i don't get the point of showing me something I searched for on Amazon or Vitacost about an hour later. It's almost like they're just doing that to check a feature box in some advertiser list of features they're selling to someone but it's not actually even useful. If I'm about to buy an intex raft I'm going to do it when I was looking at them, not 3 weeks later.
Further, there's really no intelligence in ads yet. If I'm looking at intex rafts it probably makes sense to sell me fishing gear, yet none of that happens. Also I hate fishing. I just like floating on a raft.
> i don't get the point of showing me something I searched for on Amazon or Vitacost about an hour later.
(Disclaimer: this is a description of an advertising technique as currently used, not advocacy for that technique. All ads should go away whether personalized or not.)
This kind of ad is called "retargeting", and it turns out to be somewhat effective. If you're looking at a product, and you're debating whether to buy it, seeing it again makes it more likely you'll come back and make the purchase. (And, for that matter, makes it more likely you'll make the purchase there, rather than somewhere else.)
Key word being, "more likely". An unfortunate effect of scale and cheapness of digital ads is that even if the effect of retargeting on any given visitor is very tiny, it still makes economical sense to deploy it, as it'll add up. The extra marginal annoyance and frustration inflicted on everyone who views those ads is, of course, just an externality.
In particular, there's an interesting distorting effect caused by large-scale ad vendors and sites that want ad revenue. They always show an ad, and the only question is which ad. While I think ads should just not exist (and people should universally block them), it would be an interestingly different world if the alternatives were "useful ad" versus "no ad".
Because, on average, doing that leads to more sales for Amazon than not doing it. They don't care how any given user (you) responds to it, they care about what increases sales across an extremely large user base. Trust me, they have tested this and it's worth doing for them even if you thin it's pointless.
Same. I really don’t see the problem with targeted ads. Is it really that bad to get an ad for something you bought before vs. something completely random? How is that even any worse?
Remember, we are talking about the ads themselves, not data collection or anything like that even though it’s obviously very closely related.
> Remember, we are talking about the ads themselves, not data collection or anything like that
How do you separate the two? How can the ads be personally targetted without that data collection and sharing?
I have no objection to adverts relevant to what I'm doing right now. Adverts for DB related books, cloud services, other techie things, etc... while looking at a database related article? Fine. Following me around other bits of my life, not fine.
I don't mind a waiter trying to upsell me a bottle of wine while I'm ordering a meal in a restaurant. I would object if the waiter followed me home, via the supermarket to watch what I was buying there, and knocked on the door to suggest I buy a drink from him while I was cooking dinner.
> Tracking online activity to tailor advertisements: 17% of those surveyed viewed it as ethical, and 68% find it unethical.
...
> Nobody likes advertising (a finding that aligns with last year’s analysis), as it interrupts digital browsing and content consumption. Consequently, many consumers feel misled when they read ads masquerading as articles. Our survey results reflect consumers’ view that targeted advertising is an unethical use of data.
> Amazon is a $250 billion dollar company that reacts to you buying a vacuum by going THIS GUY LOVES BUYING VACUUMS HERE ARE SOME MORE VACUUMS
For a personal example, some months back I bought a pair of identical first aid kits (one for home, one for car), and Amazon still thinks that endlessly recommending me tourniquets, splints, medical scissors, and tactical trauma kits is somehow going to result in more sales.
And yet, since that tweet was posted Amazon has become 6x larger, crossing $1.5T in market cap. So maybe their advertising team knows something we don't?
Maybe the Dutch website is different but I think it is one of the worst webshops I've been on. When you search for a product you end up in a flood of pages with half related products. No filters, nothing. So I never find what I am looking for and just leave.
Now I don't think Amazon is stupid so there must be a reason for this experience.
When I was 16 about, I read a biography of Howard Hughes. The only thing that really stuck with me was a line regarding the Hughes empire in the 70s when he was at his craziest but the money still kept pouring in, the idea was that basically once you got to a certain size there is a long time before your mismanagement can hope to decrease the money flow.
It's probably because people just shop from them, not because I bought the gay pride shirt, hat, wallet, car seat cover, pencils, earrings, and bracelet that Amazon thought I wanted. I still cannot figure out why Amazon almost exclusively goes on these advertising tangents of junk I have a rather explicit disinterest in. If targeted advertising showed me things I would find interesting I would be all for it to some extent, but when it shows me automotive stuff for vehicles I don't own after I buy a digital micrometer I can't begin to think it's a good system at all. (Examples mentioned are real experiences of Amazon's suggestions of things I may like)
As a reader, I must say that at least in the books section the recommendations work. If I buy a book I like, I look for automated recommendations, because the chance I might like those books is rather high.
Yep, if I liked one book by G. R. R. Martin, it makes sense to suggest I would like another one. If I bought one Samsung tablet, it's much less likely I'd need another one a week later, unless that one was defective. They should introduce more information about goods - but it's probably too expensive to model that, and they get paid handsomely anyway, so why bother.
How do you know it's related to their advertising team? I buy a lot of stuff on Amazon (mainly because their delivery is - usually = reliable, their selection is good and their return policy is generous) but I can't remember the last time I bought anything by clicking on an ad. That didn't happen for many years at least. In fact, I'm not sure I ever bought anything on Amazon by clicking on an ad, if you exclude affiliate links and people just reviewing stuff and then giving Amazon link.
The usual explanation is that someone who just bought a vacuum cleaner to decide they don't like the vacuum cleaner they just bought and need a new one. Probably more likely than it is for someone who hasn't thought about buying a vacuum cleaner for a long time to suddenly have a need for one, even.
If I bought a vacuum I didn’t like from Amazon I’d return it thanks to their generous return policy. Targeting ads based on returns could make some sense I guess if they wanted to roll the dice on recouping losses.
That actually would be very smart targeting - especially given Amazon actually asks you for a reason of return. So they could target people that said this vacuum doesn't work or they need a different model, etc. by offering them similar one but from other manufacturer, etc. But I don't think this happens, and it's require developing much more sophisticated models than dumb "bought together" ones they seem to be using now.
Buying a vacuum, returning it, and buying a different one is less profit than just keeping the first vacuum, so I don't see why they'd want to encourage this.
I would say that the more parsimonious explanation is that:
a) they've got a model that has learned that people who buy X tend to buy X again, and
b) they don't have a model that can properly distinguish between classes of X for which this is true and classes of X for which it isn't. They are aware of the problem and have made several attempts to fix it over the years but the results have never been sufficiently compelling to incorporate into the actual recommendation model in prod
I think another factor that may come into play here is distinguishing between "products that serve the same purpose" and "related products" e.g. between "vacuum cleaners" and "vacuum cleaner accessories" (filters, bags, additional attachements...), the later likely being purchased in addition to the former. In this case it seems like there's probably a clear line but could certainly get blurry in some cases. If two products have some overlapping features, but also some unique ones, how different do they have to be for people to be likely to buy both?
