I think it's a common misconception that "targeted" advertising in any way involves the ad viewer's interests. Showing you only ads for things you are interested in was never a goal. The advertiser targets who should see the ad, which may or may not match what the viewer's interests.
Advertising junk food and pickup trucks to someone that "can't think of two products I care about less" isn't an error. It's an attempt to make you care (if possible), and reinforce the brand so their name is familiar= if opinions change about junk food or pickup trucks in the future.
> Advertising junk food and pickup trucks to someone that "can't think of two products I care about less" isn't an error. It's an attempt to make you care (if possible), and reinforce the brand so their name is familiar= if opinions change about junk food or pickup trucks in the future.
This sounds just like what people in the ad industry would tell worried clients. The actual reason is likely to be more mundane: the guy is, according to the tracking database, in an age and income group with high statistical correlation with interest in junk food and pickup trucks. Not all targeting is as detailed and personal as everyone thinks after reading scary articles.
I don’t know, I suspect it’s in ad agencies’ interest to keep people under the impression that they aren’t susceptible to ads and the ads must be for those other people who are.
More like the advertisers who could cater to a person’s interest are not able to locate the individual.
Because the platform knows ads can be creepy, and will result in user disengagement.
Facebook often accurately targets people, and the result is terrified users.
So, the answer is other platforms have taken note, and are providing cover for users, to retain them.
This augments the return on ad spend, but only slightly, since ads actually aren’t very effective in practice. Ads are simply signage, nothing more. They don’t actually change behavior, but only reorganize behavior that usually would have happened anyway, so that the existing outcomes possibly land in the finite set of buckets differently.
Thus ad platforms only need to target so vigorously, and with that, it becomes obvious that targeting can be made less acurate, and buyers of ad space would never know.
So you can quickly see that Facebook’s game is absolute overkill, and other players likely underkill by a margin, with much improvement to their platform reputation.
Facebook does such a good job of ad targeting these days, I've actually disabled adblock on the facebook.com domain. It's weird to be getting ads for products and services I actually want and wouldn't have known about if not for the ad.. there's some junk too, certainly, but overall the ads actually improve Facebook for me. Which feels really weird to say.
I've heard this about Instagram, too, which makes sense I guess since they have the same ad infrastructure. One woman I was talking to the other week said her favorite thing about Instagram was the ads. I was like.. "huh."
Well yes, the bad ad buying is often done on purpose. In theory I would not have a problem with advertisers wasting money on this, because I figured that by now they should be getting outbid by actually competitive ads that promote new value propositions and lower prices rather than pushing brand reinforcement. This has mostly not happened yet though, and I currently doubt it will anytime soon because there is still too much of an advantage to big advertisers that can afford to run campaigns like this... many opportunities there though for folks who know how to trim some of the fat.
But does that really work, or is it some cool story they sell the people buying ads? Especially for junk food, how would that work? You cannot make McDonald's more familiar with me. It's freaking McDonald's! And I'm not quite sure my opinion on them will change through ads.
But even if, doesn't this just bring you back to the original point of the blog post? Just advertise to everyone, no data mining and ML required. Best case, you do indeed change my mind about your brand, and the stereotypical junk food consumer sees the ad, suddenly feels hungry so hops into their pickup truck heading to the nearest McDonald's.
Advertising junk food and pickup trucks to someone that "can't think of two products I care about less" isn't an error. It's an attempt to make you care (if possible), and reinforce the brand so their name is familiar= if opinions change about junk food or pickup trucks in the future.