, and American Main Cabin Extra).
There was this article a while back I read that talked about how native peoples made poisonous foods edible. Some processes were extremely convoluted and unreasonable, but it worked, and efforts by a "reasonable" man to make the process more efficient would have certainly doomed the whole tribe.
Examples like that really make me question the idea that an efficient economy is the best economy (let alone if capitalism and free markets are ideal).
It really captures the inanity of a person who just sits around crunching numbers all day and killing off people’s beloved products and showing small percentage quarterly gains... while destroying goodwill and long term customer loyalty in the process.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/04/book-review-the-secret...
Now, the models that the somewhat sophisticated supermarkets use don't fit on a spreadsheet, and really try to guess which items really are people's favorites, look at profit margins, and risks of people just going to a different supermarket altogether because the competitor down the street still has your favorite, or charges 30% less for it. They check what happens when a product isn't in stock, or when a competitor has a significant discount. It's a difficult optimization problem, given all the differences among people's shopping lists.
Having a favorite product get discontinued sucks: It happens to me at least a couple of times a year, and sometimes straight from the manufacturer, so I can't even buy it online. But don't imagine that every supermarket out there is run by teams swimming in money. It's an extremely competitive business with many players, and there's not that much of a difference between the way the small chains run their operations today and having to close down because the lower prices of a larger competitor dropped sales just enough that they are losing money.
Likewise, there's no such thing as "the best product" at a supermarket. Everyone has their own spread of products and if you cancel low-performing product lines, sometimes it has unexpected effects. (Anecdatum: We used to exclusively do grocery shopping at Woolworths until they stopped selling the cans of chilli beans that we use for nachos. Now we do maybe 1/4 of our grocery shopping at Coles instead, costing Woolworths thousands of dollars a year in lost sales, just because we needed some chilli beans and might as well get the rest of our groceries while we're there.)
I don't really follow this line of thinking.
Of course, knowing the real reason is preferable, but not always possible, especially in a premodern setting. Before the discovery of prions nobody really knew why cannibalism is dangerous, yet it was a taboo in most of the civilized world.
Samsung learned from the industry represented here and it’s disconcerting to observe the lack of self-awareness in the vitriol being leveled at them from here. Equally disconcerting is that the same people rending their clothes over this probably overlook their Gmail messages being scanned and ads in their inbox, but a television, mein gott, a bridge too far.
This is your world, HN. We all live in it now. Sucks, no?
If their $300 bargain basement basement tv was ads supported to keep the price low, eeh, maybe.
But that isn't the case here.
Consumer Gmail is free. If Office 365 premium ever starts showing ads, people will also become upset.
Not everyone on HN works in adtech, and very likely none of the people in this thread do either.
Or to put it another way, they are implementing communism by other means, with the same bad outcomes for the masses.
What difference is "Strategische Konzernentwicklung/corporate development/group development" to a Soviet 5-year plan, aggravated by quarterly reviews and HFT?
Gennadiy Gosplanovich would approve with a hysteric laugh.
I know. Been in several of them. Fortunately got out :)
edit: Of course you could call me a stoned hippie leftover from the 70ies, but that really was before my time. I'd counter that with management is on coke, crack or other medications which influence empathy in a bad way. Simple as that.
(Now playing "Ka-Ching!" with a pitchfork on the karmic harp)
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
—Upton Sinclair
Jobs which require a belief to perform sincerely, select people who hold that belief sincerely.
This principle should undo a lot of cynicism. Yes, eg., people in marketing often "really believe" their efforts are a net-positive, and no it isn't often, "mere cynicism" on their part.
Rather, what has happened, is that most who view marketing cynically, do not take a job in it.
We often misidentify this process of selecting for sincerity as a psychological-reality in those who are selected. Marketers "make money through cynical means" whilst sincerely believing they don't.
B: I don't like ads. Do you like ads on your TV?
A: Yes of course I do. If you don't like ads on your TV why are you working here.
B: Does anyone here like ads?
A+group: yes of course we all like ads (lying in a meeting is not a crime, and occurs all over the world)
C: ok no objections, we love it! Ship it!
A, C gets a paycheck at the end of the day.
B gets fired if they don't change their mind.
Big companies need to have an ombudsman department who have the explicit job of reviewing all these schemes and nixing any that will likely lose customers.
Yep, sounds about right.
“Why do we need to track users?” “To give them recommendations!” “But this wall you’re using takes 4 seconds to load. Do you think this improves user experience?” “Yes, because the content is adjusted for the user. Besides, we did a test and 96% clicks accept, so the users don’t mind” “Where is the decline button?” “...” “There is no other option. You have accept, or you have to hse settings with 100 checkboxes. I’m surprised 4% even bothered to check these!” “Yeah but most just accept, so they don’t mind, and users really want the targeted content”
If I have to add it, I’ll at least make sure it won’t take freaking 4 seconds to load.
"We need to think of our devices as small hyper local billboards with untapped potential"