I always loved when it would say "You bought No. 26 in a comic series, do you want No. 19 and 13?"
Yes, they're commonly bought together, but there's mostly, if not completely, a one-directional relationship-- someone buying 13 might want 14, 15, 16, but not the other way around.
This feels like it's just a matter of adding one more signed value to the "people who buy A buy B" record table... a weight indicating if the take is mostly A->B, B->A, or neutral.
Or, instead of the usual recommendation widget, just show a link to "All volumes in this series". Or even incorporate it into the website structure like YouTube playlists do.
Some years ago, I saw a presentation on Neo4J by a developer for a major British supermarket. (I think it was Sainsbury's.)
They wanted to print an appropriate coupon after someone paid for their shopping. "£1 off hamburgers next week" or similar, to get the person to return to the shop the following week.
They said a very important feature was to avoid giving a discount for a product someone has just bought or a closely related product. This would annoy customers who felt they'd missed out. Therefore, they were updating Neo4J with the just-made purchases and calculating the recommendation in the time it took to process the payment.
Maybe Amazon's chaotic mess of similar products makes this much more difficult than for a large supermarket, or maybe Amazon doesn't think the annoyance is a big deal.
» Maybe Amazon's chaotic mess of similar products makes this much more difficult than for a large supermarket, or maybe Amazon doesn't think the annoyance is a big deal.
I think amazon.com is no longer day one if it ever really was. I've seen at least one instance where they lowered price and refused to price match sale that hasn't even been delivered yet. I think they have data shows that not all people will go through the hassle to return and rebut and/or there's enough lock-in that amazon.com does not care about frustrating users.
Maybe the people who would be frustrated would go through the hassle to return and buy again. I mean if you have prime and you haven't opened the box, it is just two more days.
I always just figured that was because it’s much easier to figure out that I was looking for a vacuum cleaner than it is to know that I’ve already purchased one and don’t need to be targeted any more. Especially if the “looking for a vacuum” signal gets spread further, to more systems/parties, than the “doesn’t need one anymore” signal does.
Maybe it's because the purpose is to make money selling ads, rather than to necessarily sell you the consume what you need?
ie these systems have multiple customers, you, and the ad or marketplace sellers, and the behaviour of serving up ads for things youve already bought is happening to milk the advertisers/marketplace sellers?
College Humor--may it rest in peace :( :( :(--did a great bit about this a few years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbKdKcGJ4tM It is absolutely ridiculous how useless targeted ads actually are... and seeing a real person try to sell you this stuff really underscores the insanity.
After reading both of those articles... what's the reason behind it? The first article gives us nothing but definitions (it's oriented toward the consumer, so it doesn't spend any time prescribing vendor behavior). The second article has a section titled "How to Help Your Customers Rationalize Post-Purchase", which lists a bunch of things you can do to help your customers avoid buyer's remorse, but I don't see how any of their recommendations support the behavior being discussed.
I bought a glowforge about 1.5 years ago for use in a side business. Youtube still shows me ads for glowforge about 2-3 times a week. I kind of feel bad that GF is wasting their ad spend on this type of crap.
> THIS GUY LOVES BUYING VACUUMS HERE ARE SOME MORE VACUUMS
Everyone thinks this problem is really annoying, but to me it's a good sign - it indicates the current technical capabilities on using and abusing personal information is still limited, the predicted machine learning apocalypse is not here yet. In other words: despite the large quantity of personal information collected by advertisers, they still cannot exploit it efficiently enough, so far all they can do mostly is showing you the same things over and over - advertisers are still unable to develop a perfectly manipulative algorithm that makes you buy things (edit: or they have it, but it's still not found in wider deployment).
Effectiveness of targeted ads directly translates to effectiveness of mass surveillance. Perhaps we should enjoy the useless shopping recommendations from Amazon for now. When every single shopping recommendations made by the algorithm is the thing you always wanted (coming soon!), you'll know the cyberpunk dystopia is officially here.
This point of view also reconciles the two different opinions on machine learning in the tech community. The first person tells you that it's nothing but overhyped marketing, while it has some specialized uses, but everything is exaggerated as "AI" to get money from VCs, and in many areas, it's effectiveness is just too limited. The second person warns you that collecting personal information at an industrial scale is extremely dangerous, with the recent progress on "AI", they can use your data against you in ways never possible before. These two are not a contradiction: The first view is where we were previously, and the next view is where we are going to.
> it indicates the current technical capabilities on using and abusing personal information is still limited
Does it really though? I would expect a successfully manipulative algorithm to be much more subtle than this; just because we don't notice it, doesn't mean it's not there.
I don't deny its existence (in conference papers, in labs, in black projects by government and corporations, or even in a tiny startup company). I'm just saying so far it's not mature enough to be widely deployed on large platforms, like Amazon's banner ads.
Since events like this famous case, where Walmart outed a teenage girl pregnancy, it's well-known they mix in some "weird" or irrelevant things to give a sense of plausible deniability. "oh, pregger testers, haha, how weird they can be <nervous laughter>".
This was Target not Walmart and I say that not to nitpick but rather highlight that arguably Walmart is somewhat an upper tier tech company.
If this is what Target does in 2012, Amazon in 2020 not only inserts plausible deniability to optimize for lack-of-creepiness factor. They're probably running AI bots on forums and social media injecting seamless product placement in commentary you see in your browser.
If we observe that the targeted advertising doesn't seem all that good, it's a bit of a leap to suspect there's actually a great algorithm that's so subtly manipulative we don't notice it. By Occam's razor, the algorithm is probably just showing too many vacuums because it's not that good.
What if they are not aiming for "efficiency" in the same sense as you are describing it. What looks grossly inefficient to us may actually meet the minimum level of "efficiency" these "entrepreneurs" of online advertising need to generate a return and declare their "business" a success.
How effective is spam? From the perspective of the spammer, it's effective enough.
In both cases, these forms of "business" are certainly effective in annoying a large number of people, a tradeoff the operators apparently deem worthy of making.
> advertisers are still unable to develop a perfectly manipulative algorithm that makes you buy things (edit: or they have it, but it's still not found in wider deployment).
Perhaps the expensive processor time or R&D just doesn't worth it...
> Effectiveness of targeted ads directly translates to effectiveness of mass surveillance.
Assuming you're correct about the technical points of efficacy, we can still turn this around as a social problem and hypothesize that the willingness to use unproven, annoying targeted ads directly correlates to the willingness to use intrusive mass surveillance.
You bought a vacuum here are more vacuums might directly translate to you attended a protest so you're a permanent malcontent. Worse yet, the "metrics" of social monitoring aren't as black-and-white as future purchases, so badly-used surveillance might falsely think itself useful simply through confirmation biases.
Well, advertisers don't really want to spy on you and control your mind. What they want are stable, well-defined target audiences with well-known statistical properties and control groups.
Basically, applied sociology.
They can't get that directly with the current state of the Internet, so they have to rely on hacks.
