https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KbKdKcGJ4tM <- best commentary on ads ever
I wanted to check the price of the cheapest SSD price I could find on Amazon, and I've been getting sale notifications of cheap-ass 64GB SSD since. Of course these advanced AIs are not so intelligent to see that I've bought multiple 1TB and 2TB SSDs lately or hundreds of different products, but it has decided I'm actually interested in crappy disk drives instead.
It should be "this person bought a vacuum cleaner today, so let's wait two months and start showing them ads for vacuum cleaner bags" or "maybe they are buying equipment for a new apartment, so maybe they would also like a toaster oven and a lamp".
Like, imagine you had an actual salesman--a good one, as opposed to the "targeted salesman" from the video--who you bought all your stuff through and who was excited to make commissions off of you. They would never waste your time or attention or trust asking you to buy a second vacuum cleaner.
If someone buys a treadmill, they probably don't want a second one, but maybe they now want some free weights. The current algorithms are just so stupid... like, I almost appreciate the premise that if you had an "actual AI" helping find you stuff to buy that could be fun, but what we have is just wasting everyone's time.
My bet is that all the fancy ML is useless because the sellers are not adapted to the buyers. They want to sell X and buyers need/want to buy Y. If they used proper targeting they would reach a much smaller audience.
So they have an order to show 1000 crappy flash drive ads, but you only want to buy other things - what are they going to do? Skip you? No, that's money lost. They will show you the ad even if it is ineffective. Greed explains the bad targeting.
I agree with the OP that I like Instagram's personalized ads and have bought many things through them. (FWIW I used to work at IG — on messaging, not on ads — but I felt this way even before I worked there, and I continue to feel this way after leaving.) Everyone else seems to suck at it though and just do the "show me what I bought yesterday" type of advertising, which is far more annoying than just picking a product to advertise at random.
Maybe a working FLoC would be better than the cookie-based ultra "personalized" ads that most companies use? If it stops the annoying persistent yesterday's-shopping-cart around the internet, at least, it would be an improvement.
The only people really benefitting from targeted ads are the companies making the ad tech (including and especially Google) making billions of dollars from "platforms" that do way too much to prop up "metrics" that mean way too little in practice (but are great for creating fancy invoices to charge just about whatever you want to the rubes [sorry, advertisers]).
(I've been taking a lot of steps to opt out of personalized ads, without outright running ad blockers, though these days a lot of sites now believe Firefox to be an ad blocker, and the ads are better unpersonalized. It's just amazing that so much of our culture on either side of the ad tech "platforms" has been sold such a bill of goods to think that personalized ads are doing anything but sucking money out of good companies into at the very least morally gray if not unethical ones.)