> Well, advertisers don't really want to spy on you and control your mind. What they want are stable, well-defined target audiences with well-known statistical properties and control groups.
What we're evolving is predators of human state of mind. For every well-understood target audience there is an optimal revenue extraction method. With more data new sub-audiences appear, allowing experiments to find even more effective advertising for maximizing revenue extraction in those subgroups.
A huge fraction of advertising is nothing more than gaslighting us into believing we have a need or desire for a product or service. The other fraction is exploiting biases in our brains to influence our purchasing decisions toward particular brands or markets.
No. We don't live in an Isaac Asimov novel. Hari Seldon doesn't exists.
Advertisers want reproducible results backed by science and numbers. And the only way to get that today is with old-fashioned statistics - normal distrubutions, laws of large numbers and carefully controlled sample selection processes.
Nowhere here does the sci-fi of "mind control" factor.
This doesn't sound like an advertising problem, it sounds like a data problem.
At some point Amazon ran tests to see whether this stuff worked and realised that it did - they'd probably see the same results sending emails and ads that are just a big Amazon logo.
If vacuum sellers are willing to bid top dollar to advertise to people that just ordered a vac, who is Amazon to say they are wrong? Maybe they are betting on a dissatisfied return by people that clearly were in the market for a vacuum. Maybe the transaction isn't data that is available to the bidders.
Advertizing works. even on those thar believe themselves immune.
Far more smart systems already exist and are already used to sway people on a large scale.
The smartest system might not be the most profitsble for the intermediate add platform owner, so in those cases you might be on the receiving end of 'stupid' adds because it means more profit for the platform owner.
In a brute force sense yes. Word of mouth works far more efficiently.
Let's face it you can pay enough money to make nearly everyone on the planet think that grey is the best colour, but was it worth it in the end?
Millions of negative return marketing cases exist from this year alone. Marketing obviously doesn't work that well otherwise they'd all be the richest people on the planet and still yet convincing people to pay them even more.
Reminds me of the "With $1000 I can earn you 200% annual returns" If you really could do that why not use your own money?
People will get smarter, advertisers seem to ignore this.
Vacuums is not the worst of it. I made a mistake of looking for a junk removal company with shields down. Every marketing software on the planet got the idea "oh, this guy is really into junk removal, let's help him!" and all ads in every place where I couldn't disable them were about junk removal for half a year at least. Needless to say the junk I need removed was long gone after the first week. Now if I ever need junk removed again in a year or two... well, actually I already forgot all those ads, so it was just a waste of money for them.
Ahh, well next time you need junk removed, the company that spent the most on advertising to you will seem the most "familiar" and trustworthy! It's the same reason you see Coca Cola ads everywhere despite the fact that nobody needs to be informed about its existence.
> It's the same reason you see Coca Cola ads everywhere
This is one thing I don't understand, even though I know it must obviously work (to be clear, I'm not disputing it works. I just don't understand why/how). I know their purpose is to "remind you" Coca Cola exists, but unlike with junk removal services, you will never "need" Coca Cola and either you like it or you don't. People who like Coca Cola tend to drink it regardless of ads (some are addicts), and don't need the reminder. People who dislike Coca Cola won't ever drink it and the "need" will never exist in the future, unlike with junk removal.
So again, what's the rationale for these ads? Who needs a reminder that Coca Cola exists? I bet they are data-driven and their studies show that people do consume more soft drinks after seeing these ads everywhere -- I'm not disputing this -- but I really don't understand why it works.
Maybe the target is young kids exposed to these ads for the first time? But in general, the people in Coca Cola ads look like teenagers or in the 20-30 age segment, not kids.
It's not to remind you Coca-Cola exists. It's to make an impression that everybody drinks it and not doing it makes you weird. OTOH, drinking it makes you in sync with what cool people do. "Liking" it is largely a formed habit - I used to drink a lot of Cola, until I realized what it's doing to my body. Now I don't touch the stuff, hasn't been drinking it for years, and I find it absolutely disgusting if I taste it (I did a few of times over the years just to see if I'd find it tasty or not after not drinking it for so long). So it's not like there's some "innate" liking, it's a formed habit, and the ads help you to maintain the habit (or make it hard to quit it).
Oh, I fully agree it's a formed habit. Unfortunately I'm already addicted to it. However, the ads do nothing to me: I'm not a 20 or 30 something anymore, and I find ads of "cool people doing cool things" both fake and embarrassing.
(I know Coca Cola is terrible for your health and I keep telling myself I'll just stop drinking it. Maybe some day I will...)
I myself just decided not to drink it for a month. I had to think it through because it turned out I has a variety of habits that led me to having another glass of Cola, and I had to consciously modify them and keep the goal in mind for the whole time. It is a bit tiring, but you can do it for a month if you really concentrate on it. And then I discovered by the end of the month the craving is practically gone. My habits changed. And then a bit later I discovered I actually don't even like the stuff, so it takes me no effort to keep away from it. I was additionally motivated by rather scary blood test I've got which hinted my health could be in danger very soon if I don't stop, so keeping it in mind was easier.
Probably not - I literally don't remember a single one.
Also, I think Coca-Cola is completely disgusting and you'd have to pay me quite a lot of money for me to agree to ingest the stuff, so maybe I'm not a very typical consumer. The fact that I know it's literally a poison to my body, in most plain sense (and probably yours too) doesn't help either :)
Most the ads I get on Facebook are for dumb looking mobile games. Looking at "Why are you seeing this ad" it's basically "Is this person female and aged 25-35"
It's annoying because: The ads are extremely disctracting: I can't help but notice them. They look like they for the same game the last 500 ads were for with a reskin. And I haven't played a mobile game since 2012 and facebook is supposed to be able to track all of this right?
The other ads are for womans clothes or shoes which is reasonably accurate. But you need almost zero tracking to determine that I might be receptive to online clothes store. (I'm not, I buy clothes in persons because sizing is hard)
I also once got ads from Jordan Pertsons thing... WOW HOW WRONG CAN IT GET
What's stopping you from installing an ad-blocker like uBlock Origin? You can't help but notice them (no one really can), and it doesn't sound like they add value to your life.
I am. But still get them running Facebook from Firefox with Ublock installed. I also get facebook ads on Firefox and Edge on Desktop.
As an aside I switched to the mobile app recently considering the Ad Block on firefox wasn't working.
Facebook is a pretty high profile website, so it is unlikely that UBlock Origin won't block all adds there (I don't use Facebook myself, so I can't verify). In a normal desktop browser that is.
Of course.
Facebook is a serious cat & mouse with adblocking.
I once tried to look at an ad with the devtools inspector and the ad the disappeared. Somehow FB was detecting the inspector and remove the ad so it couldn't be inspected. (Well I'm sure that could be used against them)
In some cases, targeted advertising is still quite dumb. Advertisers themselves choose who to target. In your example, someone may have said “We need more women interested in Jordan Peterson! Target white women 25-35.”
I wonder (and really have no proof of this one way or another) whether this actually is successful a good bit of the time. HN readers are generally pretty thoughtful with their purchases, but maybe a lot of Amazon customers really will buy two vacuums? Maybe they see there’s a nicer one, and just can’t help themselves?
From these examples we should conclude it works sometimes for emotional or artistic items subject to impulse buys, because Amazon sells billions and knows their business, but maybe not for utility items.
The problem is, it's hard to distinguish for an algorithm. Vacuums no, but tools or kitchen gadgets, maybe
Exactly. Moreover, the ad about the second vacuum cleaner only has to be more effective than whatever random ad distribution was used previously, which would be a rather low bar.
I bought a laptop this year - naturally the ads changed accordingly.
Out of curiosity I clicked - "Out of Stock". No surprise here, because there were literally less than 10 units in my country sent in one batch, but why advertise it then?
> Amazon still thinks that endlessly recommending me tourniquets, splints, medical scissors, and tactical trauma kits is somehow going to result in more sales.
And that tactic does increase sales for Amazon, on average. Their endless split testing would have long proven that.
I think the point is that there is a middle ground between showing completely random ads and showing what someone already bought.
If I bought a vaccum maybe I want vacuum accessories, or vacuum bags (if it's not a reusable), or maybe I want more appliances for the house, and so on.
Yes, but the 'accessories' is actually not a 'middle ground' - that's actually very advanced thing to do. We may get there.
The 'middle ground' is literally 'bought vacuum -> show vacuum' - and it works.
People are emotional about this stuff and aren't thinking about it in terms of behaviour, response etc..
Some things are negative, toxic, this one is just innocuous: you only notice the vacuum ad because you bought one. Otherwise, it would be a completely random ad for something you truly don't care about and you wouldn't notice it.
It's actually technically more efficient to show you stuff 'you might want to buy' than stuff you 'don't even care about a tiny bit'.
Edit: I should add - you see ads for generic products all day long - in fact probably the least value-creating ads are those for really well established brands. Crest toothpaste, laundry detergent etc it has not improved materially in decades (small things maybe) and yet they spend billions on packaging, positioning, huge ads etc.. And yet for some reason it doesn't quite bother us.
We all have the ad that follows us. For years, mine is the forever spin top. I thought about having a nice top as a desk toy after seeing Inception (yes, that long ago). I checked out the tops, saw they came with a $70 price tag and noped out. I see these ads weekly if not daily.
Not all of us mate, I don't actually recall any ads because I block them extensively .. through software online, through habits of avoiding tv etc, changing channels or muting radio ads, and then mentally tuning out anything that gets past that .. I love the peace of mind.
I'm an avid consumer but I believe my interests are best served by a pull model where I research the things I want to get best in class. Then anything that spends an excessive amount of effort on advertising is wasting their budget which could go toward a better product and lower prices! So that helps me avoid advertising driven products, as well as advertising. #winning :D
You are not the customer of these ads. The customer is the company selling vacuums.
Your profile has "interested in vacuum cleaners" and then the ad system monetizes this fact by selling ads to vacuum cleaner companies. The ad system makes money every time you see one.
More so, since they are paying their ad dollars- bidding in a real-time auction for the privilege of filling the ad slot on the website you are looking at.
Suppose you try it out, find you don't like it, and decide to return it within a week, after which you want to buy another one. How often does that happen? 5%? That might still make you significantly more likely to buy the next vacuum than a random member of the population.
Of course, if you bought a vacuum and returned one, that would be the ultimate targeting point. I don't know if "they just returned a vacuum cleaner" is a datum provided to advertisers.
It also might be that people usually don't return it until they've chosen one that they think would be better (possibly ordering the new one, even waiting until they receive it and trying it out before starting the return process).
That's the prevailing common-sense wisdom, but it's completely wrong.
These algorithms work on statistical foundations, and the probability of you buying a vacuum cleaner if you already bought one is always higher than the probability for a randomly sampled person from the general population.
I blame Bret Victor. He wrote an influential paper that was longish and people read up to the "last value predictor" section, had an a-ha moment, went to implement it, and ignored the rest. He hasn't update the paper since so no one knows what else to do. The marginal improvement was to take the last value, relate it to a bunch of other people whose last value was the same, and show me their next values.
Imo all ads are ethically questionable. Their main objective is to make us want things we didn't want before. Unfulfilled desires make people unhappy; unnecessary consumerism uses up limited resources on a finite planet.
Ads providing information about proper precautions for covid and any new temporary regulations that should be adhered to have probably saved lives.
"All ..." frequently leads to obvious counter-examples and exceptions.
When you invent the new thing that completely solves the problem, how will you let people know that your thing is available and works just great?
Well the answer to that for designer labels is to hire film stars to appear in expensive tv ads so you can buy stink that costs cents to make for hundreds of dollars which obviously makes the world a better, kinder more equitable place for Chanel. /s
The issue is that there is no difference between smell-water and "new thing that solves problems", under capitalism. If an advertisement can tell you about a real problem, and make you buy (or quarantine) then that's good, but an ad can just as easily create a problem, and there is no way to differentiate between those. So while ads may have done occasional good, or made someone's life a little better by offering a solution to a problem they had, it's also filled the ocean with plastic.
"problems" have quite a wide spectrum. For some people, they perceive their problem to be that they don't smell the way they want to smell, or the way they think other people want them to smell. An ad that says "this smell water smells the way you want to smell" will help solve their problem.
In this sense, to "solve" advertising, you can't just avoid advertising things that don't solve problems, you need to address the underlying causes for the perception of countless problems that may or may not actually be relevant/rational etc.
> For some people, they perceive their problem to be that they don't smell the way they want to smell, or the way they think other people want them to smell.
This is one of the prime examples of problems that are explicitly created by advertising itself. What these example people perceive as a problem and the way they see it are product of generations of advertising.
> you need to address the underlying causes for the perception of countless problems that may or may not actually be relevant/rational etc.
There is nothing to address here. The market is an optimization system. As long as there exist a single exploitable loophole in the human psyche - and there always will be something[0] - advertising industry will evolve to find and exploit it. Lying to people, or making them feel bad and offering a product to relieve the emotional pain? All par for the course, tried and true methods.
Advertising - and marketing in general - needs to be reined in, because it's a cancer on modern society.
--
[0] - Even if we were emotion-free robots with perfect reasoning capabilities, there's only so much time an individual has to acquire and process information about any given thing. This limit, and prioritization in general, is exploitable too.
You seem to be suggesting that humans only prefer certain smells (eg a nice perfume) to others (dirt and sweat) because advertising has created this desire. I don't believe this is true.
No, I'm suggesting that the problem of dirt and sweat smells is solvable with basic cosmetics, and doesn't require such ridiculously huge fragrance sector. What's propping it up is advertising - both directly, and by maintaining fragrance as social signalling mechanism.
My point was rather that people always want things. Take away ads and that doesn't change: Long before ads people fought each other so one group could get the things the other group has.
I'm not advocating for anything positive about ads, but when I say we need to address underlying causes, it's that thousands of years old behavioral pattern I mean. Destroy all ads, it will still be here.
That's true. And I don't think we can really eliminate the underlying behavioral pattern entirely. But we can limit its consequences and channel it in productive ways. Advertising was never properly constrained, and it's grown far beyond its usefulness for society; I think cutting it down to manageable size would already be a huge win - after all, we ultimately care about negative consequences of advertising, not about the concept existing in the abstract.
I think we fundamentally agree, but I am also thinking about the greater system in which advertising exists. Ads drive consumerism, and we have an economy that is driven by consumerism. Technological advancement, economic stability and growth, it is paid for by the creation of economic value driven by consumerism. Societies with unstable economic systems do not stay stable themselves for very long unless the economic issues are addressed.
So we cannot remove or drastically reduce advertising without it causing far-reaching second-order consequences that in turn have their own consequences. Less ads, people buy less stuff. Places that make stuff make less of it, or go out of business, and not as many people are needed to make that stuff. Businesses that supported those businesses suffer the same problem. Countries whose economies rely on us buying their stuff or having our stuff made in those countries suffer major economic losses.
Lets take the consumer electronics industry. Lets say we just got rid of advertising for things to the point where everyone was willing to keep their stuff twice as long and buy less stuff they don't really need. That industry is about $1 Trillion/year. Let's say the second-order economic effects from support industries that depend on that are another $500 Billion. Still doesn't seem like a lot in the scheme of things, a little under 1% of the world GDP. But it's also not evenly distributed. Some countries are hit much harder. The economies of South Korea & China are hit particularly hard. And a part of China's stability is driven economic growth that supports propaganda promising increased quality of life. War may not break out, but small cracks start to appear. Do that same for the automobile industry, and that's about another $2.5 trillion out of the economy.
So we cannot remove from this system a part we don't like and still have that system function the same way. I guess we can go into it eyes-open and say "it's worth the consequences" and go ahead with it. Or, and this is my preference, we can try to understand the system well enough to figure out how we can change the parts we don't like smoothly enough to avoid the worse of those consequences.
None of this means we shouldn't complain about ads, and want them to go away. But if we're being practical about it, we don't just need a way to get rid of ads, we also need a way to patch that hole in the system.
>The issue is that there is no difference between smell-water and "new thing that solves problems", under capitalism.
Yeah, but not just capitalism. Anywhere you don't have unelected legislators imposing censorship on what they feel is good and wholesome and what isn't. Competing candidate's platform advertisements in the run-up to a union election in that union's newsletter isn't displaying a lot of capitalism and it's as true there as mop advertisements between talk-show segments on late night tv. (One or more of the candidates might be, gasp, wilfully and knowingly telling, omg, lies!)
When the ads are creating a problem that is actually difficult to solve they're revealing a problem that is not the ads themselves. It's a crisis in education and the general public's ability (or the pereception of it) to do a decent job critical thinking and bs detecting.
Making cruel fun of ridiculous fear-mongering accross society ought to be the answer to organised lying. When it isn't, getting Zuck & Jack to censor it is kind of a worrying development. Tough to get that back in the bottle even if it's initially done in support of causes you kinda like, coz you know that condition of it only being "for good", (where /you/ define good) will not last. Guaranteed. Never does.
I wouldn't call things providing information about Covid precautions "ads", because they don't advertise goods or services. I'd refer to them as public information campaigns.
That's a distiniction without a difference. Ads you like are now public information campaigns, ads you don't aren't.
"The government is about to pass a bill to lock up your reproductive organs. Join the campaing to free the genetalia!" Public information or ad? Context depedent, sure, and also dependent on your views on whether the bill is actually teriffic, terrible or anywhere between the extremes.
Still an ad to make the public aware of the information.
For covid info, advertising slots are still bought. They are filled with content tha has been paid to be created to fit the format and effectively convey the message, including on an emotional level. The covid information ads still decorate media being consumed for reasons other than seeing the associated ads.
No, the distinction is about as clear as distinctions go that you make in a HN comment as opposed to a scholarly article on sociology. If someone tries to influence you to make a profit for themselves (e.g. by getting you to spend money on their products) then it's an ad. If your government tries to tell you how to protect yourself or others from a threat then that's not an ad.
And what then about the opposition's paid information disbursement when the government policy is wanting? An ad or not? Then of course if, according to your definition there are no ads there is no place for the mandadated government paid slots which aren't ads to run. If you're a non-profit, like say a church, selling any of the things churches sell, then that's an ad for that stuff that's not an ad so that's then ok. If the profit you make is by being elected and then being a crook, then that's not an ad. If you're just doing brand awareness and recognition and promoting the fact that your company does charitable good works that's also not an ad. In fact the majority of ads I've seen don't have an explicit "you should buy this" line in them at all. The construction is obvious and basically nobody misses it but it's not actually explicitly there. Certainly Chanel's stink ads, which are the epitome of everything I hate, don't.
The grey areas here overlap so badly and based on opinion alone that it really is a distinction without a difference. Any rule you set up I'll show you as many exceptions that show it's futile until boredom takes over.
You slice it any way you like. Do they take money for services? Ok so UNICEF information is ads but political advertisements are not. The Coca-Cola company endorses being nice to puppies and supporting your local shelter.
There can't be a clear distinction. There can't be sensible policy that fairly discriminates between good and bad paid 30 second television slots or between good and bad magazine spreads, between good and bad PR influenced news articles or anything of that nature.
The Covid information adverts that probably saved lives. They could easily have had the opposite information content and cost lives. Without verifying it, i'd be sure that somewhere in the world they were and activists were advocating a better response with paid ads which were funded by industry groups.
You're not wrong, but with tracking and targeting it is able to become exponentially more invasive. So now instead of advertising to broad classes of people, they can exploit specific weaknesses and specific moments of weakness. Technology takes advertising from the ethical scale of a petty crime, into the realm of war crimes.
Honestly, I'm just disappointed it's legal to tell people about a new purchase. For the same reason, it should really be illegal. Keeping up with the Joneses should be punishable by death.
This take misunderstands how effective online advertising works. Effective advertising targets people who are likely to want the product or service already. The idea that ads can change people's minds to get them to buy something they don't want is so wrong. You would waste so much money trying to change peoples' minds. This isn't like Inception. In all my (and people I've read and worked with) experience, you have a chance at profitable ROI when you run ads targeting people likely to want what you're already selling, and just try to make them consider your product or service. You'd be guaranteeing negative ROI trying to change minds.
I disagree. Take the fashion industry for example. There is zero reason to replace clothing as quickly as we tend to. Almost all of the demand is produced by ads. Or take cars, very few people need cars of the size that they end up buying. But ads suggest that they might want to pull a trailer through rough terrain, or that bigger is more prestigious.
You might not be able to change an individual's choices by very much, but all these tiny nudges in aggregate push society more and more towards unsustainable levels of consumption, without improving happiness.
> But ads suggest that they might want to pull a trailer through rough terrain,
Most cars I see around on the roads are family sedans and not trucks. Some are SUVs but those are not for hauling trailers - those are for hauling groceries and kids to the soccer games. So I don't think the trailer one works very well :)
And actually if you take about prestigious, two-person convertible looks much cooler than your standard family-size SUV/minivan. But people that buy the latter usually buy it not because they want to be cool, see above.
There is zero reason to replace clothing as quickly as we tend to. Almost all of the demand is produced by ads. Or take cars, very few people need cars of the size that they end up buying. But ads suggest that they might want to pull a trailer through rough terrain, or that bigger is more prestigious.
I think the problem here is not the ads but that people are gullible. If those people can afford to buy a car which can pull a trailer when they don't need to its not because of advertising, it's because consumption makes them happy.
Aren't we waking up to the fact that consumption doesn't make people happy though? In fact advertising now actively seeks to make us feel unhappy in our current situation, promising whatever it is the advert is selling as the key to being able to achieve happiness. You might feel happy for a short while after buying that thing, but the problem is that there are always more adverts seeking to make you feel unfulfilled than things you can buy.
> There is zero reason to replace clothing as quickly as we tend to.
That's irrelevant to the topic of ads.
Clothing is of cultural and societal importance for individuals in a group and we've become rich enough to afford to essentially buy items of clothing as we please.
This runs quite deep in human society. Look at every human groups on the planet even the most isolated and 'primitive'. People wear symbols and try to make themselves more attractive.
Clothing ads are just a 'symptom'. Our behaviour runs much deeper than that.
> Effective advertising targets people who are likely to want the product or service already.
The whole point of advertising is getting conversions: convincing people who previously weren't going to buy your product that they should buy your product.
Some of the people that are converted just didn't know about your product, some had forgotten about it, some thought a competitors product was better, etc. So there is a sense in which the vast majority of people you convert aren't people who specifically "don't want" your product. And you're definitely right that this isn't Inception-tier infiltration of the mind. But at the same time, the conversions you are trying to get are the people who don't want your product yet, but just need a tiny push to want it.
I saw a pretty good low end CNC machine in an ad and there is a 0% chance I would have found out about it through any other means because the presence of the company is basically 0. I still didn't buy it.
> Effective advertising targets people who are likely to want the product or service already.
Yes and no.
The problem with digital advertising is that the only part that's easy to measure is what's happening at the bottom of the funnel. Which means that a disproportionate amount of effort and attention gets spent on those campaigns.
There's a whole layer of awareness advertising which, while it's not about influencing behaviour, is certainly about building consumer awareness of a brand or product to later build purchase intent.
There are well-known and documented PR campaigns designed exactly for the purpose of changing minds. Of course, this is big money, and the vast majority of individual ads are of the type you mention.
But it's quite likely that the majority, or at least plurality, of ad spending goes to the changing minds kind of campaign. This is especially visible in the massive popularity of lifestyle marketing campaigns, that seek to create a particular image making a product (or even type of product) more desirable. Think of the Coca Cola Christmas, "green" cars, hyper-technologized "smart" fridges/washing machines, fashion brands, Apple's success a few years ago in convincing people to change their phone each year etc.
You also shouldn't forget the disgusting world of children's advertising, where often the goal is to convince children to nag their parents or friends about an item - often by explicitly showing this type of behavior, which works wonders with small children especially.
What if people already have enough pointless junk?
My problem is not that I want to see ads that are more "relevant", it's that I don't want to see ads. I don't care what you're selling. If my problem that you're trying to solve is really that important, I'd be actively searching for a solution, not waiting to be enlightened by a targeted advert.
Adtech evangelists seem to think that my biggest problem is a burning surplus of cash that I'm just desperate to get rid of. If only I could find more products to buy so I could be liberated from the pain of having money in the bank! Er, no thanks. I'll put my spare cash towards saving for a house and retirement and the occasional luxury; save your bullshit for the people who don't know how to install Adblock.
(The other way I use my spare cash on is to pay directly for content, because almost everything that's wrong with the Internet and modern media is the fault of the current ad-driven paradigm, and only future I want to live in is one where ads are dead.)
Ignorant of the existence of some inane bullshit that they don’t actually need, because they haven’t been motivated to look for a solution to a real problem?
Sure! This is exactly where ignorance is bliss.
Modern marketing is just spreading dissatisfaction (sometimes borderline misery) with the false promise of relief through consumerism.
I do have strong opinions about exploitation of other humans though, and probably stronger ones about modern mental gymnastics apparatus which lets people justify the whole thing.
Ads make people ignorant as they are not based on facts but making you believe insane things how products will change your life. Axe deodorant won’t make women crazy for you
Just a tangential anecdote, but I once bought an Axe deodorant when I was staying in a boarding school in a really humid place. The smell actually made many of my female classmates cringe/move away when I sat in front of them. I had no idea about how they felt.
After that spray was over (a few months later), I decided to switch to Playboy (which was cheaper at the time), mostly because I liked its smell. It had the added bonus of being tolerable too. A few days later, my teacher bought the same Axe deo that I had, and that's when I realized that that deo would literally mix with sweat to give off this wafting smell, as though you were a raving alcoholic. The smell was unbearable to say the least, and would literally make me choke. Thankfully someone had the nuts to convey that to the teacher and he switched deos.
So you believe that your mind can withstand an entire industry that is specialized in manipulating you? They use these techniques because they work. And some part of it you cannot escape from even if you actively try.
This literally sums up my perspective on all modern advertising practices. The way we do advertising is manipulative and evil; the goal of advertising is no longer to alert people of potential solutions to their problems, it's to psychology manipulate them into buying something whether they want it or not.
> The main objective of ads is to connect buyers and sellers via brand recognition. That's why companies spend so much money on advertising.
That's a "motte and bailey" defense of advertising, though. If the stated main objective of connecting (existing) buyers and sellers were true, almost all ads would be restricted to opt-in forms like trade shows and catalogs (be it paper or digital). After all, it makes sense to let a buyer self-identify before spending money and effort on informing them about your wares.
The actual primary objective of most advertising, as demonstrated in the real world[0], is to create new buyers, and recapture those you buy from your competition.
> The problems with digital ads is that they are deceptive, clickbait, annoying, (...) ugly (...).
That's started way before digital. Check out pictures of some old newspapers or billboards from a century ago - that was "clickbait" 100 years ago too. It does read strange (all that presumptuous and grandiose language), but it's only because we've became culturally immune to that kind of wording. More recently, I'd argue TV ads were and are the worst - the current form was refined into pure and unadulterated brainwashing. On-line at least mostly spares us that.
> Their main objective is to make us want things we didn't want before.
Is it the main objective, though?
IMHO the main objective is to make potential customers aware that you exist. It's very basic behaviour for someone who tries to sell something, like setting up your fruits cart on a busy road, in full view, and not in a deserted backstreet.
There is nothing intrinsically unethical about ads or targeted ads.
Targeted ads are not that different from telling a friend about something you saw or heard of because you know that they might be interested.
"Unethical" is one of those terms that is being exponentially thrown at anything some people don't like, which only hollows out its meaning.
> Targeted ads are not that different from telling a friend about something you saw or heard of because you know that they might be interested.
Oh please.
Targeted ads are like following people around, tracking everything they do, then interrupting them as they go about their business to interject your commercial "message" about something you think you can sell them for a profit, regardless of genuine need.
They are absolutely nothing like interaction between friends.
You describe one possible way to do targeted ads, and probably the worst way in order to support your point, but this does not represent targeted ads in general.
It is obvious that targeted ads require knowledge (data) about the person. But it does not imply anything sinister despite what you're claiming it does in your comments, again you're picking a worst case. It's like claiming that cars are awful things by claiming that all cars are driven by drunks who end up killing people.
If I own an ecommerce marketplace I can look at a customer's previous purchases in order to gain some insights on what might interest them. There is absolutely nothing sinister, unethical, or just wrong about this. This is simply using knowledge about someone gained in a relationship in order to improve your service, again not too different from the knowledge you gain about your friends (or anyone you get to know since my use of the term 'friends' seems to bother you. This is not important to the point), which you use to improve, so to speak, your relationship with them.
Of course there is a profit motive, but this is a red herring. A good business profits by actually helping their customers, ie. by providing them with something of value to them.
I'm sorry, but your view of friendship is really twisted.
A profit motive is not a red herring, it's the fundamental difference between a friendly action with the person's interest at heart and a self-interested action with the intent of opening their wallet and helping yourself to the content.
That doesn't necessarily make your actions unethical, but they certainly aren't the actions of a friend.
Many recommendations from friends also don’t have my best interests at heart.
Here are reasons friends recommend things in my experience:
* They think I’ll like it (A++).
* They like it (When their default way of expressing enthusiasm for something is recommending it, one has to learn to not take it so literally. Also, I’m not discounting the opportunity for shared bonding over something that at least one of us enjoys though. Is this category of recommendation a symptom of having a weak theory of mind? I don’t know).
* Loyalty (they’ll recommend products by friends/associates/compatriots, irrespective of quality).
* Financial kickbacks/business connections. (Still can be useful).
* Pyramid schemes (almost no experience with this, thankfully. I guess the same as #4 but also creepier).
The pyramid thing is creepy, because it seeks to exploit friendship bonds. And usually only for the benefit of the company, the seller most often is being suckered into losing money as well.
I wouldn't really consider someone doing your last two things there to be doing something friendly, those are self-interested actions and I would treat them with suspicion.
The first three though, sure, those are friendly actions. Their utility is variable, but they aren't motivated by personal profit.
No idea who flagged your next reply but I was going to say that I think the first sentence of it detracted from your otherwise good points in this thread.
I have vouched but I doubt it will have any effect, which I think is a shame because it think that, other than that single sentence, your conversation was constructive.
1. Inform the consumer that certain offering exists. If someone invents a new superior type of coffee maker, they should let people know that there's now an option to make their coffee in a better way. There's nothing unethical in that. Of course, you can invent something like cigarettes, which people would be better without, but most inventions aren't like that.
2. Inform consumer that certain provider exists. I.e. if you have 20 coffee maker vendors, all alike, then when a customer goes to buy a coffee maker, they would tend to choose one they heard something good about, thus brand promotion and celebrity endorsements. This _might_ be somewhat unethical if inferior product is promoted with superior ones available, but usually there is enough offerings of similar quality that this is pretty neutral. Sometimes also something good comes out of it when companies sponsor worthy causes to get attention.
3. Associate the offering in consumer's mind with something positive and desirable. This one may be the ethically questionable one, as usually the association is completely bogus and is not based on any actual qualities of the offering but only on unsubstantiated claims of the advertiser that consuming the offering makes the customer "a kind of person" they want themselves to be. This is the kind that gives advertising the bad rep. But most online ads are actually not of this kind - it's just much harder to make such kinds of ads as a small banner.
You don’t need product adverts for ‘ethical’ functions 1 and 2. Honest aggregators and reviewers which the buyer can seek out when they need something would fulfil that. I think that would also be much more convenient for the buyer (though obviously not for the seller, who wants to invent needs in people who otherwise wouldn’t think of buying anything).
I’ve had some experiences getting hungry while visiting unfamiliar city centres pre-smartphone and wishing there was more public advertising of restaurants. That is to say, there’s definitely some minimal amount of advertising that I apparently want in my life.
If you don’t rely on advertising (speaking directly to possible customers) then you have to work with journalists other middle-men, whose tastes might not reflect those of your customers, or you have for a network to build, which might be too slow. Possible grateful future customers loose out here too.
In what way do the aggregators/reviewers not solve that issue for you though?
If I see a place that has 100+ 5 stars on tripadvisor/yelp I'm much more likely to go than if I see an advertisement, because at that point I know a reasonable number of actual people have gone and liked the experience.
I typically dismiss any claims an advert makes as total bullshit because adverts are lying to you the majority of the time. In the case of a restaurant it might work if you're advertising that you're newly opened, but otherwise I'm wondering why people aren't being pulled in when they look on sites like tripadvisor/yelp.
You don't "need" ads, as in there are other ways to do it, if there was some reason to never use ads. But there's no reason, so ads are used too, and are quite effective in that too. And it won't be convenient for a buyer that doesn't know certain offering exists. I.e. if I don't know such thing as wireless headphones existed, I couldn't effectively look it up and seek reviews for it - somebody should tell me first - dude, did you know you can get rid of those annoying wires and just buy wireless ones? Now, did I "need" them? Strictly speaking, no - I could very well have lived all my life with wired ones and be fine. But wireless are better for me, so why should I resent someone who tries to sell them to me? For me, it's a win-win.
In response to 3. I'd argue it's a much bigger factor than we'd think. Instagram as a platform is now based almost entirely around influencers creating an idealised and unattainable representation of a lifestyle and then selling ad space for your product to be seen as part of that lifestyle.
All social media enables/encourages this to a certain degree and I think the personal touch and reach that individuals give to the products they promote is potentially far more subtle and harmful than the banner ads we typically think of as problematic.
Agreed. Push/pull. If someone wants to learn about that new offering, go ahead and seek out. Otherwise it is literally spam. All without talking about the privacy/security of electronic ads.
Back in the day, there were those golden times when ads were relevant to the content I was reading and not to some profile an advertising company had on me.
It was the best kind of "targeted" that could work on me.
The other kind, prevalent today, is outright creepy.
It's funny, because I always hear people talking about how creepy and stupid all these personalised ads are, but I have honestly never noticed. I've been blocking adverts on every device I use for almost as long as I've been using computers. I would have no idea that targeted ads are a thing if I didn't hear other people talking about them.
If people are so bothered by targeted ads, why do they continue to look at them?
Turn off your adblock for a few hours. You'll suddenly remember of some very specific thing you brought once a long while ago or some site you used to look at.
Your average person knows nothing about technology, or advertising, or ethics. They have a hazy understanding of cookies, have no idea how real time bidding works, certainly cannot define ROAS, and could not differentiate between deontological and utilitarian theories. They have no understanding of how much Facebook earns per year from the average Western user, and virtually nobody would actually pay that to use Facebook ads-free (even if Facebook offered that option, which they have no moral obligation to do). This is just another hit piece against the boogeyman "surveillance capitalism".
Is it really that much? 32B per year from 320M of U.S. population, that's $8 per month, with 72% having an account, that's $11 per month per user. Not all that much as i see it (trick is though, those who would opt to pay for ad-free experience would be the best, highest-revenue users, so a fair price for one would be a lot higher, i'd say no less than $100 per month).
But, i also see nothing wrong about personalised ads. At least, when personalised ads truly work the way they are (haha) advertised. Before personalised ads - remember the 1990s banners - most of the ads were utterly irrelevant, just visual spam.
To add to that, I just found out that Chrome "accidentally" started logging every activity I do on chrome. Every one . Of course I was never asked consent for this
When are people going to learn that polling is dead, and has been dead for some time, and that statements like these are pure fiction — written by people who have the goal of influencing you rather than informing you?
Polling has issues, but it's an extreme exaggeration to say that it's dead and that any statement based on it is fictional. Anecdotally, very few people I know are comfortable with the state of personalized ads. The kind of people who are too paranoid to answer polls are probably not fans of personalized ads either, so I wouldn't be surprised if the real percentage of those who disapprove is higher than the polls in the article show.
i'd like them more if they had even once shown me something i actually wanted or needed. being forced to sit through the same 3 ads for beer, car insurance and most recently sports betting does not make me want those things at all no matter how loud and obnoxiously repetitive they make the messaging.
when i look through the newspaper or a skate mag, not only is the user experience considerably better but my eyeballs-to-purchase rate is much higher with completely non targeted advertisements that don't flash, pop out or scream at me. this is the most frustrating thing too, advertising does not have to suck. ime pretty much any enthusiast sports publication is about 60+ percent advertising, maybe more depending on if you consider any kind of feature about a team or a brand to be advertising in of itself as well
e.g.
>https://www.thrashermagazine.com/articles/videos/first-look-...
The problem is that these polls assume the authority of scientific inquiry without any rigor. I could state that 40% of people believe personalized ads are unethical, and that might be accurate, but when I claim it and admit that I pulled it out of hot/thin air, at least you know that it's just that -- hot air. Polling 6,000 self-selected people from 2 different continents and 4 different countries and weighting the responses based on populations in the millions is pseudoscience.
RSA bought this survey. They're an internet security company. They didn't "research" this for any reason other than the fact that this press release is good for their bottom line.
Corollary: they must be fine with what facebook is doing!
Sorry, having a grumpy day here, but I find it kind of arrogant to think you know better than people. Yes, looking at actions provides info you don't get from polling. But the same holds the other way around.
I'm hoping this is sarcasm, because "revealed preferences" are bunk. Let me propose alternative conclusion and corollary:
Conclusion: they don't dislike it to the point of actually closing the account. Possible factor: everyone they know uses Facebook, so they're hostages of their social network - the so called network effect.
Corollary: they don't really know what Facebook is doing, nor do they have time/energy to care, but if they did, they wouldn't be able to act on it - see point about network effects.
If I may source the same website from the same year (https://www.forbes.com/sites/tjmccue/2019/03/19/47-percent-o...) so many more users do not use an ad blocking solution. Google analytics for example is among the most used trackers. From checking ublock origin menu alone I would say probably twice or thrice as much as anything else. Every silly blog employs that shit. So now we can go figure about how much understanding users have of how tracking and ads work, how much more awareness and consistent behavior we need.
For me it often hinges on whether I view the company being advertised as part of the community being targeted or as just trying to profit off of that community.
For example, I get a lot of targeted ads for fitness equipment. A company like Onnit provides quality equipment at an affordable price so it is one of the go to place for people getting into functional fitness. In that respect it is a "contributing member" of the fitness community and I don't mind getting targeted adds from them.
On the other hand, I also get a lot of ads for gimmicks or dumbed down versions of legitimate fitness equipment. I view those companies as parasites on the fitness community and resent getting targeted adds from them.
Personalizing is fine. If I buy a bike from your store and then return, then I’m happy to see you say “how is your bike? Want to buy these cool wheels? They’ll fit”.
Showing ads based on a rough geo ip or the referrer is also fine. And that’s where it ends.
The majority of the 16 pages are just business "takeaways" and "insights" based on the headline results. The only information about statistical methodology I can see is that roughly 6,000 adults were surveyed in America and Europe by YouGov for 9 days in December 2018. There is no breakdown of raw response data by age, country, region, income, education or other demographics. Moreover, there is no discussion of techniques used to reduce sampling bias (for example, by broadening the survey time over a longer period and by specifically targeting more demographics).
Don't draw any conclusions based on this report. This is content marketing for RSA services with a thin veneer of academic polish.
I find that lowes and home depot have very useful personalized ads. I bough some concrete repair spackle, they saw it in the cart and suggested all of the other tools I needed (degreasers, cleaning brooms, chisel, sandpaper) that I would need as well. Which is extremely nice because the rest of their site sucks. Amazon also seems to have a nice book recommendation system.
Just as a contrast to most of the targeted ads which are mostly a waste of time.
Facebook and Google are the Bell Labs of our times, built on ads. Ads do not provide value to consumers, they provide value to advertisers. Targeted ads provide more value to advertisers, at the expense of tracking users ever more closely.
Part of the danger are the ads you aren't seeing. Buy a sci-fi novel and maybe you never get a recommendation for anything else.
Everything about machine learning is hill-climbing. But maybe I don't want to summit this hill, maybe I want to go to a few other hills and see a different view.
I think a lot of this comes down to how you phrase the question. From the same survey, the phrase "recommendations based on purchase/browsing history" (which is arguably the same as "tracking online activity to tailor advertisements") had 25% rate it as ethical.
Contrarian opinion: Ads are, as it is, can be quite annoying. So why do I want to see irrelevant ads? Now granted that recommendation algorithms sucks but shouldn't the efforts be in better recommandation? Please note that I don't condon at all evil use of personalized ads such as in political situation.
Whats evil is that the government and anyone willing to pay a few cents can find out everything you have ever purchased and from where and when. How that information is used is irrelevant to how evil collecting it all is.
Further, there's really no intelligence in ads yet. If I'm looking at intex rafts it probably makes sense to sell me fishing gear, yet none of that happens. Also I hate fishing. I just like floating on a raft.
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